https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate#:....
I bring this up every time people discuss working week length, productivity etc. We have massively reduced the percentage of people working. But instead of giving everyone 2 extra days off, we gave 40% of people all the days off and made the rest work harder...
For example, having the 16-25 labor participation rate decrease could be considered a good thing (maybe, it's debatable), but the increase in people on disability is usually a surefire indication of an economy not offering people on the margins a way to work. Most people on the "margin" for disability will work if the job market is good and will go on disability if it's bad.
Soviets did have everybody work all 5 days, that didn't quite work for them economically.
In Soviet Russia people worked 10-12 hours a day 6 days a week, on average .
Because they were poor.
Poor people work a lot, in Scandinavia the average work week is 30 hours, plus 41 days of paid holidays/year, plus no less than 480 paid days for parental leave, because they are a rich country and can afford it.
Why people in US think that working a lot makes you rich, when the opposite is true?
Prior to, and during the second world war, Russians worked like slaves, yes.
But starting in the 60s, the urban workweek became 41 hours over 6 days. [1] Kolhoz farmers, though, continued to work insane hours (for almost no pay) throughout the country's existence. (And much like in China, they could not leave the Kolhoz to go work in the cities.)
[1] Yes, some employers had really shitty overtime expectations. However, depending on other economic conditions, those employers could have also have a hard time attracting and retaining workers. Contrary to the popular belief in the West, you weren't just assigned a job at 16 that you had to work for the rest of your life.
Because many of us know people that worked their ass off and became wealthy. Does that not happen in Europe?
But we still have 4 weeks of paid vacation.
Doesn't that happen over there?
For most people, wealth is tied to income, and income is tied to the number of hours you work. So it's a direct link in their minds that most hours of work leads to more wealth.
The fairly obvious truth is that the quickest way to any reasonable amount of wealth is to both improve your skillset to increase the amount of income you can make per hour, and also to develop sources of income that aren't tied to the number of hours you put in.
But both of those require delayed gratification, which people aren't big on.
Also, in the US, our tax structure clearly greatly rewards investment income over wage income. Of course, most people need to work to get enough capital to invest in the first place.