28 ms·

Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

• markus_zhang 7y ago
  And people has to work from young age if I am not wrong...and because they don't have electricity they also work shorter hours.
• zackkatz 7y ago
  Than we.
  • Areading314 7y ago
    do.
  • grammarfuhrer 7y ago
    Thank you for your contribution.
    • jammygit 7y ago
      I absolutely love that s/he created the account just to post this
  • zik 7y ago
    Common usage indicates that "than us" is just fine. Remember English grammar doesn't come from a grammar book - grammar books are merely imperfect attempts to describe common English usage.
    • sukilot 7y ago
      Common usage comes from users. Us have every right to apply our pressure on the common usage.
    • Areading314 7y ago
      Imagine writing this in a code review
      • edoceo 7y ago
        English is far from code. And if it was, it's like a hybrid PHP+JS
      • atq2119 7y ago
        Why not? Programming language grammar is fixed by the compiler, but idioms and stylistic preferences change over time based on usage as well.
    • myrion 7y ago
      At this point, to this non-native speaker, "than we" sounds bizarrely antiquated.
    • yesenadam 7y ago
      More than that, "Than We" sounds archaic to me, 19th C at best, i.e. wrong. Who talks like that?
      • pinkfoot 7y ago
        Elisabeth II
      • chownie 7y ago
        Carl Sagan did, I recall a quote of his talking about the composition of the brain and he says something along the lines of "to consider that we live in a universe which permits the construction of biological machines as intricate and as subtle as we"
    • chibg10 7y ago
      Ohohoho that depends very much on who you're talking to about the English language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription EDIT: These downvotes confuse me. It is a matter of fact that there exists an entire non-trivial linguistic school of thought which holds a belief completely incompatible with what GP just presented as more or less indisputable. GP's authoritative tone is unjustified, regardless of which camp you happen to agree with.
• timoth3y 7y ago
  This is true, and it's interesting. However, it's also important to keep in mind that there was also a lot of grinding poverty and near-starvation during the off-seasons. A peasant family might not have been working during the winter, but its a bit misleading to view that period as "leisure time."
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    The article argues that even when they had a chance to work more they didn't. Maybe they were all being shortsighted, or maybe that happened in a brief climactic golden age.
    • afiori 7y ago
      It was a common mindset, historian friends tell me that also shopkeepers in villages would work on a need-money-soon basis. I think that historically the first job with the work ethic of more is better was the merchant.
      • xg15 7y ago
        Which would support the article's hypothesis that the big change in working time came through capitalism.
• bsanr2 7y ago
  In America, at least, we should consider the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude in attitudes towards working hours. Many of the expectations for economic output by American industry have been set by the productivity of people who had little or no right to question the conditions they worked under, overseen by people who cared little for their well-being beyond that productivity. If that's the basis of the American work ethic, no wonder your boss looks at you like you're crazy when you say you'd like to be able to live comfortably on 30 hours of labor a week.
  • jaynetics 7y ago
    There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery. I'd wager that when looking at countries with roughly the same level of industrialization, whether humans view fellow humans as something more than mere resources is linked to a certain set of attitudes. I'd guess that reduced working hours are positively correlated to pluralism and pacifism, and perhaps negatively correlated to religiousness. The more you think that life ought to be lived a certain way, the more likely you are to see work as a savior from straying from that way. Looking at countries that have severely mistreated minorities, natives or remote people might also reveal a correlation, the more so the less this is part of the public consciousness.
    • feviskus 7y ago
      Just an anecdote from quitting yesterday at a German IG-Metall company: Yesterday I quitted my working student job in order to precipitately take the opportunity for an internship at another company. My boss congratulated me for the offer, said it's a pity that I leave AND spoke with HR so that I do have a shorter period of notice (otherwise I would have had problems). All on the same day. While accompanying me on my way out he said that especially with students, he invests in people. The doors are always open and he would be glad to see me there again. In fact, he recommended a former student worker to join another company before graduation in order to have a better looking CV. Im kinda blown away by this non-selfish (in a company's view) behaviour and strongly consider to rejoin at some point.
• hodgesrm 7y ago
  This article is somewhat surprising. It does not seem to account for variation in the intensity of work at different times, for example planting and harvest. At those times it's hard to imagine that people worked anything less than dawn to dusk to ensure they had food for the next year.
