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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)

#241

Post by mschuster91 »

majewsky wrote: post #178
UglyToad wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week. Not just America. We have elections coming up in Saxony (a state in East Germany), so I watched a 2-hour interview with the current MP from the conservative party (the same party as Angela Merkel). When it came to the topic of UBI and automation, he adamantly refused to consider any policy that would move away from the 40-hour work week. He…

> His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".

Bavarian here. Your MP is a nutjob, as is Söder and the rest of the conservatives. The point is that conservatives (as well as the FDP and the AfD) focus primarily on the needs of the businesses which means keeping to old Prussian traditions no matter what.

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

#242

Post by TheAlchemist »

"Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner."

I would argue it's a flawed thinking then. If you are required to be there for 16 hours, even if you work only every second hour, I consider it 16 hours of work - you cannot do anything in between anyway. It's a bit like your if job is to sell cars and your boss only counts your time when there is a customer there and you are talking to him.

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

#243

Post by lostjohnny »

danieltillett wrote: post #232
ivanhoe wrote: post #219

It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you…

Exactly. Hard physical work is real work - sitting at a desk tapping on a keyboard is a dream.

it's a different job.

it's equally hard, one could argue it's not equally heavy, but many athletes today exercise way more than what the typical medieval "drunk till the early morning ready to beat his wife and kids" farmer did.

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

#244

Post by raducu »

zulgan wrote: post #196
rubber_duck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example. When there is enough choice people change jobs all the time - the demand in my l…

I guess this is cultural as well, I(anecdotally) absolutely feel shame when I am about to leave a company, or even negotiate.

Funny because my todler is never ashamed to loudly demand what she wants, yet as adults we feel shame when we want to negotiate.

It absolutely is cultural.

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

#245

Post by lostjohnny »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #238
HSO wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification. Well, in Europe it is more the estate system and urban manufactures, I think, that have influenced the culture of work. In the US, you have something much worse even. I found this recent article eye-opening for me: [1] M. Desmond. In order to understand the brutality of american capitalism, y…

>"the big institutional lie” The big lie is all the lavish promises people made to their future selves. Expensive medical treatments (Medicare), retirement funds (social security/pension payments), expensive infrastructure (constant access to clean water/electricity/gas/sewage/etc). Maybe the biggest lie is pretending to be able to predict the future. All those aforementioned promises require future resources, popula…

> Expensive medical treatments

Again. Universal healthcare solved that in Europe.

It is expensive, but it's a shared cost that benefits everybody.

> Maybe the biggest lie is pretending to be able to predict the future

Maybe, but back then they didn't have the means to care for more than a few days at a time, to think about the future.

If they could have done it, they would have done it.

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

#246

Post by prepend »

jdavis703 wrote: post #218
H8crilA wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple rules that work for me: a) don't take my work laptop home, no corp provided phone (if they insist I'd keep the phone at my work desk, where it belongs). b) work 40 hours on average per week. Just go home already! Helps if you're a late sleeper (like me), you can simply arrive later at work to compensate for the hours you've recently donated to your employer. This works very well for me, although I'm based in E…

Not taking your laptop home is poor information security practice. We had a break-in where dozens of laptops were stolen. We had to do key rolling, password resets, etc for the whole organization. Many people couldn't even work until new computers were shipped in. Of course me and the people who took our laptops home were fine.

This is a curious statement. Why would someone having a bunch of laptops require password resets? Weren’t the laptops properly configured so physical access != network access? If not, then having people commuting with these timebombs is not a good idea. As it’s much more likely that a laptop will be stolen from a worker’s home or car or anywhere than the office.

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

#247

Post by JackFr »

zulgan wrote: post #196
rubber_duck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example. When there is enough choice people change jobs all the time - the demand in my l…

I guess this is cultural as well, I(anecdotally) absolutely feel shame when I am about to leave a company, or even negotiate.

Back in the day, Merrill Lynch had a rep for hiring really green people on the cheap, doing a very good job training them up, and then not paying them according to their new value in the market. When you would leave, managers would often lay the guilt trip about "What you owe us..." (to which the proper response is the line from Goodfellas -"F* you. Pay me.")

There was a sitewide IT town hall in NY when I was there and some senior MD brought this problem up. "We're investing a lot of money in training people and then having difficulty retaining them." From the crowd of around 1000 a voice cried out "Stop training them!"

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

#248

Post by lostjohnny »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #121
varjag wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty countries where both parents normally work and there are no servants.

Who is taking care of the children? Who works in the daycares?

The state!

Have you ever heard about public schools?

They are a thing in Europe.

have you ever heard of family?

Kids usually have four grand parents (sometimes less, sometimes more)

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

#249

Post by lostjohnny »

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.

> So there's a large group of mostly women who

enjoy what they do

> so

other people can do other jobs that the aforementioned women benefit from, such us public hospitals, roads, railroads, public transport etc. etc. etc.

FTFY, dear American friend

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

#250

Post by Mirioron »

pandapower2 wrote: post #53
mbell wrote: post #13

Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer,…

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…

Most farmers lived on farms. They actually did have to make a lot of their stuff themselves. Yes, you had a large family, but you needed that to be able to survive.

>Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.

You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.

Imagine how you would live, if you could only buy metalworks from the store. Basically everything else you'd have to make yourself.

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