I’m in the middle of a four day weekend. I’ll probably get absolutely nothing extraordinary done in it. Despite there being plenty of things I could be doing. The 40 hour work week is tyrannical.
If you are stating this seriously, I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace.
It’s kind of mind boggling to me why we have to trade most of our waking hours for the majority of the prime of our life to make a living wage. Modern society should be solving for this.
There are voices saying that. You can find some on almost every HN thread about work. This is a tricky topic, though, because our society has a deeply ingrained sense of deriving one's self-worth and status from the job they perform. A sentiment that was once critical to our survival - now, arguably, less so.
> Modern society should be solving for this.
There are attempts. 4-hour workweek. People (like myself) switching to remote work to reclaim time spent commuting. Individuals seeking FU money. Proposals of UBI. Regulations around paid vacations and parental leave. It's messy and slow-going, and things probably won't change until there is a cultural shift in our relationship with work we do.
I used to work in the medical device industry, and hospitals, and also have some real estate company experience. I can assure you in my experience, a 40-hour workweek was by no means unreasonable in these industries. If you're working in Semiconductors or Finance or Law or most industries out there, you really do need to be physically present and working 6-8 hour days.
The problem is that people want to buy more than they can afford from doing less work.
There is no way to resolve this. As long as there are status goods like sneakers for $1000, people will have to work the hours needed to afford them. You can only have fewer hours if everything is standardized to the point that machines do all the work. But who wants to live in such a world of uniformity?
Everyone worked on a Saturday then suddenly most of the people stopped working on the Saturday, I don't see why it would be impossible for most of the people in the society to stop working on Friday too.
In the US, the government is supposed to create and reinforce individual liberties and property rights. That means creating a legal framework around personal property. It should be protective of peoples’ time as well.
As I said, people can already work for 30 or 20 hours per week. Why is it not enough for you if you stop working on Friday?
Do you want 30 or 20 hours per week with equal pay? Then indeed you have to reduce the supply of work to rise hourly wages. But then, less is produced, the supply of goods is reduced and thus things cost more, most likely disproportionally more than the increase in wages.
That is obviously not true because of two things:
1. Machines take over and do work and create goods
2. Humans are more productive than they were before
Here is a handy graph which I found googling https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-graphical-representati...
We are more productive now, but that surplus is used to put a supercomputer into the hand of every person and new clothes to wear every other month. If people wouldn't buy that, then the increase in productivity could lead to less working hours.
Btw, as far as I understand your graph, it is not telling that we are more productive but that farms are more productive if they are bigger.
As far as I know, Western workers are just more productive because they assemble pre-made parts and the final value of the product is ascribed to them when in reality, they just profit from wage differences. That's not sustainable.
If that wage difference is ever closed then people will even get less for the same amount of work.
I'm sorry, but who told you this?
The median amount of PTO in American companies is 10 days + 8 days of Federal holidays. That 18 days vs 260 weekdays, or 7% of the work year, meaning the average American works 7.5 hours a day, not 4.
In comparision, people spend 3 hours on average watching TV.
Sounds great to me. I don’t want a choice in most things anyway. I hate it when I find myself dithering in a shop over whether to pick this brand or that when they probably come from the same factory anyway. Let me work less AND expend less effort making choices!
There’s a lot of hand-wringing over UBI and other suggestions because the economy will change dramatically if a lot of people suddenly work less. As much as I agree that it seems like we shouldn’t need to be working this much, I have to admit that when I think about how completely fixed into our core the ideas of work and jobs are, I feel like reducing them quickly could have massive and unintended consequences for our economy.
That said, I think it’s a mistake to underestimate how deeply ingrained work is in our culture, or to underestimate how hard it will be to change. People judge each other’s status by work and wealth, the education system is designed for careers both private and academic. The extremely pervasive beliefs that struggle and hard work are required for people to learn things well, and that competition is required for survival and optimal markets, and that good financial management skills only come from earned money, and that expertise only comes from years of experience, these are all part of the big burrito that jobs are part of. It’s a burrito that will be hard to take apart. Not impossible, but very hard. Jobs aren’t required for those ideas to be true, but today they are tightly wrapped together.
Many humans[0] naturally want to create, build and improve things around them. A typical job is a nearly insurmountable obstacle to that, especially if fruits of the labour only ever manifest as paycheck - hence the desire to do that in whatever free time that's left.
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[0] - I'd argue, all.
Nope! I take no joy and have no interest in creating, building, and improving things. I like buying stuff, watching TV, scrolling through the Internet, and that’s more or less it.
Just passing time until I die.
When it's your turn to go, how you feel about the matter will make no difference. So I say enjoy the 4 days off.
I used to feel the same way up until the point when I clarified my goals and broke them down into small accumulative chunks, and ignored any goals which obviously couldn't be dealt with before the others. I feel like I'm getting plenty done at that point even though the marginal increment of effort every day looks more modest.
The vast majority of people in the world aren't tech workers where productivity and time spent have a nonlinear relationship. Having been on both sides of the coin, calling a 40-hour work week "tyrannical" screams "ivory tower". Those of us in law and medicine (not to mention numerous people in early-stage startups) would get a great laugh out out of that characterization.