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    The table at the bottom is in units of hours.
    • manfredo 7y ago
      > Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year. I think the point the above poster is making is that "working hours" logged in these sources are very vague. Does the "175 days" in the English manor mean that these people had free time for the rest of the year? Or did the go and work second or third jobs to get by? Remember, only have the manor's records.
  • bsanr2 7y ago
    You've never worked crunch or a holiday period?
• mbell 7y ago
  Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.
  • devoply 7y ago
    French farmers did nothing 1/3 of the year now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives.
    • croisillon 7y ago
      it's not only due to the work but to the solitude as well. there used to be 70% of the population, men and women farming and living in farming communities, now only 3%, mostly men, actually working and not many people around
    • ryanmercer 7y ago
      >now many are hyperstressed and a number are taking their own lives. Not just France, suicide rates are up among farmers the world around A couple of examples: The U.S. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer... India https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides-of-nearly-60000-indian-farmers-linked-to-climate-change-study-claims https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides...
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    Remember that people didn’t really have money. Most folks subsisted or tended a few animals. Capitalism wasn’t a thing, and the society was fundamentally different. People were in caste like social strata and did what they were supposed to do, no more.
  • 7y ago
• JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  If I was to visualize a Venn Diagram of people who write articles such as this on mit.edu and the people reading them, and my other circle being people who get the short end of the stick of capitalism, I see very little overlap. It's true there are skilled workers that love what they do, and their jobs allow them to exert influence -- so they are motivated to work long hours (versus, say, a worker assembling widgets on a factory line). Something about that dichotomy of the people who have the luxury of choosing how much to work, writing about how we work longer, is something I find interesting. The management class of workers are the ones who have the most influence on the working hours of an organization's individual contributors.
• calimac 7y ago
  The federal reserve has a mandate. Maximum employment and price stability. There is no preservation of wealth or store of value. Any excess is soaked up by fed policy to maximize labor. Seriously. Read the mandate at the feds website and process it literally.
• maxerickson 7y ago
  I wonder how much more egalitarian forms of government are a factor. If you have a fixed amount of land to farm, there's only so much work you can do. If you give the king or the bishop your excess crops, there's only so much motivation to work.
  • chrstphrhrt 7y ago
    Whereas with good abstractions and maintainability, software can grow the pie/field significantly. It's not completely irrespective of hours and is totally contextual to how innovative/novel the challenge is. But there's still the potential for a multiplier that doesn't exist in farming, short of biological breakthroughs.
• aaomidi 7y ago
  I think this article perfectly captures people's reaction to: "Hey your life is shit than your ancestors and we're all to blame". I am absolutely loving the random shade we're throwing at people that came before us, as if they were some sort of savages.
• jhallenworld 7y ago
  I think a comparison with someone living as a citizen of the Roman empire is much more apt. Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy Of course they had slaves, but then so did we..
• kwhitefoot 7y ago
  Here is some more recent data (from 2014): https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours I'm glad I live and work in Norway where the average is between 1300 and 1500 hours a year.
  • notimetorelax 7y ago
    42 hours in Switzerland is IMHO a lie. I’ve seen and experienced tech and pharma setting expectations so high that people have to work at least 50-60 hours.
    • donquichotte 7y ago
      Don't forget the commute either. Suddenly you're clocking in 12h days without even noticing.
    • kwhitefoot 7y ago
      Don't you have anything like the Working Time Directive? I know Switzerland is not an EU member but then neither is Norway but we adhere to it as part of the obligations that we have regarding access to the Single Market.
• BurningFrog 7y ago
  It's hard to compare, but those who try usually say we have about 30x the income now. So the extra effort is worth it!
  • swayvil 7y ago
    But you can't buy time.
    • BurningFrog 7y ago
      Well... we live twice as long as those people.
      • pandapower2 7y ago
        That's not really true. Once you exclude people who died in childhood the average life expectancy shoots up. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b... In England and Wales around 1850 the life expectancy overall was around 40 because a lot of people died as children and dragged down the average. For someone that made it to 5 years old their life expectancy goes us 15 years to 55. People now definitely have a higher life expectancy but the difference isn't as vast as some might assume.
