Leisure is the new productivity
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
We work more, and earn the same. We get zero guaranteed vacation days. We have labor policies that are worse than many impoverished countries.
Our politicians are absolutely not working on solving this problem. What is needed are large scale strikes with a few simple demands, but it won't happen because people are too afraid of being cut loose and losing what little security they have.
"Ironically, it was only when Henry Ford took the wildly controversial step of shuttering his automobile manufacturing factories on Saturday and cutting daily work hours from the then-standard 12 to 8 that workers began not only enjoying leisure time at home, but became more efficient and productive at work."
If Google and other big corps shorten work hours, then other companies might follow just like they did when Ford changed. Eventually it'll trickle up to legislation.
There's probably a better way that doesn't rely on them, I think.
I would think a federal law is the best way to solve the problem while avoiding repeating the messy negotiations.
Many workers depend on their paycheck to survive day to day precisely because of the meager amount. In today's USA there is very few union who can back workers up while on a strike.
Edit: Part of what I meant by the third paragraph is that someone else will take the job at low pay if you work away. Thus the fact you are saying no individually has little effect on wages when the market (currently) is filled with job seekers. It takes a whole bunch of us saying no together to have an effect.
Setting a precedence that individuals are respected as valuable contributors to business and not simply Human Resources is the first step if you're on the business side. Doing what's best for yourself and the business, regardless of how hard you're perceived to be working is the first step on the employee side. There's no need to appeal to some imaginary benevolent authority to make the "bad people" be nicer.
See also: the Free Rider Problem[1], Prisoners' Dilemma[2]
As for organized bullying... well, surely you can see how well that argument applies in the other direction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
[edit] fix spacing on links
2. Improve skills and network until you can do 1)
3. Don't have children until/unless you achieve 1)
Problem solved in one generation.
1. Don't be poor
2. Don't be busy
3. Be able to have a time machine to undo previous mistakes.
Problem solved with snark.
One of the main reason people have to work so many hours is the government diverts much productivity to waste. The best example is health care spending. Americans blow 25% of GDP on it. For all this spending Americans achieve a life expectancy of 78. Mexicans achieve 76 with a far lower GDP per capita of about $13,000 and spend something like 8% of GDP on health care. From this I conclude American health care spending is essentially a wasteful racket. It's not a stretch to say Americans spend one full day a week working to pay for doctors and medicines that don't really work.
Pile on other rackets such as massive overspending on defense, over-budgeted police and fire fighting forces, over-budgeted primary and secondary education, and you easily get another day or two. Americans in productive industries are spending probably near half their work week producing to pay for government connected parasitical industries.
Legislating less work time is not the primary problem. The first thing to do is address the question of Why are we as a society blowing so much money and effort on worthless crap? Cut back on the massive levels of waste and there will be more wealth with which people can choose how to spend their time, working or not.
Exactly. Productivity has more than doubled since 1970. That means we have 50% fewer jobs.
We have a labor glut; striking in that environment isn't going to happen.
Why try to regulate the market into doing it as she implies by comparing European countries, where by the way, unemployment is very high for the young? It is the surest way of doing it wrong.
Nothing prevents companies from offering more vacation time, but forcing it with regulation will prevent a host of other good things to happen.
"By 1905, the eight-hour day was widely installed in the printing trades – see International Typographical Union (section) – but the vast majority of Americans worked 12-14 hour days.
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit."
"Ironically, it was only when Henry Ford took the wildly controversial step of shuttering his automobile manufacturing factories on Saturday and cutting daily work hours from the then-standard 12 to 8 that workers began not only enjoying leisure time at home, but became more efficient and productive at work."
Now if we re-read the Wikipedia article we see that, in fact, Ford was not the decisive factor but that there were a series of labor struggles before and after Ford's decision mostly outside the automotive industry that eventually won legislative support that truly universalized the 40-hour workweek. Thus Ford's role is minor, but perhaps decisive for the automotive industry only. Very different from the strong and historically warped claim made above.
It doesn't seem too far fetched to me that Ford's cutting daily work hours would have made a huge impact if only because it brought the idea to the public's eyes. At the very least it wouldn't surprise me if only because it wouldn't be the first time I read about Ford's influence on setting trends for working.
If it's in service of bringing about better worker rights in the US it's... I dunno, justified, I guess? Ends, means, and all that. Still gross.
"Some years, international comparisons of GDP per hours worked have found, workers in Norway, Ireland, Denmark and even France, with their 30 days of paid vacation every year, their café culture, their generous paid family leave policies, their short work hours mandated by law and their new directive forbidding some employers from expecting workers to check work-related texts and emails after hours, beat us by a mile."
In other words,
In some years (not others), the GDP per hour worked is higher in countries where employees work fewer hours per year.
If people work 20% less and are 10% more productive per hour when they do work, they're still less productive in total than if they didn't reduce their hours.
Why does a company care if their salaried employees are more productive per hour? They just want that employee to maximize productivity over the employee's lifetime with the company.
If the article has only historical anecdotes to demonstrate that employees are more productive in absolute terms if they work fewer hours, that's not very persuasive toward the point the author is trying to make, that major industries and large companies should change because they get more value out of having employees work fewer hours.
I'm not saying I disagree with the author's point, only that they are using misleading evidence to try to support it.
Salaried workers tend to be college-educated. Putting them on the treadmill reduces their ability to innovate and thereby threaten the established order.
Hourly workers tend to have less education, which lowers their status and reduces their ability to threaten the established order. So leisure for them does not pose the same risks to the established order.
Quick, what were the professions of the following people - Jefferson, Lenin, Castro, Ghandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah? Hint: they probably would have a hard time dabbling in revolution today without failing to meet their quota of billable hours.
[The fact that you included Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah in your list suggests to me you quite possibly are South Asian and thus perhaps are already aware of this and simply made a typo; however, as this mistake (or, rather, its variant "Ghandi") is so common (I see the misspelt version far more frequently in Internet discussions than the correctly spelt one), and is related to frequent misspelling of my own name, I use any opportunity I can to bring attention to the correct spelling]