The rise of steam power during the industrial revolution didn’t just result in people working fewer hours. Workers were much more productive than before, but they didn’t automatically get shorter work weeks.
Getting an 8-hour work day required the workers to form powerful unions and go on strike. Those strikes were broken up by private security and cops. People were killed. But, eventually, decades later, the rich people with power were forced to negotiate and 8 hour days were the norm.
I have known individual workers who had skills that were in high demand which gave them leverage. They negotiated deals like 4 day work weeks, or 30 hour work weeks because they could.
But, for the average worker to get a shorter work week, it’s going to take collective action. It’s probably also going to require that blood be spilled. Unless people are angry enough to getting beaten or maybe killed, nothing’s going to change. Step 1 is joining a union.
The US government crushes unions routinely.
They were at over 45% of the work force in the 1940s-50s.
Now less than 10%, and most of those are cops ironically. The union busters have a union.
I don’t think the government itself particularly hates unions. A lot of government workers are unionized. The problem is that rich people are either getting elected or are buying elections, and the rich-friendly reps are passing more and more laws that weaken unions.
I came across an article recently by some reporters who had “snuck in” to a police union meeting. It’s interesting what they saw. One quote:
“When it comes to police unions, what we run across is the left is very suspicious of us because we’re police, and the right is suspicious of us because we’re in unions. We get it from both sides.”
https://therealnews.com/beards-and-loathing-a-cop-union-convention-comes-to-las-vegas
Most governments hate unions because they stand in the way of their work: doing the oligarchs bidding.
Now tell them about the light bulb cartel and planned obsolescence.
I just bought an unbreakable Superfest glass on Etsy. When we start producing these things again we can revisit this conversation.
It’s meant to make dollars, not sense.
In a better world, we’d be paid much more for less work. No loss of jobs to AI, company would just keep on employees to cover for others to take long vacations. CEO and executive team won’t make 300x more then their average employee
A lot of that extra hours is because of planned obsolescence. If products lasted longer, if products were repairable, less would need to be manufactured. If less needed to be manufactured, the less work we need to do.
I just commented something similar. These are the fruits of capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
(or the grapes of wrath, as it were)
We really need a stakeholder centric economy and not a shareholder centered one.
The owners should be the shareholders, and the shareholders should be the workers. I think that makes sense. If everyone owns a stake in the company, it is in everyone’s interest to work well. Who gives a shit about loafing and stealing from some anonymous corporate job where your wages don’t depend on your contribution at all?
Capitalism
Capitalism is feudalism with more math.
Yes, because feudalism was famous for its short work weeks.
capitalism is an advanced form of feudalism
Sure, just like wood is an advanced form of metal.
The end goals and results are the same. That’s what matters.
And that will always be true by necessity for capitalism, it is the inevitable end result, it will always end the same way and it will always end the same. With implosion.
The end goals and results are the same. That’s what matters.
Ah, so an airplane is an advanced form of motorcycle, because the end goal is transportation.
Similarly, an oven is an advanced form of garden because the end goal is to provide food to eat.
Feudalism and capitalism are both forms of government, so they’re related, but one is not an “advanced form” of the other in any meaningful way.
No, that is you arbitrarily assigning random variables to the underlying proposition.
But yes, I agree that feudalism and capitalism are both forms of government, and I’d say that capitalism is the fruit of feudalism. It is feudalism in another shape. The purpose is to let the rich stay rich at the expense of everybody else. It is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, it stands in direct opposition to it.
The general societal stratification is the same, and acts similarly. It is feudalism with more math, but it’s still a form of serfdom. It’s like, capitalism says that it will solve everything, because on average everyone will have a better life.
The rich will make 1000, and you will make 1. Everybody wins, right?
The stratification, the accumulation of wealth, is the point. It is the mechanism by which the former feudal lords can whitewash their wealth- “look at us, we earned this money by smart investments. We are admirable! You could be like us! We aren’t tyrants and kings and princes, we were just smart!”
And over generations everyone is like, yeah, that makes sense!
If money is power, then capitalism is a form of government, and in direct opposition to the rule of a democratic process and law and order.
In my correct opinion.
People cut heads off nobility to get better conditions, and had to keep doing variants of it and fight for their lives for two hundred years until we finally broke free from it- only to have to slave for half the time of the day
They had more holidays and time off than we do now. Most of their work was seasonal, they were worked almost to death at harvest time for example.