        • BurningFrog 7y ago
          > That's not really true. Once you exclude people who died in childhood the average life expectancy shoots up. An entertaining use of the word "true". Yes, if you exclude a lot of the data, the average changes :) Sarcasm aside, that is an important point in average life span statistics, but doesn't change the point that preindustrial life was "Nasty, brutish and short", as the old saying goes. Also, 1850s England was the richest place on earth, almost a century into industrialism. Already a vastly elevated existence compared to our "natural state".
          • 7y ago
• hairytrog 7y ago
  Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190876166.001.0001/oso-9780190876166 https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087... Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.
  • dcolkitt 7y ago
    I don't disagree with you. The average eight hour office worker probably only does do four hours of work a day. But I think the problem is that that nearly everyone has internalized that cadence. If every office worker had their schedule cut to a 20 hours a week, I strongly suspect that only 10 hours of work would actually get done. It's just too much of the low efficiency is culturally ingrained on every level from the cultural to the organizational. It would probably take a generation for things to change.
    • bsanr2 7y ago
      I beg to differ. Everywhere I've worked, people have despised the waiting built into the processes they have to conform to. Many roles are constructed so that they're actually two roles: one is pure productivity, with clear goals and deadlines. The other is some sort of service role where you're at the beck and call of clients who could waltz in whenever, defined less by your productivity than by your availability (which is always meant to keep you in an workplace for 6+ hours). Switching between roles is aggravating; effectiveness at one kills the other, to some degree. Most would rather just do one at a time, and be paid for either the time sacrificed or the work completed, at a dignified rate. But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.
      • isimluk 7y ago
        > But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends. I beg to differ. I think, the mixture of work items as you describe is solely motivated on fear that employees may produce less if not under 8hours control in open plan office. The fear however may not have anything to do with the reality.
• manfredo 7y ago
  > One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night. Hours spent working is hardly the same thing as quantifying human toll. Most people in agrarian society subsisted on a near-starvation diet, to the point where most women would not get their period until their late teens and early 20s. If you go to a civil war museum you might be surprised at how small the uniforms are - lower diets pushed average heights down by several inches. Antibiotics were non-existent so infections were lethal at drastically higher rates than they are today. Mortality between the ages of 0-20 averaged ~50%, and life expectancy at 20 was usually in the 40s or 50s. Due to this high mortality rate, the births per woman required to form the replacement rate was 6-8 (this is counted of the women that survive to adulthood, raw BPW is about half that). This meant that women effectively had to spend most of their adult lives bearing and caring for children, a big reason why agrarian societies are overwhelmingly patriarchal. Rates of literacy and education did vary, and were as high as 40% in some agrarian societies, but were still far lower than the >90% rate we see in most countries today. And I'm not even going to dig into the can of worms that is the amount of slavery that occurred in agrarian society that was displaced by industrialization. Capitalism may have a higher demand in terms of hours worked in explicit employment, but I doubt many today would genuinely trade life in a capitalist country for life in a pre-industrial society.
  • atoav 7y ago
    All of what you said is why poverty is usally seen as a relative value — it is relative to the perceived average of the wealth of the society you live in. A society that continuosly sustains high degrees of poverty under that definition, usually needs a narrative for why the poor people deserve to be poor and why the rich people deserve to be rich. Centuries ago (depending on the place) this might have been still been religion: you have been born into a poor life and those in the lead have been born as leaders and there is nothing you can/ought to do about it. Today individualism takes that function: you are responsible for beeing poor, even if you have been born into it. But you can become a billionaire if you want — it is just very hard. This means also those who are billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth. Rich people usually inherit their wealth tho, which makes a fool of the whole narrative and suggests who profits from it. Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in.
• ltbarcly3 7y ago
  And every year 4% of them died from measles, and every now and then half would die from a pandemic. In between pandemics their growth and mental development would usually be stunted, to some degree, by malnutrition.
• ltbarcly3 7y ago
  People who live in Detroit have shorter work weeks than people in New York City. It's called 'unemployment'.
• PeterStuer 7y ago
  If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since woman were drafted en mass into the salaried workforce post ww2, going from a 40hr week to well over 70hrs.
