6 ms·
"It was five days long, with days of rest staggered across the week. Now, the Soviet economist and politician Yuri Larin proposed, the machines need never be id
by petermcneeley 8y ago
"It was five days long, with days of rest staggered across the week. Now, the Soviet economist and politician Yuri Larin proposed, the machines need never be idle." This is actually totally sensible and was practiced in the factory where I once worked.
- waynecochran 8y agoTotally sensible? The whole thesis of the article is its failure.
- Avshalom 8y agoAnd yet find me the Walmart that's closed Sundays.
- waynecochran 8y agoYes. I do find we would be better off if these places were closed on Sundays. But this hardly compares to the forced labor of the USSR.
- AnarchoYeasty 8y agoHow. You are forced to work or you lose your job and your house, food, etc. Please tell me how our system was so much more moral than theirs. Where working at Walmart for 40+ hours a week still isn't enough to make rent. Where many people are working 2 or 3 jobs just to have a roof over their head and food on their table. Let me guess, you are a middle class white guy who never had to experience that, that's why you think our system is so much more moral.
- waynecochran 8y agoYou point about about the plight of the poor in any country including the US should be taken seriously. You comparison with Stalinist USSR is completely insane. Go read The Gulag Archipelago. Please.
- danharaj 8y agoThat's not a book of scholarship. Read an actual historical account of the gulag system. Trust me, its depressing enough without literary embellishment. And then compare it to the atrocities that established western capitalism. Fairly, I recommend.
- AnarchoYeasty 8y agoWhy would I read western propaganda? I'm not defending the Soviet Union, simply pointing out that the horrors y'all make up about them are largely made up, and that the United States does every one of them, if not worse, both to our own citizens and to people around the world. You think the Soviet Union was bad at silencing their enemies? The US assassinated Fred Hampton for telling black people they don't have to bow down anymore. They assassinated Allende in Chile because he had the audacity of being democratically elected and a socialist, and then backed a fascist (Pinochet) and helped him become one of the most murderous dictators in history. In Iran when the Mossadegh was democratically elected, he told BP gas that their monopoly on Iranian Oil was over. In return the US orchestrated a coup, installed a brutal dictator, and set up the Iranian secret police that we now view as the epitomy of evil. Eventually you are going to have to wake up and realize that the West has been the largest force for evil in the history of the world. And I'm not talking about Hitler.
- waynecochran 8y agoWestern Propaganda? Are you serious?
- monocasa 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovska...
- stale2002 8y agoWell for one, you have a choice of where you want to work. If you can convince someone to hire you, the government isn't going to come in and say "actually, we need more factory workers. So you don't work there any more. You instead are working here." I'd also like to point out that there are numerous places in the US where people are perfectly capable of living on minimum wage, working 40 hours a week. Most homeless people are homeless not because it is impossible for someone to live off of these wages, in the right areas. They are instead homeless because they have some sort of mental or physical disability that makes them incapable of work. The idea though, that able bodied adults are unable to provide for themselves, is ridiculous. There are numerous living conditions and places where it is cheap enough to live off of.
- 8K71PS 8y ago> Well for one, you have a choice of where you want to work. No you don't , it's entirely dependent on your birth and the luck of the draw in what class you were born into, your opportunities etc. > If you can convince someone to hire you, the government isn't going to come in and say "actually, we need more factory workers. So you don't work there any more. You instead are working here." There was no forced allotment of work in the soviet union, that's a nonsense claim coming from McCarthyist myths > I'd also like to point out that there are numerous places in the US where people are perfectly capable of living on minimum wage, working 40 hours a week. Not without exorbitant debt or unfavourable conditions compared to those who work above the minimum wage. A society that does not require you to work, and allows a livable wage for all work is a preferable one. > Most homeless people are homeless not because it is impossible for someone to live off of these wages, in the right areas. They are instead homeless because they have some sort of mental or physical disability that makes them incapable of work. That's not true at all, here in Ireland for example, mostly it's because of real estate speculation and treating houses as investments rather than places were people live. Mental and physical disability should not mean you live out on the streets > The idea though, that able bodied adults are unable to provide for themselves, is ridiculous. There are numerous living conditions and places where it is cheap enough to live off of. I've never seen a country where most of the homeless were unemployable, and in many cases the homeless have jobs, at least here. It is absurd to argue that people should move into the rural equivalent of a ghetto , devoid of job opportunities or development, or live cold.
