Why didn’t we get the four-hour workday?
rootsofprogress.org
rootsofprogress.org
Not many doctors and dentists and so forth 1000 years ago, because the agricultural base couldn't support it. It took 95% of people being farmers to produce enough food for themselves and the remaining 5% of the others. Now 5% of people can produce enough food for the other 95%, which allows them to be doctors and programmers and whatnot.
It defines them this way: "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
It goes further and defines various types of thse jobs, with examples for each. Those are included in the Wikipedia article.
"As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all, without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure."
I think the 'without qualification' part is really important, so that there is no incentive NOT to work, and no stigma attached to receiving the money. Just give it to everybody and otherwise leave them alone.
The reality is that business owners always want to make as much profit as possible, so they're never going to intentionally or knowingly pay labor for something that is useless, money that would otherwise go straight into their pocket. Sure there are some inefficiencies in the chain and a subset of managers trying to expand headcount unnecessarily because of office politics, but owners and board members are incentivized to eliminate that as much as possible because, you know, profit.
The only plausible spots for "bullshit jobs" are in government and in endowment-funded academia, where for various political reasons, effective oversight of costs is missing in certain scenarios. Usually that's a temporary phenomenon, as eventually a "nosy" journalist (or whistleblower) reveals a bunch of money is being wasted, and political pressure builds to reform that and stop wasting taxpayers' or donors' money.
That’s just the lizard brain mode of thinking. The person you paid $5k to redo your roof isn’t more deserving of the money because they spent two weeks on it instead of one. You’re both better off if they get it done faster.
My company went down to 80% time for 100% salary and every metric we use for productivity didn’t change one bit. I have no doubt we could drop another day down to 60% and still have hit all our targets. And anyone who actually works knows why, because the time off isn’t cutting into working time, it’s cutting into bullshit time.
And valuation has nothing to do with headcount, that's not how stock market analysts work. They look at revenue and costs and growth. The higher salaries are because of increased headcount, the higher costs are and therefore a lower valuation.
If it only takes you a few hours to do the thing the boss hired you for, you can bet they're going to find some more productive work for you real quick. In any business, there's virtually always more profitable work to be done that there are employees to do it, so it's not difficult.
You should read Graeber’s book sometime.
There are jobs that are useless but still benefit business owners financially. Graeber gives the example of a receptionist at a small firm. The firm had so few callers and visitors that the receptionist was totally unnecessary and sat idle most of the time.
Why did they hire her? If the members of the firm answered the phone themselves, they would not be taken seriously. Every serious firm has a receptionist to answer the phone, so they felt they had to hire one. She was essentially there as decoration.
looks are sometimes not unimportant nor useless. It's only the hacker mindset that thinks otherwise. "Normal" people do put some importance on appearances. Therefore, it's not useless.
but why is there an expectation that they get anything more than a paycheque out of it? It's called a job for a reason.
while a good moral argument, the world has not reached a point where such outcomes can be had. At some point in the future, when there's post-scarcity for all basic resources, then it would be possible that people shouldn't have to justify their own shelter or food.
For example in the construction industry barely any heavy machinery is used - it's cheaper to have labourers do the work than it is to rent machines. In road reconstruction you will see men digging the road by hand, then women carrying the rubble away somewhere with small buckets.
https://www.looper.com/1047273/rick-and-morty-season-6-episo...
The author left out the most probable hypothesis of why it didn't happen though: ownership kept all that extra productivity and kept working labor just as hard for no more money.
The author left out that same option in the concluding statement: Some of them might have just been saying that productivity could be much higher, regardless of whether that turned into shorter working hours, higher wages, or a combination of both
... or neither, all of the money can be diverted to "shareholder value".
This is fact the way it's almost always been. Only in situations where labor has been highly organized has the outcome be any different, i.e. workers benefiting from productivity increases.
I hope there are some among us who (cf Carnegie) might view building the equivalent of libraries as a positional good?
Personally I opted for no car even though I can easily afford it. It’s a huge amount saved and honestly the lifestyle of walking to places is nicer anyway.
Your increase in rent would have to be over $200AUD/week to be more expensive than owning a car. Not to mention the fact you benefit from living in a much more desirable area and everything else that comes with.