  • freddie_mercury 7y ago
    That's really only true is you take the parochial view that what women do at home isn't "work", when it clearly is work. In the 1940s a woman would typically spend 62 hours a week in housework. Nowadays women typically spend 15 hours in housework and 45 hours in paid work. So the same ballpark, really, and not a dramatic expansion.
    • wickedsickeune 7y ago
      It may be "work" but it's not the same work. Your boss is your family and its well-being when you do housework. It's not the same as someone who doesn't care about you.
      • silveroriole 7y ago
        I hate housework WAY more than “work work”. At least work has the possibility of being something new/interesting rather than the grinding tedium of washing the same plates, floors, furniture and clothes day after day after day.
    • PeterStuer 7y ago
      I specifically mentioned 'salaried' work, as monetary income has a direct impact on prices. 2 salaries is now expected and often required for many families.
      • marcusverus 7y ago
        Not to mention that the work that had previously been the full time focus of the stay-at-homer (cleaning house, gardening, doing dishes, grocery shopping, misc shopping, cooking breakfast, preparing work lunch, preparing dinner) is still being done. Only now it’s being done after traditional working hours or on weekends.
• vondur 7y ago
  I believe at the height of Imperial Rome, workers almost had one day off for every day worked. The Romans did use a lot of space labor, so that may also have something to do with it.
  • simonebrunozzi 7y ago
    What's "space labor"?
    • aidenn0 7y ago
      My guess is autocorrect for "slave labor"
    • proto-n 7y ago
      Probably slave labor typo + autocorrect
    • hnick 7y ago
      Auto-correct of slave, I imagine. Unless we believe in ancient aliens.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • natalyarostova 7y ago
      Imperial Rome enslaved the martians, and as a result creates an entire lower caste of space laborers. Over time they could not adapt to earth and their species went extinct. This resulted in the dark ages.
      • honestoHeminway 7y ago
        Romani ite domum. Martiani libertas
      • mothsonasloth 7y ago
        I want to believe
• dabbledash 7y ago
  It seems like they’re just excluding domestic labor from their calculus. The fact that people had breaks from farming tasks doesn’t mean they were filling that time with medieval Netflix.
• aaron695 7y ago
  Need to make up you minds, did women 'work' long hours doing house work in the olden days or not? Did they just laze around like the men did in this fantasy? The whole idea is garbage, getting water can take half a day for men or women, is that not work? If you're stuck starving and have malnourished kids, which was common, is that work or leisure? If you start working hard at 13, does that count towards your hours that mostly only adults have to do in modern society? Many people live in conditions pretty close to serfdom/pre industrial today, go tell them they work less.
• csbartus 7y ago
  I have a hobby: when I meet Americans I'm starting to tell them how lazy we Europeans tackle working. I mean the work / life balance for us means nothing since we do life first then work. And I'm telling them another thing: for me it seems in America everybody is working. The president, the millionaire, the middle and lower classes. Nobody does the `healthy meaninglessness`. Of course all these are friendly provocations. What surprises me is the cognitive dissonance they cause.
  • omeid2 7y ago
    On the topic of "healthy meaninglessness" and somewhat related to the discussions around Universal Basic Income, I think Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" is a mandatory read. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
  • gerbilly 7y ago
    Yeah man, enterprises optimize to make as much money as possible with as little expenses as possible. Why on earth is it that people aren't allowed to make the same optimization (greatest income with least effort) without being called lazy?
• andrewfromx 7y ago
  "One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two days-works." I've been saying this for years with programming and tickets! 4 hours a day is a full days work. If you can get a 4 hour ticket done each day you are right on pace. If you can get two 4 hour tickets done in one day, that's double pace!
  • ehnto 7y ago
    That leaves 4 hours for configuring your development environment. Nice work!
• nitwit005 7y ago
  > called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. They didn't exactly have a choice with the food. It's needed if you genuinely spend a hard day working. People used to make drinks for laborers containing things like molasses here in the US. I admit we've lost the afternoon nap, but I'm not sure why. It does happen elsewhere. The China office at previous job worked long hours and all napped at their desks in the afternoon.
• lmilcin 7y ago
  I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate. How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their household and there are countries when it is mostly male parent that does the same with same effect. Yet, there is not much difference in their capability to provide, it seems in cases of both types of countries the system settled and regulated itself.
