Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

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Marx's writings around the working day are built on the assumption that wages will be set at the level necessary for the worker to survive long enough to turn up to work the following day rather than according to the perceived value of their labour time by the highest bidder, and that because of this near-universal day rate for undifferentiated "labour power", employers' main route to improving profitability would be extending the working day, with no meaningful proportion of the workforce having the ability to change this arrangement, not because they might dislike the status impacts of having to choose a different position, industry, location or smaller house/car/pension but because no capitalist will be willing to pay them enough to eat for a shorter working day. He even devotes a footnote to ridiculing "vulgar economists" for suggesting that labour rates could be set by supply and demand. In this respect, he's far more wrong about future developed economies than Keynes' (later) wrong assumption of a tendency towards a 15 hour week.

Marx's microeconomic theory is even more wobbly than many of his more capitalistic contemporaries at the best of times, but his writings on the lengthening of working days at mills is particularly irrelevant to modern service-based Western societies and even wealthy programmers and lawyers still working more hours a week than they would prefer. There's a kernel of truth in the idea that employers will tend to profit from people working longer than they're contracted to work, but you don't need to read Kapital to understand people like getting more than they originally asked for.

> Marx's writings around the working day are built on the assumption that wages will be set at the level necessary for the worker to survive long enough to turn up to work the following day rather than according to the perceived value of their labour time by the highest bidder, and that because of this near-universal day rate for undifferentiated "labour power", employers' main route to improving profitability would be extending the working day, with no meaningful proportion of the workforce having the ability to change this arrangement

Dude this sounds incredibly close the experience of American retail workers nowadays.

American retail workers might have a tough lot but the economics behind it is the precise opposite of the Kapital model: the retail outlets pay people by the hour and the workers need the long hours because they can't afford their family/debt/house/consumerism on 40 hrs per week at minimum wage and sometimes take additional jobs because retailers won't offer them enough shifts, rather than the retailers paying people by the day and their profit margins being driven mostly by lengthening it. The threshold for what is considered subsistence-level real incomes has risen a bit since the Industrial Revolution too.

Retailers have taken it to another level by requiring you to commit to availability without a commitment to have work. Nobody gets 40 hours — you target around 28 typically.

Control and keeping high turnover is an objective in retail management. It’s usually cheaper and more efficient to have full time staff, but it’s easier to skimp 5% of labor hours and force the salaried manager to fill the breach.

>Retailers have taken it to another level by requiring you to commit to availability without a commitment to have work. Nobody gets 40 hours — you target around 28 typically.

This is the law of unintended consequences as applied to the ACA. If they give you more hours care their costs go up dramatically unless they're already offering health.

The careful tailoring of work hours to avoid healthcare requirements was a thing long, long before the ACA.

Not in the US. Prior to the ACA there was no requirement to give FTEs health care.

Incorrect. It seems mandates were state-by-state prior to the ACA, and certainly existed. Here's a quickly dredged up citation.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/09/16/3489562...

What are you citing? There's nothing in that article about hours or benefits that accrue to FTEs only. Did you even read it?

In the dark red states, sure. Not everywhere. Most places added those requirements 30 years ago.

It’s not just health care. Intrusive regulation like requiring a nominal amount of paid sick leave is mandated in my state over a certain number of hours. (32 iirc)

By "not everywhere" you mean... Massachusetts? Benefits like paid sick leave are rounding errors compared to health care.

Many labor rules kick in with full time status. As a assistant manager in a mall store in 1996, scheduling more than 2-3 people (out of about 30) over 30 hours was up there with skimming the till in terms of severity of offense.

It has little to do with the ACA. This has been happening in retail and restaurants for DECADES.

This was happening at least a decade before the ACA was a glint in anyone's eyes. Probably more like three decades...

The point is that employers have the power to define the hours worked and the wages received, and they will always maximise the hours work and minimise the wages paid.

Workers can only change income by applying for more jobs, or by having exceptional skills. (Which may or may not be genuinely high-value, but do have to be perceived as high-value.)

Since most workers don't have high value skills, that means most people have to work multiple jobs to survive. From the Marxist point of view, it's completely irrelevant if someone is working two shifts for two employers or one very long shift for one employer.

What matters is the loss of personal freedom and opportunity for the worker, who not only gives up personal time, but also lacks both the finance and the time - never mind the energy - to develop any independent small business prospects.

The political reality is that there by the end of the 19th century there were aggressive anti-capitalist movements working hard to limit hours and raise pay against very aggressive - sometimes criminal and murderous - pressures in the other direction.

These movements were less successful in the US than in most other countries, but they still had some influence - which had mostly faded by the end of the 20th century, and has now reverted back to the 19th century ultra-exploitative model for most of the working population.

The shocking thing about the US is the extent to which these movements have been written out of history. Instead of an accurate historical account of what happened, US economic and business history seems to have been rewritten entirely by propagandists who not only ignore the influence of worker movements on pay, social mobility, and working hours, but also use spurious pseudo-economic arguments to pretend that the oppressive policies that benefit the ownership caste also benefit the rest of the country.

Not incredible, rather the only thing that is credible.

And not just retail workers, they are only one of the canaries in the coal mine.

>Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more?

Because lowering the work hours of laborers who provide more profit by more hours worked, over the short run or the long run, was not the intention of allowing economic progress to begin with.

The ones employing those workers are supposed to benefit by increased leisure time for themselves, not reduced hours for the workers, even when financial rewards are more liberally dispensed across the board as economic progress occurs.

The purpose of the US Federal Reserve was to better control economic progress not for the benefit of workers or the general citizenry, but for the bankers themselves, largely those in the Northeast with the oldest money. This was particularly important to them after major deposits of precious metals were discovered and exploited in the west. (Which is one of the major reasons why SV is where it is.) Hard currency or especially gold when the dollar was based on it could not have been allowed to continue to be held by working citizens or the potential power shift could have been too much to enable the growth of their capital gains to continue to outpace labor.

Before the Federal Reserve took control, economic progress was much more out-of-control in a way that was not was as bad for workers who in bad times could still always work for subsistence, compared to pure capitalists who were subject to non-increasing gains, reduced gains, or gasp actual losses even when they were in what was supposed to be the least risky investments.

After decades of control and supposedly harmless gradually increasing financial incentive for laborers, union power became too great anyway by the early '70's so Nixon & the Fed put a stop to it by inflating the currency in a way that would never had been possible if citizens had been allowed to retain gold or hard currency. Gold was for banks only for decades up until that time.

Gold could only be re-allowed to the public after it was fully decoupled from the dollar.

They don't want you to work for mere subsistence (especially on your own farm or business) nor allow enough collective wealth to accumulate among the workers, since either extreme reduces the incentive to put in as many of the hours which lead to Wall Street profits.

This trickles down right through SV to any new company whose ultimate outcome is an IPO through a Northeastern stock exchange.

The first volume of Kapital is heavily devoted to the economics of industrial production, and he basically skips over distribution and markets until volumes 2 & 3. Unfortunately a lot of Marxists got fixated on the production side of things and then try to apply that logic to everything else, to their detriment.

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