- blfr 8y agoPlease tell me how our system was so much more moral than theirs. There's this FTFA For ordinary workers, quitting one’s job, missing a day’s work or being over 20 minutes late became criminal offenses, with mandatory prison sentences. and then there are tens of millions of people murdered, starved, and sent to gulags by the communists. Communism has an absolute lock on the title of the greatest moral failure in human history.
- Pxtl 8y agoHonestly, this drives me nuts. Retail used to be a middle-class job... And now we're employing more people to work longer hours but less money per hour, so in the end the same amount of wages are paid but it's less livable for the individual employee. And for what? So we can get groceries at 10pm on a Sunday. The same amount of product is getting sold for the same amount of wages, it's just the wages are smeared across more hours.
- pgeorgi 8y agoGermany. That is, as long as Walmart had tried to fight German labour laws. They've since given up, so I guess it's really "Germany, in the past".
- ars 8y agoAnd yet they are open on Saturday. So I suspect it's more to do with the Christian religion than with preserving weekends. Can a store in Germany choose to close on Saturday and open on Sunday?
- dan-robertson 8y agoThere are lots of laws in different European countries about when businesses can open on Sundays. They typically have religious origin (aiming for all people being sober and able to go to church on Sunday) but most of those countries are not so religious now yet some of the laws remain. Perhaps it’s just inertia, or some interest in the laws staying the same (eg in the U.K. small shops can open longer hours on a Sunday), or maybe in some places the people don’t want the laws to change.
- hibbelig 8y agoSaturday used to be a workday. It might have remained a workday for shops to make it easier for the Monday to Friday, nine to five, people to go shopping. Shops used to close at 6:30pm, which made it difficult to do shopping after work. So being able to go shopping on Saturday was important.
- pgeorgi 8y agoSaturday is still legally considered a work day in Germany. One of the more important places to remember this today are public parking lots with usage limits on work days: those apply on Saturdays just like on Mo-Fr.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoCulture and Religion are deeply intertwined in most of the world, even if people are not particularly overtly religious, traditions and behaviours are integrated. It's pretty hard to convince regular people how they should change their ancient ways to make investors an extra buck.
- Udik 8y agoDon't most factories work like that?
- jpindar 8y agoNot in my experience, no. There are some that do, such as the ones running chemical processes that can't be stopped and restarted. The ones that are basically assembly lines putting parts together can stop on weekends.
- petermcneeley 8y agoWell the most interesting part is that the preferences of workers are reflected in salaries in a free market economy. So its usually more expensive to have night shifts and more expensive to have workers work on the weekends because these are less desirable working times.
- ozim 8y agoWhen it is some factories and some workplaces it is ok. When you try to adopt it nationwide it breaks down. Like in hospitality, hotels are not going to stop cleaning rooms on weekends. You are not going to close restaurants on weekends. So quite some people in services also have random days in week off.
- 8y ago
- soneil 8y agoIt is sensible, on the face of it. It just doesn't appear to scale. Once you and your partner are both on shifts, any semblance of a weekend is gone. I worked 3-on 2-off for a long time, it was fantastic. Then once I got a live-in partner, on a regular 9-5, I was unavailable for 40% of her weekends. That was a stretch. Add in kids, and it'll get even messier. If mom's day off is Tuesday, dad's day off is Thursday, and the kids have the weekend off? It works for the factory, but the more of the same family you put on opposing shifts, the messier it gets.
- TomK32 8y agoScheduling is hard but in a factory you have a wider range of workers in different life circumstances, add small factor to the pay on unpopular days and it could work. Here in Germany hairdressers are closed on Mondays because they are open on Saturdays. If we can finally move on to the four-workday-week we can also think about rescheduling work more flexible with the help of computers.