  • dannyw 7y ago
    The commute may influence this. The average American commute is about 30 minutes each way. That's 1 hour round trip. Commute as a portion of work time.... 4 hrs work: 25% 5 hrs work: 20% 6 hrs work: 16.7% 7 hrs work: 14.3% 8 hrs work: 12.5% Considering you don't get paid for your commute, there is a natural incentive to work more hours.
    • wwn_se 7y ago
      10h 4 days a week to keep the 40h work week. But it also depends on the type of work. I think desk jobs would benefit more than manual labour form longer days(asuming same total). As the mind and body recovers differently.
      • coldtea 7y ago
        >10h 4 days a week to keep the 40h work week Why keep an arbitrary "40h" standard? Productivity has increased 100x from when it was established, what keeps it is busywork...
      • UglyToad 7y ago
        I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week. It's almost 10% longer than the default UK week which is already too long. Having worked both and currently on 36.75 there's still a huge amount of slack and wasted time assuming software development or other office jobs.
• chewz 7y ago
  Preindustrial workers also had organic food and clean air. And no commute
  • kortilla 7y ago
    Huge commute for hunter gatherers.
  • vixen99 7y ago
    And terrific life expectancy in which to enjoy it ...
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    If you liked eating only oatmeal all winter. Poach the lord's forest, get your hand cut off. Not all organic peaches and funtimes.
• lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  I can measure my output quite effectively and could, if allowed by my boss, adjust my hours to ensure some constant level of output - ie work less when Inwas being more productive. However my boss cannot measure that output - it's generally too complex, too uncertain too ... software-y Until we fix that, which is possible, we are stuck with "work 8 hours"
  • malux85 7y ago
    Your boss cannot measure that, I would argue, because he's incompetent (assessing progress of subordinate is a primary management function) As a boss myself, if my developers finish early, they are free to go. I can read their code and pull requests, I know who is pulling their weight. When I worked at Google, all of my bosses (including project managers) could read code at a superficial level, and accurately assess progress, so it's certainly not unique to my org. There's better options out there
    • lifeisstillgood 7y ago
      I may have been too simplistic 1. The work is never finished. As such no matter how productive you are or not there is more to do. So when do you say "Ok go home early?" 2. My view of productive may differ from my boss - and that gets further afield as the hierarchy goes up - so let's say you were working on Google+ (insert corporate white elephant) - no matter how productive you were in the small, it was ultimately a waste. 3. Output can be measured by reading code, yes absolutely- but it can also be measured by outcome of code (ie the report now runs five tones faster) these last two is measurement by value - and that gets hairy. So it's not quite "pointy haired boss" is bad So does google allow folks to go home early? it is that like the "as much holiday as you like" uncertainty ploy?
      • dnh44 7y ago
        I also think measuring by value is particularly difficult. How do you compare complicated solutions against elegant solutions when the elegant solution is so nice it makes the problem look trivial?
• lota-putty 7y ago
  Slavery isn't abolished, you've just stopped recognising it. was an ad for a local SUV over a decade ago. - Spending is good for Capitalism -- Spending on products with short-life is even better --- Everyday dependency on short-life products is a gold-mine. Break nation in to major groups based on colour, religion, language, jobs, social status. Break each group into families, families into nuclear & nuclear into individuals. Coz, "I'm Unique" is the best catalyst for consumerism. "I did it my way", reminds us so. Growing population is the best reinforcement out there for consumerism. BUT, Democratic-Republics & Capitalism are best out there for people in general. We accept long working hours coz, we're chasing a dream; sadly a dream aptly set by others. But, most likely we're in debt; monetary advances we received to chase our/their dreams. make a list of things you own that you haven't used over a month; you might want to share them with others if you don't like long working hours
  • msiyer 7y ago
    I totally agree.