Their “holidays” were “holy days” where they had to go on long pilgrimages, etc. It wasn’t the day where they sat at home and did fun things, they were the days where their religious duties trumped their farm work duties. And, when it came to their “time off” those were the times when they were mending pots and pans, sewing up holes in clothes, and other housework that they didn’t have time for when they were out in the fields.
I fail to see where the original comment highlights that feudalism is the next best option? Unless they edited their comment?
It’s nothing about “the next best option”. The problem is they seem to think that capitalism caused this issue, when really it has been a part of every form of government that has ever existed, and was significantly worse under feudalism.
K
Actually it was… Typically you only worked for your lord around 3 days a week, the rest of the time was yours to toil your own fields, and even then there was a lot of down time. The church mandated more time off than modern companies give…
I have read that with our current productivity we should have a 4-day workweek and much higher salaries. But all the gains go straight to the top.
I believe it’s already possible with a 20 hour work week.
I know I only put in about 20 hours of work into a 40 hour work week…
I’ve been arguing this for years. I’m 10x minimum more efficient since I got into IT almost 2 decades ago, there is no end in site, no slowdown. Just more work work work. So much shit is instant and only takes a few moments when it’s not. No way we need to work this much.
Ok so is this story, I think it’s from the book Freakonomics, but I can’t remember. So I’m paraphrasing:
Monsanto (or similar) goes to like Vietnam or Cambodia (or whatever).
They say, use our GMO rice, it will double your yield per year.
They say, great!
A year later Monsanto comes back, and finds the Vietnamese have only planted half their fields.
“Why did you only plant half the field?”
“Because with your seeds, we can work half as much”.
I tried half assedly find the original story but the other cheek couldn’t be arsed.
Because the American workforce in general are a bunch of morons. I remember when I was a corporate guy everyone would walk around with their heads down and when you would ask someone you were friendly with how are you their immediate response would be “so busy so so busy.” They would ask how I was and I would say “well I’m not busy like you and I’m happy I’m not busy like you.” And they would look at me like hush how dare you say that if I’m even seen next to you saying that I could be fired.
Just imagine if America decoupled healthcare from your job and people actually had the ability to choose where they really wanted to hang their hat for their daily billionaire chores. I think the workforce would dramatically change and there would be a lot of happier people. But since America was founded on Puritan values I don’t think happy is part of the lexicon when it comes to work.
Yes, decoupling healthcare would be a stark change, which is scary so we can’t do that. Also, it would nuke the Ritchie Riches’s hold on competitive hiring so … more propaganda.
Yep. I’m a communist but let’s be fair, this is not even a problem with capitalism. It’s not a win-lose situation where the oligarchs make money off of your misery. It’s a lose-lose where your misery causes lower productivity and the only thing that fuels it is a shitty, psychotic culture of dominance, obedience and puritan values.
We really need to start firing rocket launchers at billionaire SUVs
Sixty hours a week? Tell me you’re Ametican without telling me that you are American.
And if you complain, you are not a “team player”. That’s how you end up on the next layoff list.
What?! You took a couple days off last year?! I know we have “unlimited vacation time”, but team players don’t take time off. Believe it or not, straight to the layoff list.
I’ve had three days off this past year besides weekends, only one sick day
I’m still poor
With my socialist European collective bargaining agreement I would only be working 5 months in a year if that was my usual workweek
I would argue that you’re not thinking about working hours at a high enough level. The notion that someone can tell you that the negotiation for labor exchange is hourly is just simplifying the negotiation. For example, I make $70 an hour after you calculate it annually, but I’m not an hourly employee. I also work from home, which is a net positive because I’m a more laborious worker when I do this which is a benefit to the employer, and it’s a stress reducer for me, which is a benefit to me, the employee.
But there’s a secondary aspect of this situation which is that I do not have someone else “watching” me and making sure I’m working all the time. That concept is antiquated. It isn’t that there’s X amount of hours of work to do in a day, it’s that there’s Y amount of labor that needs to be done, but we don’t know what that Y variable is. We fundamentally understand the overarching goal - it might be something like, how can we increase efficiency? But it’s a problem solving concept where we need to utilize time (labor) to think up strategies to how we can solve that problem while connecting objective information to those strategies so we can better understand how they can even be implemented.
