Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

groups.csail.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 523 posts

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

#451

Post by marcusverus »

PeterStuer wrote: post #141
freddie_mercury wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifically mentioned 'salaried' work, as monetary income has a direct impact on prices. 2 salaries is now expected and often required for many families.

Not to mention that the work that had previously been the full time focus of the stay-at-homer (cleaning house, gardening, doing dishes, grocery shopping, misc shopping, cooking breakfast, preparing work lunch, preparing dinner) is still being done. Only now it’s being done after traditional working hours or on weekends.

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

#452

Post by BurningFrog »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #434
BurningFrog wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. My point was more that if you choose to work an extra hour, you're vastly more rewarded for it now. And I guess that's one reason people do it.

The value of extra income drops the more you have. All else equal, more money per hour should decrease the number of hours worked. The biggest exception is when you're taking advantage of a great deal to save up now and retire or half-retire early, but even that is still reducing your lifetime average work hours per year.

> All else equal, more money per hour should decrease the number of hours worked

I would have shared that guess, but clearly that's not how we humans operate.

Maybe we just like to work!

Or maybe we really like to be richer than others. We're primates after all, and primates really care about their place in hierarchies...

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

#453

Post by ixtli »

An owners only real goal (sometimes enshrined in law!) is to increase private profits for himself.

At a certain point you run out of ways to do with for a single product or service so you're left with reduction of labor to lower margins. So in a way we can consider this article to be a very clear documentation of what people mean when they say capitalism is "efficient."

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

#455

Post by fuzz4lyfe »

mikelyons wrote: post #441
ailideex wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's considered completely reasonable for employers to terminate employees and not even pay them for the rest of the day. Nope.

"Nope." is cute and shows you're cocksure about that. However, the reality is that this happens all the time and is never punished by culture as "unprofessional" for a corporation to do. Who would punish them? The customers?

>Who would punish them? The customers?

Future potential employees. If I go on glassdoor and read about this happening I'm either going to

A: raise my rates as I need to keep a larger emergency fund to deal with these guys

B: decline to work there at all

They end up only ever getting entry level kids to work for them. The system sort of works in that regard if you come from a non-traditional background you can work for a year or two at a job like that, skill up and move on.

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

#456

Post by aflag »

bjourne wrote: post #325
aflag wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on demand/supply. Tech companies in cities with high demand for engineers have no problem hiring people who will leave as soon as something better shows up.

That is subtly different from what I wrote. :) I wrote that no one who were open about it would be unable to find a job. If you told your interviewer that your only objective is to maximize salary they would (rightly) treat you as a sociopath. A company whose only objective is to minimize salaries (and therefore maximize profits) is also a "sociopath" but that is somehow acceptable.

Yeah, that's true, I guess you'd normally wouldn't say that. Although I've worked a guy once that said something similar and got hired anyway. He still works in the same place after a couple years and still has the same attitude. I think that most people make it up to be a lot less socially acceptable than it actually is.

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

#457

Post by 0xffff2 »

pgreenwood wrote: post #212
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.

If you cycle to work you can change this equation, because, your commute becomes one of the best parts of your day.

That's optimistic. I have what I think has to be about as close to optimal a bike commute as it's possible to get in the US (nearly all separated bike paths, minimal risk of getting hit be a car). I wouldn't call it particularly enjoyable, much less one of the best parts of my day. It's just a thing I do a couple times a week because I hate going to the gym even more and it saves a bit of gas.

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

#458

Post by leftyted »

I don't think this is about "your employer owning you". I also don't think this is about capitalism (which is just private property, economic freedom, and a government to enforce those two things). Instead, I think the pressure to work so much comes from society, which wields incredible control over all of us.

More specifically, I believe that the 40-hour work-week is a consequence of the ascension of wealth creation as the primary goal of our societies. Past civilizations, rich and poor, did not see the creation of wealth as their raison d'etre. Modern civilizations do and, as a result, we're sacrificing everything else (autonomy, privacy, free time, family, etc) at the altar of wealth-creation.

It's not all bad: wealth makes people's lives better. But there are downsides (like overwork, the feeling that you have no control over your life, the feeling that your life lacks meaning, lack of meaningful social relationships, and so on).

I'm borrowing this argument from Hannah Arendt. I find her incredibly convincing: she sees this whole process as having kicked off with the Reformation, which resulted in the expropriation of ecclesiastical property in Europe that had been serving as the commons. Since then, we've never had much of a commons and wealth creation has slowly become the primary goal.

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

#459

Post by Dylan16807 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #452
Dylan16807 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of extra income drops the more you have. All else equal, more money per hour should decrease the number of hours worked. The biggest exception is when you're taking advantage of a great deal to save up now and retire or half-retire early, but even that is still reducing your lifetime average work hours per year.

> All else equal, more money per hour should decrease the number of hours worked I would have shared that guess, but clearly that's not how we humans operate. Maybe we just like to work! Or maybe we really like to be richer than others. We're primates after all, and primates really care about their place in hierarchies...

> I would have shared that guess, but clearly that's not how we humans operate.

What are you basing that on? I mean, the article is about as far as you can possibly get from "all else equal".

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

#460

Post by 0xffff2 »

odiroot wrote: post #157
jaynetics wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Not much of" does not seem to significantly conflict with your single anecdote.
Post reply on HN