Hacker News Reader

Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.

View on HN

Yeah there’s a lot of people who don’t know the history of labor at all and have been convinced that companies without outside regulation would totally treat their employees well and not abuse, over work, injure, or flatly refuse to pay owed wages. It’s a real success story for the pro-business groups in the US and around the world.

I'm endlessly amused that the Richard Nixon years gave us OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and NIOSH - National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act (proposed by the Nixon Administration, passed by Ford), the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, and the excellent Clean Air Act amendments/extension of 1970.

It’s kind of crazy how fast American politics went off the rails. Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan but I’m not versed enough to be sure if he’s the cause or just one of the symptoms (most likely both really in the end) but it’s always wild to see just how many of the ‘big government run amok’ agencies came out of the Nixon admin.

I've seen the idea float around that in order for democracy to function, the people need to see the political leadership as a) competent and b) acting in good faith. For the group of people who were coming into political adulthood in the 70s-80s (mostly born circa 1945-1965), those sentiments were deeply undermined by the Iran-Contra affair/hostage crisis and Watergate respectively.

That cohort have now been the modal force in politics, business and the electorate for a few decades, and we're seeing the results.

Personally I think it's partially an (mis)information issue. With the explosion of information sources starting with cable and then exploding again with the internet and social media we've gone from a relatively uniform media environment and a drought of information to a fractured media environment with an absolute deluge. So now you can live in a completely different factual world than someone doors down from you and still have more supporting sources of information than you could consume even if you spent all your time awake.

Nixon was planning on redistributing money through a negative income tax as well. I’d say what you’re describing really started with the ideology behind the Goldwater candidacy.

It's easy to write "just-so" explanations about American political trends, but I agree that Goldwater is really the crux to understanding exactly the mess we're in today: you can draw a direct line of thought and political lineage (one politician fostering the next) from Goldwater to Reagan to the Contract with America[1] to our most recent ex-administration.

Toss in America's (inevitable) deindustrialization and the violent, systematic oppression of worker's movements without any real pushback from the DNC, and it's hard to see how things could have ended up any differently.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America

> Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan but I’m not versed enough to be sure if he’s the cause or just one of the symptoms

It was a concerted effort that started in the 1970s, and when Reagan got in things kicked off:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Geniuses:_The_Unmaking_of...

Given that Democrats controlled Congress during the 1980s, they were complicit, but most of the ideas originally came from right-wing think tanks funded by oligarchs like the Koch brothers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/koch-brother...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko...

Goldwater lost but it surprised most strategists that he was able to carry the deep south, historically a democratic stronghold since the end of the civil war, particularly with blue collar workers.

This was essentially due to Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights movement. This observation became strategy, to use the movement as a wedge issue to convince conservative southern democrats to switch allegiance. Before this, the distribution of conservative to progressive, while still slanted, was more even than afterwards. The trend continued through Nixon, Reagan, Newt Gingrich, GWB, and now Trump.

It's largely been the same cohort of voters driving this trend, and their views have been becoming more radical vs centrist. Among democrats you can see some attempts to cater to these voters as well like with Bill Clinton. Another big part of it is the rise of the evangelical right to top level influence in the republican party as well.

There's certainly a whole heck of a lot more to the story than this, but when you go digging through the dispassionate history and summaries, this realignment is clear. In some sense the republican leadership is now being hoisted by their own petard, as the more classical or centrist ones show in relation to how they respond to Trump's most extreme actions.

We're probably headed for another realignment, but I think anyone claiming to know what will trigger it or how it will shake it is far too confident of their own clairvoyance.

You see the same misconception with environmental regulations, it makes for some interesting (though frustrating) discussions though.

You see the same misconceptions in the other direction as well.

It's like some people think a work stoppage from cleaning up a dead worker or hazardous material spill don't result in lost productivity that workplaces would rather not incur.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire happened on March 25, 1911. The owner kept the factory doors locked and as a result 146 people either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths. The owners were acquitted of manslaughter, but did have to pay $75 per person they killed. The owners made $60,000 profit due to the insurance payout.

Two years later in 1913, the one of the owners was arrested for locking his factory doors, again, and fined $20.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

But it’s been shown again and again that the cheaper option will be taken and if the fix is more expensive than the pause to clean, guess which happens.

Amazon seems to have (or had?) this issue with climate control in their warehouses. Was the fix done because of the need to protect workers and keep them working, or the PR disaster that they caused?

Well that assumes they actually stop work beyond the exact area to address the death/spill. Very few places run just one line after all you can keep running everywhere else. This also ignores the fact that we have contemporary and decades examples of factories continuing to operate as they continue to injure workers because even a death doesn't actually cause them to lose much without meaningful worker protections.

You are assuming businesses know precisely what level of overwork or negligence will lead to lower costs (higher profit) and what level will lead to needing to cleanup a dead worker.

...So they lobby for 'pro-business' laws to limit the downside of such events.

Add in the wild and arbitrary decision that punitive damages shouldn't exceed ~9x the compensatory damages and the corporate behavior control mechanisms have been largely denuded (and many US states have lowered that even more).

Yeah, I didn't fully understand the point of that tangent, and it sounds like to me this "debate" between the Progressive and Capitalist, was "won" by the Progressive. But I guess I'm just a radical?

> P. ....But the safety movement was not inevitable—it was the result of progressive reformers. Capitalism would never have accomplished this on its own.

> C. Well… I have to admit, reformers like Eastman and Hard seem instrumental in this story. Their work helped bring about the legal reform, and the legal reform brought about the safety departments. So, I have to give them credit for that.

> P: Good.

Is this not a straight admission of the flaws of capitalism?

This bit was especially hilarious to me--

> C: No, you can’t sign away all your rights. You can’t sell yourself into slavery, for instance.

uh... yes, people did.

I somewhat think that's the point of the tangent though. Much of the blog goes into nitty-gritty detail on other ways society progresses-- by blood, sweat, and tears-- and so I think this tangent pushes that narrative, but it's weird that the opposite narrative is appeared to be given equal footing when previous posts seem to argue that it's not.

Or perhaps it was an attempt to push to reader into the mindset at the time, in which case, the counter-arguments still aren't that convincing to me, but again perhaps it's just the modernity bias.

You nicely illustrated the incentives to never give credit to people on the other side, not even if you are a fictional character, because that will be quoted as an admission that you(r side) lost the debate.

It is an essentially inevitable result of technological development. If the 40 hour workweek people had protested 30 years earlier, nothing would have happened, and if they hadn’t protested at all it probably would have been achieved with less effort a few years down the line. You need occasional shocks to remove entrenched procedural traditions like work schedules, but the magnitude of the shock required decreases as the change becomes more obviously beneficial.

"It is an essentially inevitable result of technological development"

So its been over a century, why are we still stuck at 40 hours?

We'll probably see a big shift soon. The environment is ripe for it. Various factors have suppressed the probability of such a transition occurring (e.g. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com), but it's becoming overwhelmingly likely.

Already, many white-collar jobs (especially in tech) have large numbers of people working fewer than 40 hours a week.

There are plenty of countries where this is not achieved, and it's unlikely to change without some kind of pressure, either from the workers or from the government

Which countries? I can think of some but the reason is usually something like elite overproduction or poverty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com