Working 40 hours a week is too much. "Working" 50 hours a week is absurd. Occasional crunches are ok of course, but as a constant minimum, those are just idiotic numbers, and people who support this sort of work ethic should be deeply ashamed and possibly fired.
Really? What makes 40 hours the magic number? What number of hours a week isn't too much? 30? 20? 10? 1? A few minutes?
How many hours of work is required depends on the job. To say that anyone who supports working 40 hours a week "should be deeply ashamed and possibly fired" is way, way, way too strong a statement. How the heck do you know what is required by every single job?
We've had decade upon decade of substantial increases in productivity since then. Why hasn't our weekly working hours since the 30s ever been reduced?
Apply that to a household and the average family didn’t have 2 parents working 100 hours in paid labour. The typical breakdown was likely a male in paid labour and a female mostly doing household chores. There was about 60 hours per week of household chores in 1900, and that was down to just under 8-15 by the 1980s [1, 2].
The number of hours that are spent at work would appear to have declined for males and females, through when unpaid work is factored in, a household consisting of a male and a female shows a much less dramatic decline. This brings us to a household work week total back at somewhere around 100 hours. Sort of what you said, but sort of not.
[1] Table 7. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
Original studies were done with factory work. It is harder to evaluate mental work.
6 hours would be ideal since you would have time outside work for family, kids and hobbies. It would create a society where people are happier and have more energy, which benefits us all.
Furthermore, you can work remotely.
I think that's the question that TFA, and parent, and a lot of other people in between, are asking.
The answer tends to be 'because that's how it's been for a while'. Or, if you like, it's what mum and dad taught us, and various governments & employers advocate.
Parent was suggesting this is an unnaturally high number, but you're right that coming up with a replacement number - if indeed that's the best approach - is not as straightforward as just picking another one and making forcing everyone else to agree with it.
> How many hours of work is required depends on the job.
...
> How the heck do you know what is required by every single job?
I think this is a dangerous, though obviously prevalent, way of thinking. That every job currently requires ~40 hours a week to perform is, objectively, a ludicrous claim to make.
It suggests a massively tightly coupled relationship between scheduling, specific personnel, and output.
I'd suggest that's a fallacy because western societies have typically settled upon ~38hr of 'being at work' per week ... and apologists try to work backwards from that number on the assumption it's normal / sensible / just right / tenable forever.
And that's not what I was saying. I was simply suggesting that there might be some jobs where 40 hours a week is needed, since, as I said explicitly, how many hours is required depends on the job. Therefore the blanket statement the post I responded to made about what a proper "work ethic" is, was way too strong.
My point was that this way of thinking requires that the job is done in a certain timeframe, can't be split between multiple people, etc.
It's probably some jobs have genuinely tight timeframes and a focus that can only be satisfactory obtained by engaging a single person to perform the role for short periods, and quite possible some number of jobs are much easier to manage with this thinking.
But given the time, resources, and scope triangle, it's hubris to assume three of those are fixed (and fixed at 40hr/week) in (m)any cases.
No, it's not "hubris"; it's a common belief that, when looked at closely, might not be on the firm ground that many people seem to believe it is. But that doesn't justify a blanket statement that anyone who has this common belief is therefore guilty of hubris, or "should be deeply ashamed and possibly fired", which is how the post I originally responded to in this subthread put it.
To me, it's you and the person who posted "deeply ashamed and possibly fired" who are guilty of hubris, for claiming that your own personal opinion about how all jobs should be organized outweighs everything else.
Very much not what I was claiming.
Job requirements, especially working hours, aren't part of some natural law. They are set as high as possible by bosses as they can get away with.
Really? How do you propose to support yourself without working? Or do you just mean work is dumb and bad for you, so you'll live off the work of other people?
And also, different people on the same position and with same work have routinelly deferential salaries in all eu countries. It is truly something between you and management.
Do you think that if Bill & Joe find out that John earns 4 time their salary at the same position they will think “oh well it’s only fair, he sorts 4 times as many packages as we do”. Or what if john is paid the same but can leave at 10 ? Do you think people will be happy with that setup ?
That’s one of the reason why piece-work is usually forbidden
2.) Reality is that people are paid differently and it does not causes massive social issues. It causes occasional smaller social issues.
3.) Another reality is that different people stay differently longer - some bare minimum and some have larger overtimes.
4.) Rewarding productivity is not same as rewarding piece work, especially in collaborative complex work.
It is happening right now and I don't see much large issues around it. What I am saying that ambition to reward productivity is better then rewarding but-in-office time which motivates people to hang around office and work ineffectively.