• vfc1 7y ago
  The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification. This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time. The servant was not expected to leave its master, that was not OK. Or that you are expected to be available at all times, even though the contract only mentions 40h, and that is perfectly OK and even interiorized as acceptable by most people, which will even go to the extent of defending that state of affairs. What I see in the workforce is a desperate need for people to continuously prove the need for their own role, as automation and informatization eat away more an more jobs. It's a game of face time, who sends most emails past midnight, and who is willing to sell more of their personal life and squeeze other people out of theirs, often to do "important" tasks that are often completely unnecessary. I had a couple of jobs where I was working overtime, running for deadlines all the time, sending emails left an right, meetings, you name it. One day I had enough and I left, and to my surprise, I was never replaced :-)
  • growlist 7y ago
    When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.
  • rubber_duck 7y ago
    > such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time. Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example. When there is enough choice people change jobs all the time - the demand in my local dev market went through the roof last couple of years for multiple reasons - I see people change 2 jobs within a year, demand all sorts of things - last round of job interviews I did the interviewers spent double the time explaining why their company was a great fit for me instead of actually interviewing me for position - compared to the usual narrative of asking why I fit them. The situation is pretty much dictated by supply/demand and both sides take advantage. Firing and quitting can have negative implications for both sides, just depends on scenario. I don't see where shame enters the equation.
• spyckie2 7y ago
  Access to opportunities for more income also didn't exist either. The article specifically references serfs(!!!), possibly the most difficult economic class to escape, as the example. Cars, computers, phones, and health insurance also didn't exist back then, and neither did social mobility. Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on average would work more, not less. Note that I am one of those people who would predict that UBI would not reduce people propensity to work because it just doesn't make sense economically. I think most people's utility curves want the benefits of extra income OVER the benefit of leisure. It's security over enjoyment, which is not out of the ordinary for human value functions.
  • ptah 7y ago
    > Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on average would work more, not less. this is not how it happened and quality of life is not an objective measure. factory owners needed workers so they lobbied to have common land used for grazing and growing crops to be grabbed by land owners and forced people into cities to fill factories with cheap labour.
    • abdullahkhalids 7y ago
      From Cory Doctorow's Walkaway: Seth said: "Insert tragedy of the commons here." Natalie put her hands up. "You know, I've heard the term 'tragedy of the commons' like a thousand times and I've never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?" "That's commoners," Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and use it for a stage. "Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day's grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn't anyone's, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there's nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead's sheep." "Sounds like bullshit to me." "Oh, it is," Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. "It's more than mere bullshit. It's searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn't to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren't overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone's, because once he's running it for profit, he'll take exquisite care to generate profit forever." "That's the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because, that way they'll make sure they're better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story."
• ptah 7y ago
  I think a big part of the blame is the promulgation of Calvinism and it's "work ethic" by early industrialists. It was also used as justification for removing access to common land under the guise of building the character of a "lazy" population by forcing them into cities and factories to fulfil labour shortages
• ptah 7y ago
  also https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/18871-the-highland-clearances-a-capitalist-tragedy https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/18871-the-highl...
• Kaotique 7y ago
  I think this whole x hours per week system is completely flawed. If I can deliver the same amount of value in 20 hours, why would I have to work for 20 more hours and all profits go to my boss and nothing to me?
• averros 7y ago
  Well, in the Middle Ages no government or lord routinely took half of worker's production. Historically the "tax" was around 10% flat, and there weren't myriad other fees and indirect taxes (such as corporate tax).
• jokoon 7y ago
  I'm not waiting for society to change to live a better, more normal life, I've already abandoned the classic work sphere and its crazy carousel, and it has a long time since I have accepted it. All those findings done in that research confirms a lot of how I'm feeling already. It's true that I don't "see" as many people as people who work, so I socialize less and I don't meet many people, but: * I learned that having several friends can be "come and go", it's not an essential part of life (like many people would pretend), and many people told me it can be difficult to keep having those friends. Friendships can be hard work. Introversion is not a flaw. * I realize that work won't necessarily improve your social life, a lot of the time it can make it worse. Work is never forced, there are welfare programs and other way to sustain yourself, and once you realize that people who work 40 hours a week consent to it, it allows you to benefit from the mainstream belief that work matters. If you think about it, nobody will send you to prison or punish you for not working. Most people go to work because it's a habit, because they want to see and talk to their colleagues.
  • silveroriole 7y ago
    May I ask what you do? As in, to sustain your life/living situation/etc.
    • diveloper 7y ago
      I'm curious as well.
