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After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at t

After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly. The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many. I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of 'work from anywhere' technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet another expansion of salaried-time, even when no 'salary' is provided for it. We should also ask ourselves if the stance on 'working-from-home', which should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn't been hampered by a standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to employees. Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great costs to both the employee's health as well as the environment. (P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year? As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade-offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the direction of 'good-enough' rather than the 'best-of-the-best'.)

yomly 8y ago
>After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly. >The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many. These two facts often make me ponder whether we are regressing as a society but simply blind to this fact because various quality of life things have become cheaper (e.g. going on holiday and electronics). Meanwhile, we are mostly collectively losing at the wealth game and I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly). As such, social mobility also seems to regressing as who your parents are seems to be more important now than it might have been 50-60 years ago - I need only to look to my parent's achievements (and their peers) to be reminded of this fact.
- jstanley 8y ago
  > I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly) So what is it that has convinced you that we're losing, in the face of evidence to the contrary?
  - yomly 8y ago
    I apologise for the following unstructured stream of unconsciousness. It would be interesting to know what age group you are in as that could well colour your perspective. For me, my anecdata leads me to believe it is very hard to get on the wealth ladder. I have built this perspective from associating with people ranging from backgrounds of very working class to ultra high net worth people. We live in a world where (thanks to things like QE) it's easy to make money if you have money - equity markets have gone through a sustained bull period and housing prices have seen a sustained period of growth which has only in the past few years cooled down. An easy thing for many people to relate to is house prices (which is often most people's entry into wealth). If you live in a major city like London, good luck buying a house without parental help. The past decade has seen growth which has basically been faster than most people can save at. What's even more crazy is that the gap is small enough to see within (half) a generation - I have an older brother and people in their mid 30s face a very different situation to people in their mid 20s now. If you got on the housing ladder around or before 08 you'd have made widened the gap between those who didn't in a stepwise fashion. Meanwhile, my father was able to buy a house and have a kid when he was 27 after arriving in the UK with nothing on his back - he didn't even have a university degree. Contrast that with today, people who work in classically "elite" jobs live paycheck to paycheck in the city. Do you know any junior doctors in London? Most of them are amongst the most miserable people I know - they work all kinds of crazy shifts (night oncall) then have 1-2 hour commutes home. So if you're in a situation where most people are struggling to move out of home, let alone get on the ladder, while it is known that the rich are getting richer can we say that we live in more equal times?
    - Domenic_S 8y ago
naravara 8y ago
>(P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year) Probably not, but you also need to consider the second order effects. If it's not expected that you be in the office often, people more often choose to live far away from where they work. This makes it marginally harder to make people come into the office when you do need to pull together for "gold standard" collaboration. If you wanted to mitigate against this, then you'd need to make part of your hiring requirements easy access to the office. But now you're needing to be prescriptive about where your employees should live, shrinking your potential talent pool and encroaching on their personal lives.
- PeterStuer 8y ago
  Thing is, if you ask your friends why they chose to settle down in the place they are living, it is very rarely 'because it was close to the office'. I think that is a direct consequence of the 'volatility' of work. Your grandparents might have expected the company they joined in their teens to employ them for the rest of their lives. This sounds alien today. Not many people take it to the extreme of working with a laptop and a sat-link from a remote tropical beach, but plenty chose and environment they like, be it a hip bristling city or somewhere more rural for the peace and quiet, and then suffer the commutes that come with accepting a job. Now you are right that there is the potential for abuse, certainly in employer side ruled sectors, an maybe we need some safeguards, but we need to try and stop this madness. Turning some of the costs from employee to employer seems to work. I didn't run into many companies where the devs had 3x4K monitors and a quiet private office, because you know, at times 'you need that extra efficiency'.
  - naravara 8y ago
    Part of what makes hip, bustling cities hip is that living there makes you close to many offices. I have a plethora of employment options within a 1 hour commute from me in a major city in a way I would not somewhere far flung. The hipness is nice, but really it's a hedge against being laid off and having to pick up stakes if I am.

yomly 8y ago

>After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly. >The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many. These two facts often make me ponder whether we are regressing as a society but simply blind to this fact because various quality of life things have become cheaper (e.g. going on holiday and electronics). Meanwhile, we are mostly collectively losing at the wealth game and I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly). As such, social mobility also seems to regressing as who your parents are seems to be more important now than it might have been 50-60 years ago - I need only to look to my parent's achievements (and their peers) to be reminded of this fact.

jstanley 8y ago
> I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly) So what is it that has convinced you that we're losing, in the face of evidence to the contrary?
- yomly 8y ago
  I apologise for the following unstructured stream of unconsciousness. It would be interesting to know what age group you are in as that could well colour your perspective. For me, my anecdata leads me to believe it is very hard to get on the wealth ladder. I have built this perspective from associating with people ranging from backgrounds of very working class to ultra high net worth people. We live in a world where (thanks to things like QE) it's easy to make money if you have money - equity markets have gone through a sustained bull period and housing prices have seen a sustained period of growth which has only in the past few years cooled down. An easy thing for many people to relate to is house prices (which is often most people's entry into wealth). If you live in a major city like London, good luck buying a house without parental help. The past decade has seen growth which has basically been faster than most people can save at. What's even more crazy is that the gap is small enough to see within (half) a generation - I have an older brother and people in their mid 30s face a very different situation to people in their mid 20s now. If you got on the housing ladder around or before 08 you'd have made widened the gap between those who didn't in a stepwise fashion. Meanwhile, my father was able to buy a house and have a kid when he was 27 after arriving in the UK with nothing on his back - he didn't even have a university degree. Contrast that with today, people who work in classically "elite" jobs live paycheck to paycheck in the city. Do you know any junior doctors in London? Most of them are amongst the most miserable people I know - they work all kinds of crazy shifts (night oncall) then have 1-2 hour commutes home. So if you're in a situation where most people are struggling to move out of home, let alone get on the ladder, while it is known that the rich are getting richer can we say that we live in more equal times?
  - Domenic_S 8y ago

naravara 8y ago

>(P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year) Probably not, but you also need to consider the second order effects. If it's not expected that you be in the office often, people more often choose to live far away from where they work. This makes it marginally harder to make people come into the office when you do need to pull together for "gold standard" collaboration. If you wanted to mitigate against this, then you'd need to make part of your hiring requirements easy access to the office. But now you're needing to be prescriptive about where your employees should live, shrinking your potential talent pool and encroaching on their personal lives.

PeterStuer 8y ago
Thing is, if you ask your friends why they chose to settle down in the place they are living, it is very rarely 'because it was close to the office'. I think that is a direct consequence of the 'volatility' of work. Your grandparents might have expected the company they joined in their teens to employ them for the rest of their lives. This sounds alien today. Not many people take it to the extreme of working with a laptop and a sat-link from a remote tropical beach, but plenty chose and environment they like, be it a hip bristling city or somewhere more rural for the peace and quiet, and then suffer the commutes that come with accepting a job. Now you are right that there is the potential for abuse, certainly in employer side ruled sectors, an maybe we need some safeguards, but we need to try and stop this madness. Turning some of the costs from employee to employer seems to work. I didn't run into many companies where the devs had 3x4K monitors and a quiet private office, because you know, at times 'you need that extra efficiency'.
- naravara 8y ago
  Part of what makes hip, bustling cities hip is that living there makes you close to many offices. I have a plethora of employment options within a 1 hour commute from me in a major city in a way I would not somewhere far flung. The hipness is nice, but really it's a hedge against being laid off and having to pick up stakes if I am.