111–120 of 523 posts
I believe at the height of Imperial Rome, workers almost had one day off for every day worked. The Romans did use a lot of space labor, so that may also have something to do with it.
What's "space labor"?
If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since woman were drafted en mass into the salaried workforce post ww2, going from a 40hr week to well over 70hrs.
That's really only true is you take the parochial view that what women do at home isn't "work", when it clearly is work. In the 1940s a woman would typically spend 62 hours a week in housework. Nowadays women typically spend 15 hours in housework and 45 hours in paid work. So the same ballpark, really, and not a dramatic expansion.
I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate. How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their hou…
The commute may influence this. The average American commute is about 30 minutes each way. That's 1 hour round trip. Commute as a portion of work time.... 4 hrs work: 25% 5 hrs work: 20% 6 hrs work: 16.7% 7 hrs work: 14.3% 8 hrs work: 12.5% Considering you don't get paid for your commute, there is a natural incentive to work more hours.
This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.
The servant was not expected to leave its master, that was not OK.
Or that you are expected to be available at all times, even though the contract only mentions 40h, and that is perfectly OK and even interiorized as acceptable by most people, which will even go to the extent of defending that state of affairs.
What I see in the workforce is a desperate need for people to continuously prove the need for their own role, as automation and informatization eat away more an more jobs.
It's a game of face time, who sends most emails past midnight, and who is willing to sell more of their personal life and squeeze other people out of theirs, often to do "important" tasks that are often completely unnecessary.
I had a couple of jobs where I was working overtime, running for deadlines all the time, sending emails left an right, meetings, you name it. One day I had enough and I left, and to my surprise, I was never replaced :-)
In America, at least, we should consider the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude in attitudes towards working hours. Many of the expectations for economic output by American industry have been set by the productivity of people who had little or no right to question the conditions they worked under, overseen by people who cared little for their well-being beyond that productivity. If that's the basis of the Ame…
I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate. How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their hou…
Cars, computers, phones, and health insurance also didn't exist back then, and neither did social mobility.
Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on average would work more, not less.
Note that I am one of those people who would predict that UBI would not reduce people propensity to work because it just doesn't make sense economically. I think most people's utility curves want the benefits of extra income OVER the benefit of leisure. It's security over enjoyment, which is not out of the ordinary for human value functions.
I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate. How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their hou…
Countries where it's normal for both parents to work rely on a serf class, usually of immigrant women, to care for their children at terrible wages so both parents can work. I wonder how long this can be sustainable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that is true. Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not. >You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near…
You should look into inflation. Most jobs pre-industrialization absolutely would not provide you food with delivery or several shirts in exchange for a couple hours of unskilled labor (which is what you can get today).