After all, if I can increase my own efficiency by 5% but doing so requires 6 months of my time, that isn’t going to have a payoff for many years and is likely not in the best interest of either myself or the business.
In addition, working more hours doesn’t correlate to more work getting done. One man might push a boulder up a hill in 8 hours while another might be able to do it in 6, or even 4. Do you want to pay them both the same amount? Would you want to be paid the same amount if you were the man pushing the boulder in 4 hours as the man pushing in 8? Of course not.
And do you always receive additional reward each time your labor correlates to some kind of improvement? Well no, of course not. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you can go years without seeing anything outside of your salary. The reason is simply because life and human relationships and interactions are complicated and there’s a lot more going on than you’re going to give credit for.
I make a decent income, but I also have to prove my value to my company. What I do can be in no small part measured, so if I’m not producing value, the business won’t want to keep me on the payroll, and if someone cheaper - thus, less credentialed/experienced - can do much of, or even all of the value I can provide, they will just swap me out for that person, and rightly so. Wouldn’t you leave a company who’s only paying you $40 an hour for work that another would pay you $70 for?
Most of the people complaining about why we still have to work so much isn’t seeing the bigger picture, and likely works a shitty job where the average employee needs to be monitored and probably doesn’t have the expertise to be doing anything that isn’t more or less transactional (meaning, you are asked to specifically perform very informed tasks like on a conveyor line). This is just a byproduct of people without high-level modern skills complaining that they’re sick of pushing boulders up hills all day every day.
I mean, I haven’t pushed boulders up hills for 20 years.
Working for time is standard because working for a production quota was too easily gameable by the employer as it was used to pay workers less than a survivable wage and then claim it’s their fault for not working hard enough. It’s not antiquated.
Yes, it’s antiquated because we used to be factory workers, where we’d just have a start-stop time because we weren’t automatons that could work anytime. The factory had a beat because product Z takes N steps.
But a cashier is basically in a sales factory; they mediate sales between shoppers and the department store. So, your “antiquated” is just a privileged perspective.
I’ve worked as a cashier many times in my life. I would not say that my perspective is privileged.
That said, I will continue to argue that it is antiquated. I’m talking about from the perspective of the business as well, mind you. The notion that we have to pay someone who stands at a register for X number of hours Y salary per hour is antiquated. There are so many other ways to handle that kind of trade for labor. Per person who goes through your line, for example, or just salary.
The problem is though that like it or not, the kind of people (this is a generality, mind you) who end up working a cash register for any length of time don’t often have the same kind of mentality to hold the ability to provide high value to a business. If your biggest value is your ability to scan items, there isn’t a position I can hire you for in my structure where I can’t find simply far too many others with more experience and skill who will provide more value. It goes back to, can you push that boulder up the hill in 4 hours, or does it take you 8? I don’t want to hire two people who it takes 8, I want to hire 1 that can do what both of you can do combined. The fact that you have to compete with that other person isn’t unfair, it’s just rational.
I used to work for an internet retailer where we had this thing happen that we called the 50/50/50 rule. Every year we would hire a bunch of warehouse workers. The company even invested in a bussing system that would drive these individuals to and from work every day and the pay was very fair for a warehouse role of this caliber. Everyone we interviewed had to take two tests. The first test was a VERY simple math and reading test. We’re talking adding and subtracting of 2 digit numbers and basic multiplication and division and simple reading. The second was a more complex test but I’d have placed it around an 8th grade level, at most. Of those we interviewed, 50% failed the first test, of those that passed that, 50% failed the second, and of those who did not, 50% didn’t show up to work the first day.
Keep in mind I took the tests and scored 100% on both and this was before I ever went to college.
Like it or not, there ARE calibers of people in this world. We want to think of everyone as equal, but they’re just not. Everyone should be treated equally under the law, but that doesn’t make them equal. If you are someone who cannot pass a simple math and reading test, and by simple I mean like 2nd grade stuff here, then I can’t hire you - not for the simplest job we have a need for.
There’s a firm point with what I’m saying here: Many businesses find that it makes more sense to pay hourly to a casher because if not, the casher is a lot more likely to not show up for work, not do their job when they do, and not do it correctly when they do their job than someone in my field. Same with the kinds of people who applied during my anecdotal warehouse example. Police were called every week due to fights and illicit drug use as well.