I live in an exurb of a major US metro on the East Coast. It's hard to compare costs directly as I own a house but anything remotely equivalent in the city on public transit lines would be much pricier. As for desirable? Well I have forest trails right out of my house. Don't care that much about walking to cafes and restaurants.
A 1 bdr condo in my city would cost an overall ~$4000 for a really old condo in a shitty building, and there's <9% of people on record in the country who'd be able to afford that without a ton of pressure, and the only people I know that own anything more than that absolutely couldn't pay for it without renting our all of their rooms.
I guess it's still proportional in the sense that eventually renters will literally just have no money left
You are right that prices are raised by what people can afford but we need to be specific and say, which people?
No one forced them to pay more than the minimum for housing.
Not all land in a given area are equal in their attribute and there's fundamental scarcity in desirable lands. The richest presumably purchases houses in locations that has the most amenities, while everybody scrambles for the rest.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it is very well possible the lower priced housing has unacceptable attributes, but that leads to different causal factors.
It is also determined by housing supply in a given location and transportation policies, how we decided that homes are investments which increases exclusionary NIMBY behaviors.
It is not merely 'desire to have more' than the other that determine the cost of living.
If you're not tied by an employer, then you can be way more flexible about how you spend your housing budget
Yes, it is cheaper to live where fewer people want to live.
But, usually, there are reasons fewer people want to live there.
It’s hard to explain how good life is when you live within walking distance of friends and can spontaneously decide to go to the cafe for breakfast rather than having to schedule an event days in advance so people can transport in.
Moved to the city and some of my friends live here while the others have very easy public transport to the city from their houses so now I meet up with friends several times a week. Often they don't have to travel at all and just walk from the office to my place after work.
For me it's been life changing.
Some of the types of people we desire to be around aren’t going to be in those areas. If you’re into tech but live around a bunch of troglodytes - you’re not likely to make many friends around tech subjects. If that’s your passion and you want friends who share that passion - gotta move.
Some people have incredibly low standards (anyone will do) for friends and lovers. Some have high standards (very few will fit). If you live in niche small towns/villages with little in common - it’s gonna be rough to be someone with high standards.
Yes, one is that a lot of people want to live there. That one's inevitable though. Some places are more desirable to live than others. I don't want to live in a small town with nothing to do.
The other factor is when a city refuses to build sufficient housing. This one is not inevitable. It usually comes about due to entrenched interest in the value of existing housing. For instance, north San Jose has built no new housing in a decade, despite a well known housing crisis.
Personally, I have just reduced my hours from 40 to about 35 and I love it. It's not just the extra hour that I have in the evening but also that I am way less tired after work (thus can enjoy the rest of the day more). Also, this last hour (to me) always felt like "I have to do it although it ain't productive at all". But that's me. Just one anecdata. I would like more.
In the past, this was mainly family and community events.
As the strength of both the family and civic social institutions declined, we became dependent on businesses to provide us things our families used to (child care, elder care, parties, dinners, storytelling, entertainment, music, etc). These cause demand for more commercial businesses.
As the article states, all the commentators were envisioning a work week dominated only by making sure you had enough to survive. If people actually wanted this, they would be able to achieve it. However, people really want iphones, vacations, nice clothes, etc as well. So there is demand for labor, and where there's demand and a buyer with excess cash, we will step up.
We made it approx 1/6th of the way to the income goal and maybe 1/6th of the way to the time goal, when you account for improved vacation time, sick leave, mat/pat leave, remote work time, etc. all of which consume some of the productivity gain.
The big gap is that productivity growth rates didn't really sustain after 1970s leading to slower income growth and slower free time growth (see flattening of curve https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours).
I don't mean this to denigrate these countries, but the living standards in some countries are very different. These countries are often "cheap" by Western standards. You could settle in the Balkans, for example, and work a few hours each day, four days a week, and cover expenses very easily with a freelance salary.
I know several Americans who moved to Croatia on DN visas specifically because they could only afford to live there on their freelance salaries.
[0]:https://money.cnn.com/2017/08/07/autos/gm-china-electric-car...
But there's no easy way to opt for a four-hour workday, which I would prefer— instead, I save most of my income.
