The Surprising Reason We Have a 40-Hour Work Week
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
The 40-hour work week was won after a bitter decades-long fight by workers and unions against business owners.
The idea that Ford bestowed it upon a grateful staff to improve capitalism is wrong, pointless and insulting.
Here's an article in favour of shorter workdays that takes history a little more seriously: http://www.iww.org/history/library/misc/Bekken2000
Henry Ford reportedly had a couple of intuitions about his workers also being consumers of his products, so now every time you look at any aspect of the consumerist society, some people will assume that Ford must have thought of that.
Also, you can't talk about socialism in polite society, right? So the whole history of worker-rights movements in XIX and XX century is "forgotten" and concepts are shifted to the next available historical subject.
This is why the practice of historical research is so important, so progressive, and so underfunded. Whoever controls the past, controls the future.
By the way, it's also quite laughable that you're citing a blatant biased piece from a union website. Please tell me you're just trolling.
If you really want to argue that the 40-hour work week was the product of benevolent capitalists I think you have to try a bit harder. Perhaps there's an Ayn Rand blog somewhere with some made-up facts you can use?
And yes, I linked to the website of a union.
The IWW worked tirelessly to bring about the 40-hour work week, as well as other fun bits like "weekends" and "workplace safety" (probably Ford's ideas too, right? -_-). I'd say they're in a better position to comment than either you or the author of the original misguided article.
The truth is that thousands of workers died in a world wide struggle for humane working conditions during the 19th century.
In Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
In 1921 bombs were dropped on striking coal miners in West Virginia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Now think about how today, the American military gets away with bombing weddings...
After all, one of America's founding fathers said - "I'd rather murder trillions with my bear hands, than let a guilty man go free".
^ Note: Bear arms is not an error.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation
Do you have a citation for who said your quote - I'm not an American but that really doesn't sound like something one of their founders would have said (of course, I could well be wrong!).
I guess the old adage about sarcasm being indistinguishable from regular internet posts.
BTW You may be thinking of Poe's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
"Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."
The truth is that, when it comes to work arrangement, we failed to keep up the struggle: we now work more (in productivity terms) and for less pay than we did in the XIX century.
Next, you're going to tell me that JP Morgan invented the weekend.
I stopped watching television.
Granted there's a 1/5 chance of finding something golden but you break even eventually.
Other places, not so much.
About the only things I read are: HN, LWN and occasionally the Guardian.
I used to think live TV would survive because people like to just turn stuff on, but watching my son and other kids I realise that kids growing up with on-demand services, Youtube and DVR's don't seem to grow into that mindset: My son does not want to just turn on some channel, he instead asks for ridiculously specific things and expect it to exist. And as it turns out, most of the time he'll find something "close enough" on YouTube - even if it's some crappy homemade recording of some kid playing with his toys - if it's not something he can find on TV.
Live TV is about to become something unfashionable that old people watch, other than for a few major events.
Television to me is the least distracting of them all.
Obsessive tracking of the time is as unhealthy I found. I keep a work log but I never read it. It's mainly for other peoples' benefit.
It seems like as businesses grow and add more and more employees, they move to a more repetitive and uniform way to organize. Everybody should have the same schedule, losing an employee or hiring a new one isn't felt as much as a problem, they start to receive less feedback from employees and treat them more as repleceable workers.
> it would be counterproductive for my co-founders to work at
> 9AM (just like it would be inefficient for me to be
> working at 2AM).
Here in The Netherlands, this is a tough sell. It's hard to come by a company that REALLY implements this policy. I've heard the "Just put in your 8 hours" and it often will have the side-clause "But we would like you to put them in as we do".
Even at my previous company, where we were not customer-bound, and most of our contacts were in the U.S. It made sense I'd come in later, and work later.
But they didn't see it that way, and got in a lot of fights with management about it. They didn't "see" all the hours I often put in late nights at home, only the next day I might got in the office with a full day without conversions ..
There were a few people who would make jokes or "annoyed complaints" to management about me coming in a few hours later than them. Being a misfit is often met with ill repute.
Man, being at work at 11:00 AM instead of 9 made all the difference for me:
- I didn't get upset when I had to talk to contacts in the U.S. when they'd come online around 17:00-18:00 or discussing technical implementations even later.
- Our peak hours were U.S. targeted even, so I was having NewRelic sessions every some other night around 23:00-02:00.
Obviously, every next day when there were server/app outages, I would tell about my 3 hour fit to optimize query x by a factor 100. But in the end these moments seemed to be lost to management quite easily. They will remember the times you will come in late though..
I was putting in 50 hours in a 40 hour week.
For these reasons I now freelance :) I enjoy working in start-ups and with people in general. I think a lot of talent is left on the table by companies because they can't adapt to how developers are generally wired a bit different than other people ..
Some people need strict guidelines to be able to trust they put in the 8 hours. For me that comes naturally with having fun and sense of responsibility and being trusted.
Cheers!
He may want to see how this experiment worked in Italy for the last 50 years. Most companies completely shut down in August for a few weeks. Even those which want to stay open would do so with nobody else to interact with so they close too.
I find that having a roughly fixed number of hours of work is useful in the long run to balance burnout from working too many hours against not working to your full potential.
My productivity per hour goes down as I work more hours, but unless I am really tired each additional unit of time still provides a (diminishing) positive return.
Thinking that you have been really productive and can slack off for the rest of the day is a dangerous trap to fall into if you want to work at your full potential - it is better to use the positive mood you get from making progress and use it to motivate you to make even more progress.
If I've achieved my work goals for a day / other accounting period, there is no further reward for me pushing-on to achieve more. I'd rather use that remaining energy for my own personal goals.
So I don't see it as a trap, quite the opposite; use that positive mood to go and fix the leaky faucet, or whatever.
Topics like crunching always affect me, being in the video game industry.