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Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

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Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#151

Post by icebraining »

ericmcer wrote: post #30
flatline wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently read Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to the kids. The parents’ life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.

The closer your work is to the actual benefit it provides, the more gratifying it is.

This seems counter-intuitive, if you consider the work choices throughout history. People who had no choice did all the "direct benefit" work (cooking, cleaning, etc) whereas those with money engaged in a bunch of pursuits with no clear benefits, just for the sake of it: science, theoretical math, philosophy, art, etc. Often the fruits of their work only came after their deaths.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#153

Post by odiroot »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #116
lmilcin wrote: post #95

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.

In my country (Poland) we "use" grandparents for that.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#154

Post by UglyToad »

wwn_se wrote: post #106
dannyw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

10h 4 days a week to keep the 40h work week. But it also depends on the type of work. I think desk jobs would benefit more than manual labour form longer days(asuming same total). As the mind and body recovers differently.

I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week. It's almost 10% longer than the default UK week which is already too long. Having worked both and currently on 36.75 there's still a huge amount of slack and wasted time assuming software development or other office jobs.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#155

Post by lazyjones »

spyckie2 wrote: post #117

Access to opportunities for more income also didn't exist either. The article specifically references serfs(!!!), possibly the most difficult economic class to escape, as the example. 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…

> Cars, computers, phones, and health insurance also didn't exist back then, and neither did social mobility.

Also: proper lighting, especially outdoors. An important prerequisite for many jobs, so the length of a work day had natural limits.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#157

Post by odiroot »

jaynetics wrote: post #73
bsanr2 wrote: post #54

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…

There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery. I'd wager that when looking at countries with roughly the same level of industrialization, whether humans view fellow humans as something more than mere resources is linked to a certain set of attitudes. I'd guess that reduced working hours are positively correlated to pluralism and pacifism, and perhaps negatively corre…

> There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery.

Excuse me? My grandma was a slave worker in Germany. Kidnapped from the streets of Warsaw and forcefully moved to Southwest Germany to work for a rich farmer.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#158

Post by ptah »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #136
ptah wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. this is not how it happened and quality of life is not an objective measure. factory owners needed workers so they lobbied to have common land used for grazing and growing crops to be grabbed by land owners and forced people into cities to fill…

From Cory Doctorow's Walkaway: Seth said: "Insert tragedy of the commons here." Natalie put her hands up. "You know, I've heard the term 'tragedy of the commons' like a thousand times and I've never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?" "That's commoners," Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and u…

yes, also land owners enclosed the areas and reserved it for their own use during early capitalist era

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#159

Post by ido »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #139
ido wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Germany, both my kids go to public kindergarten/daycare (there is no distinction between the 2 here, it starts when the child is 1 year old) & the kindergarten teachers are mostly German themselves. They don't earn great wages but they are not indentured servants either.

Right. So there's a large group of mostly women who accept low wages to store children so more privileged people can go earn higher wages.

Why do you assume the kindergarten teachers earn less than they would have otherwise had in a different job or less than the average parent of the kids in their group? I mean yes, I support better wages for them (jobs in education generally don't pay that great) & I'm sure people working in the financial sector earn much more but I don't think that was the alternative the common teacher had to chose from.

As I said wages are not great but they are not that far from the median. My wife (teacher in a music school) doesn't earn more than a kindergarten teacher, the advantage is mostly in economies of scale (1 teacher per 6-7 pupils vs 1 mother per 1-3 offspring).

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#160

Post by C1sc0cat »

stareatgoats wrote: post #113
dannyw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remote work may influence this. Commuting to a workplace just to do the things you might as well do from home will be considered old-fashioned, inefficient and/or shameful in a few years, if my crystal ball is not lying.

The problem with that this is is co located teams are a massive multiplier - very few jobs are truly singleton roles.
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