For example, your nice electronics requires huge, globalized workforce, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of specialties to manufacture. Each of those specialties need the volume and scale to be profitable - so much so that it seems to not consume much of your income (as a rich person in a rich country).
Ditto with healthcare - you will have to abandon the fact that you would have access to it, or in any modern quality.
Wait a second, sure you can. Why can't you? Your example isn't as good of an example as you think. The rest of the people in the world can hum along on their current trajectory if they want; what do I have to do with the production of those electronics in the hypothetical world? I don't have anything to do with it in the world we're actually in.
These projections always read like something that would come from a person who doesn't understand where their food comes from, how much work goes into building and maintaining their housing, or that most people's preferred entertainment options require a lot of work to produce.
I could see us arriving at some of these extreme estimates if everyone universally agreed to eat the cheapest synthetic food we could produce with the most automation, live in the most bare-bones housing, and exclusively choose free or cheap entertainment and hobbies. But in the real world, it takes a lot of work to get food to people, build and maintain housing, and the things people like to do and own are also labor-intensive to produce at various stages.
There's definitely more room to squeeze labor out of the market through more automation, but that doesn't result in higher wages for people.
This statement is kinda in odds with what proceeded it. You are suggesting that "in the real world" this is impossible. But then also conclude with the line of reasoning that you seem to be arguing against.
From a smaller and smaller proportion of the population working in the agricultural field-- about 25-30% of the population in 1930 to about 10% now-- despite producing more calories per person and more meat, etc.
The graphs in the linked article show weekly working hours declining from 50H to 40H over that time frame.
Taking agricultural workplace participation from 10% to a hypothetical 1% isn't going to drop working hours from 40H to 10H.
Yes-- the point is that your argument that it requires eating the cheapest synthetic food seems faulty; if 10% of our work hours are going to agriculture and related industries (including, as a sibling points out, restaurants and stores and manufacturing of junk food), then it's not a huge driver of our work week.
Similarly, it's not as huge a portion of our labor going to maintain and construct housing as you imply.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
The only problem is healthcare.
No one _has_ to have the latest iPhone pro.
Edit: was meaning to speak broadly about “keeping up” m
I'm being a little tongue in cheek but my thought was that daily life isn't that different now vs 80 years ago. Having a good cup of coffee provides the same level of stimulation. You go to work, chat with people, make something, and go home. These days you have access to more reading material during your commute, and can die from less diseases, so I mean the present isn't bad or anything, but people were probably enjoying existence as far back as 1945 ;)
I can't help but s/1930s/Great Depression/ and wonder what this even means.
cf David Graeber Bullshit Jobs.
I don't think it's at all true that those people didn't understand the labor that is needed to create food (especialy this; they correctly predicted that agricultural labor has gone down drastically), housing, or even entertainment. I think they actually had it right, and that we don't work less is not about material necessity but just about the way our present economic structure works.
> Alienation is not ‘Bullshit’: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs
> David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095001702110150...
>Productivity in the United States averaged 63.33 points from 1950 until 2022, reaching an all time high of 115.97 points in the fourth quarter of 2021 and a record low of 26.24 points in the first quarter of 1950.
it seems wrong to ignore this. productivity 5x'd since 1950, but hours roughly 1x'd. you're not speaking to why this doesn't result in higher wages for people or a shorter work day. which is implicit support of whatever the benefiting factor is.
It's about $54k now.
So, it's not 5x, but hours went about .8x and wages went about 1.32x, so we're about 1.65x better off per hour. The overwhelming quantity of the benefit from productivity went to capital, though... which perhaps in unsurprising because a lot of the benefit to productivity has come from capital expenditure.
"Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year"
https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-...
> Here’s the arithmetic. According to our analysis of occupational data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. (This figure includes both the public and private sectors but does not include individuals in IT-related functions.) That works out to one manager and administrator for every 4.7 employees. Overall, managers and administrators made up 17.6% of the U.S. workforce and received nearly 30% of total compensation.
"In 1950, 14 percent of men were out of the labor force. Today, that figure stands at 31 percent."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/men-unemployment...
If we take 40 hours (and that's less, according to the original article), then this factor alone would make it 31% less for an average man! So 8 hours a day just turned into 5.52 hours, for men at least. It's just that the rest of the time is not spent puffing cigars at the gentlemen's club as Keynes might have imagined, but stuffing your face with hot pockets playing Call of Duty on your aging parent's couch.
