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Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

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Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#101

Post by new_guy »

legitster wrote: post #26

This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were f…

> And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities

Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today.

https://victorianweb.org/history/leisure1.html

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#102

Post by Swizec »

slv77 wrote: post #94
ren_engineer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

article basically ignores quality of life in exchange for "leisure". I could build a crude shelter and be homeless and basically achieve the same thing, turns out most people don't want that. Fact is most people voluntarily opt in to capitalism because life is better, if you want something close to what the article talks about you can pretty easily move to an Amish community or try creating your own commune and try t…

The biggest increases in quality of life comes from public health measure such as access to clean water, food and air. The next is protection from the elements with access to adequate clothing, shelter and fuel. After that I would argue that trust in the integrity of public institutions (rule of law) and security from the threat of violence and extortion. Then it would be access to education, basic health care to pro…

“What have the Romans ever done for us”

https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#103

Post by legitster »

mc32 wrote: post #78
legitster wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that for all the festival days, they did not have our modern idea of a "weekend" either. When the French revolutionary government created a secular approximation of the church calendar, they only gave off 1 out of every 10 days.

I think they had Sundays off for religious reasons, but not sure how much choice peasants or farmers had given fields need clearing, seeds need planting, crops needed harvesting and animals needed caring, reproducing, feeding, butchering and preserving, irrespective of day of week. Slacking on any of the above could result in starvation the coming Winter as well as possibly losing your animals as well. There was lots…

I guess it depends on the era or region of Europe, but it seems "Sabbath-keeping" was not always assumed - it having Jewish connotations.

So it seems that outside of religious holidays, people could have been expected to work every day.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#104

Post by supperburg »

hogFeast wrote: post #67
emodendroket wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt anyone would really be happy returning to feudalism, but I imagine the goal of highlighting this stuff is to expand the sense of what is possible. It's easy to start thinking of the current state of affairs as some kind of immutable law of the universe and not a carefully negotiated political arrangement that can be altered as we see fit.

Again, this is exactly my point. This isn't history. This is specifically not what history is for. History does not inform that process because the past is not like the present. They are orthogonal. Attempting to inform your view of the present using the past is like trying to play baseball like football...it just doesn't make any sense.

Isn’t history supposed to repeat itself and in that way tell us about the future? And isn’t history an insight into human nature and in that way illuminate modern issues?

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#105

Post by watwut »

grawprog wrote: post #89
varjag wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex. Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now, but unlikely it was in 16th century.

Why would something people find fun enough to do as a hobby now not have been fun 500 years ago? Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work. Why would it have been any different back then?

We consider programming work. Overwhelming majority of it is pure work.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#106

Post by gbronner »

gadders wrote: post #23

"An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two "days-works." " Presumably because in the other half of the day, they'd be working to harvest and grow their own food. I'm not sure what the difference is between working…

First, if you are doing heavy work, like fixing roads, you usually can't do it all day. Neither can most draft animals. Second, the mid day meal was the big one, and there was usually a nap as well. People had to walk to work, and it would be hard to get everyone back at the same time.

Third, the Lord's inventory of tools was limited, so better to have two shifts of reasonably rested people than one double shift of exhausted people.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#107

Post by watwut »

fma wrote: post #75
SavantIdiot wrote: post #6

> And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). This goes against everything I've been taught, that the plebian class basically toiled endlessly, from Feudal Times to I…

Most of the time spent is preparing and harvesting. In between you watch things grow and maintain. When nothing is growing...at least, my in-laws in China...drink, gamble (mahjong, card games) and hang out with other villagers. They all pooled their money together for some heavy machinery too...so even that has cut down a lot of time spent on prep & harvesting. You could get jobs in the city when there's no farming t…

Yeah, cloth and bedsheets make themselves. Fabric just exist and don't need to be created. Animals don't need continuous care. Tools and houses don't need fixing. Candles appear from thin air. Wood cuts itself.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#108

Post by Aunche »

masklinn wrote: post #8
Swizec wrote: post #3

Sure they had a “shorter workweek” but it also took women a full workday to wash the family’s clothes, hours of walking to get water for the day, and if you wanted something from the town over that was a 3 day trip. So many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days. I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being bl…

> So many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days. Indeed, prepping food was no cake walk. Grinding grains by hand is pretty hellish, and making edible flour from high-tanin acorns takes weeks. Sane with spinning yarn.

Not only was it incredibly labor intensive to process grain by hand, it was also caused the flour to be full of tiny rocks that would wear away one's teeth.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#109

Post by mrandish »

legitster wrote: post #26

This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were f…

I agree that many people today tend to over-estimate the 'simple' and 'idyllic' aspects of the average pre-industrial person's day to day existence and we should be careful to remember the stark differences as well as to discount the influence of fiction and history's focus on the extraordinary, influential, wealthy and powerful.

I've always thought it would be an interesting reality TV show concept to create a historically accurate medieval village populated with well-researched, role-playing actors and then to drop a small group of modern people into that context to see how they do. I suspect the reactions of those who over-estimated the idyllic-ness of the past would make for compelling reality TV fodder.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#110

Post by asdff »

legitster wrote: post #26

This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were f…

Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too. Instead of repairing a thatch roof I'm working on shingles, but the amount of labor needed around the home and in domestic life even today is seemingly endless and somehow fills to expand all available free time like a gas in a container.
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