Again, there simply ARE calibers of people and there’s nothing you’re going to do about that. If that’s not you and you work at a register all day, then I’ve confidence you won’t be for long and maybe that antiquated way of trading for your labor will change, as it should.
I hate how the word “privileged” comes with a passive aggressive moral accusation. We all operate in the circumstances of our times.
Yes, basically all of these missives and thought experiments implicitly exclude retail while studiously avoiding admitting that this is the case. Retail stores need to be open a sufficient number of hours at the right time(s) of day to capture their potential customers. Unless you’re not able to handle your checkout line or your restocks for whatever reason, “efficiency” doesn’t really enter into it. Not in the sense of employee time, anyway. Maybe the world’s best 7-11 clerk could check out a thousand customers in an hour but just because he can that doesn’t mean it makes sense to close the store at 4:00 PM or only keep it open three days out of the week.
Edit: And to add to this before anyone pops out of the woodwork to state the obvious, this does not preclude the store from having more employees who work shorter shifts. In fact, this is often already the case not for any altruistic reason (to put it mildly) but rather to prevent anyone from achieving full time status such that the company would then owe them benefits.
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And we only live once. And our lives fucking suck because of a greedy few. Our short time alive is being wasted so some piece of shit can make billions or conquer 20 countries or any other pathologically despicable goal like that. And I mean pathological. These people are not sane, and society glorifies their mental illness.
Billionaires are OCD patients with Financial Hoarding Disorder. They have no need that for that much money, and no amount will EVER satisfy their mental illness. They will literally kill millions in order to accumulate more.
They need to have their hoard confiscated, and given mental health treatment, and if they don’t respond to the treatment, then they need to be institutionalized for being a danger to society.
Why would they surrender the power to have any vacation they want at nearly anytime and buy our politicians to push whatever narrative they like? They are dragons, and they live for status and power — the rest of us be damned.
Because it is not true.
Scarcity can absolutely be artificially created. Just look at the diamond industry. But I suspect that is not the kind of scarcity this meme is referring to.
There is a reason the 1% exists, and scarcity is certainly part of the equation. We live on a planet with finite resources, and there are people who seek to accumulate and hoard those resources, along with the wealth and power that come with controlling them.
However, the 60-hour workweek referenced in this meme is not an inevitable consequence of scarcity. It is a consequence of how our economic system prioritizes corporate profits, investor returns, and perpetual growth over the well-being of workers.
A company can be profitable and still be considered a failure if it does not generate enough profit to satisfy investors. Revenue growth is not enough. Profit margins must increase. Returns must keep climbing. And when the pursuit of ever-increasing profits takes precedence over everything else, workers are expected to sacrifice more of their time and energy to sustain it.
That is the real rot: an economic system that treats the failure to maximize profits as though it were the same thing as losing money.
Scarcity is real, but it does not explain or justify every form of inequality. The concentration of wealth and power is also a consequence of who controls resources, how ownership is structured, and what our economic institutions reward.
Until we address both the limits of our finite resources and the systems that allow wealth and power to become increasingly concentrated, we will continue to see extreme inequality. The problem is not simply that there isn’t enough to go around. It’s also that the people who control the most are incentivized to keep accumulating more.
There was a lot of progress until quite recently. Current retirees saw truly mind boggling changes during their lives. My mother (born in the 1940s) grew up in a house with no electricity and no running water. Now she’s retired and she can browse facebook on her mobile phone. My “father in law” bought his first house when he was in his twenties, paying cash with money saved from his first job. Their generation was not exploited and abused the way young people are today. They got to work less and less and managed to retire comfortably. Then political class broke their contract with voters and next generations are significantly worse off than previous ones (less intelligent as well) but a lot of people are still living comfortably enough not to complain. The way people participate in politics also changed. Polarization won over organization. Young people try to fight but without proper structures and strategy it quickly turns into violent lashing out and nothing is achieved. Is it going to change? Probably not. People in charge will keep exploiting divisions among us to further dismantle the system.
It’s starting to come to everyone. Wait a few years while the true sleeping giant, the people, start to churn inside while waking up.
I didn’t know we had time travelers from the 1920s on Lemmy!