However, from the original rootsofprogress.org article, i didn't quite get this part: men aged 20 Work hours Other hours 70,612 (20%) 276,522 (80%)
Ok, so retirement, sure. They mentioned child labor, holidays and education, but for most men aged 20 in the US that doesn't even apply (20 is not a child, number of holidays barely went up on their graph, education is irrelevant for 70% of men aged 20). They don't seem to consider the 31% men checking out of workforce. So what is this huge number of non-work hours that makes up 80% of your life? Guess I have to go read the reference.
Here's some data on aggregate U.S. labor force[3], and breakdowns of men[4] and women[5] constituent components. I'll leave it to the passersby to contemplate.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
* Though the 40 week is still standard, more and more tech people are making their living as independent consultants/contractors, working part-time, advising, retiring early, etc. When you look at the amount of wealth created by tech and software, but also the flexibility and ability to do things like remote work, we actually have made a ton of progress here
* In the US at least, as long as health care is tied to full-time employment which is quantified by some arbitrary # of hours, it will be the predominant way to work
* Working hours are ultimately set by founders/owners, not by the employees (unless you're in a union like situation). Many software businesses have enough leverage that they can be run fully on fewer than 40 hours/wk, but generally investor interests, greed, desire to grow quickly, wanting to optimize profits, etc etc. Ultimately, culture and precedent is a really strong thing.
I'll hypothesize though that after the grind that was COVID, a refocusing on profits vs growth, we're going to see many more balanced businesses taking a far more progressive approach to working hours and reduced time roles. The 4-day work week is just one movement in this direction, and we're going to see a lot more tech companies that offer 20/hr week positions and more.
For me it looks like the opposite: today companies want full time employees (with a good LinkedIn profile). Unlike the 90'ies they no longer want independent consultants solving individual projects.
And all companies absolutely wants full time no matter the efficiency. Partial time gray beards not wanted.
At least in North America unemployment is very low right now.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/414896/employees-with-ze...
Although I've heard that there are a few countries/holidays where the holiday will be put on a workday if it falls on the weekend. However, my home country (Germany) is not such a country.
https://www.government.nl/topics/working-hours/question-and-... shows 11 holidays in NL if I'm counting right
What an odd thing to write in 1934, at the very bottom of a terrible depression. Is it an equivalent of a starving person fantasizing of a huge dinner some day?
Wow. I (and many people I know) have switched to jobs with fewer hours but lower pay just to be able to spend more time with my kids. This mindset that ones' own kids are to be avoided as much as possible is mind boggling to me.
Of course different people are different.
Either way, it's a huge problem that currently most of the people paid to take care of kids (very especially but not only pre-public-school age) are underpaid and overworked -- this does not lead to the kind of care for our collective kids that we would want.
Those paid to do childcare especially should be able to work no more hours than they can do while still being attentive and caring and fully invested, and be able to access continuing education and mentorship in how to raise kids, and still live a comfortable life.
That is currently not at all how it works in the USA.
Why don't we have a 6 day week with a 2 day weekend? That way we get the benefit of 4 working days, we can standardized the calendar to not have this 31, 28 day nonsense (30 days only), and more importantly working day lengths stay the same. We just get to the weekend faster.
I propose the day to be deleted be Saturday because Saturn's mythology is a righteous c*nt.
Here's a calendar of what a 6 day week would look like https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/calendars/images/9/93/Cale...
Same reason we have 6 based arithmetic for time and circles. Standardizing on something is more important than what you standardize on in many cases.
I'm sure someone will stop by shortly to try and score a few cheap virtue points by claiming the French Republican Calendar was thriving before municipalities killed it at the behest of lobbyists for Big Nobility.
The point is that there is inherent value in having an adopted standard.
I kinda think TikTok, wow, candy crush, etc are are secretly funded by communists to bring down the capitalist west from within
Because humans are in a constant sexual arm race. People (and mostly men) are judged by economical status which is competitive, some men will use every extra minute to gain any advantage possible. And even if you decide not to participate in this game, then you will be working under someone who does and this person will want to max the output from you.