    • jokoon 7y ago
      I don't live in the US. That's a big parameter.
• WalterBright 7y ago
  On the other hand, I read that archaeologists have studied the bones of American colonists and found evidence of very hard labor. They didn't live very long, either.
• alexashka 7y ago
  I don't quite understand why anyone considers it a good idea to drive to their destination, by looking in the back mirror and arguing about what they see in there. Maybe we should have a look at who's behind the wheel and where they're driving us.
• anticristi 7y ago
  I feel there is an implicit assumption in the article, which is that work time is defined as time that you give away from your life to serve someone else. What if work time was more like a paid hobby or time spent with like-minded adults on intellectually stimulating topics? Surely I don't like all aspects of my work and surely there are rainy days, but on average I like my work. I like the people I meet at work, the challenges that work exposes me to. My boss often asks me for favours ("can you take this customer call during holidays"), but also makes sure that the emotional account is balanced ("you want more salary or an extra holiday?"). Also, the so-called 40-hours week includes coffee breaks and 1 hour per week of sports (I'm living in Sweden). I see nothing wrong with people working long hours assuming they do it because they want to, not because they have to. I would much rather like to compare the number of hours people had to work in pre-industrial times (which is likely 100% of their work time) compared to today.
• feritkan 7y ago
  In many countries donkeys are not allowed to work more than 6 hours a day by law. In Palastine this still exists. Or in England : ) . -- https://www.blackberrydonkeys.com/donkey-riding-rules-regulations https://www.blackberrydonkeys.com/donkey-riding-rules-regula... Compared with donkeys, we are not doing well- I am researching mules.
• TheDreamBotcher 7y ago
  Well work is done more or less to pay for the interest, that is created on top of the money, that is also created out of thin air. That is why politicians keep talking about more jobs, because people need to pay the interests on government loans. More work, more taxes. How production has been automated for 100 years we should be working 1 day a week. No such luck. We work for 5 days and some pedo looks after our kids in the mean time. So soon we work for 6 days a week and still get the mandatory "unforeseen" market crash every 10 years, so that what ever we can save up can be transferred to the banks&corps. Just waiting for the big crash to come and us moving into cashless society. I bet it comes around 2021 and get rid of Dollars&Euros. You behave or you don't eat. Everybody is chipped and talking against the government is considered "domestic terrorism" like the FBI already announced. This new electronic currency is backed by gold that they have taken from WTC, Libya, Egypt and Iraq. There is still time, so add Syria and Iran to that list. If you still live in the "matrix" this all sounds a like wild conspiracy theory to you, but you will eventually see it. Maybe it is too late then.
• tomohawk 7y ago
  I have talked to relatives who, in living memory, established and ran farms on the plains. Sod huts, the whole deal. They worked way more than 40 hours a week. A 40 hour week would likely have led to loss of everything or maybe even death. Even after mechanization, a 40 hour week was not in the picture. Factory workers used to work 6 12 hour days. Then 5 12 hour days. Then 5 10 hour days. Now, more like 5 8 hour days. We live better than kings and plutocrats did 100 years ago, with luxuries undreamed of in history, and with amazing freedoms.
• perfunctory 7y ago
  In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue. -- Bertrand Russell http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
  • CalRobert 7y ago
    And this is why scarcities of necessities (housing in particular) must be manufactured - to keep people competing with each other to see who can best make investors wealthy that they might be rewarded with the ability to barely able afford a decent home (after signing away their liberty for 30 years of course)
    • pitaj 7y ago
      Imagine believing scarcity is manufactured. Scarcity is NOT equal to shortage
• _pmf_ 7y ago
  Wait until you learn about hunter/gatherers.
• PeccClamantia 7y ago
  Bourgeois that is merchants and finance took over the state after the revolutions, the dystopia hell we live in is a product of rule by money.
• PeccClamantia 7y ago
  People have realized that the revolutions to overthrow the old order were advocated by merchants and finance. The dystopian hell we live in now is the result of avarice being turned into a virtue.
• Proven 7y ago
  Anti capitalist propaganda. It was hard physical work so you couldn't work as long as you can today. Today, thanks to automation and mechanization, if you want to make an extra buck you can work 12 hours a day. And now most workers don't have to work very hard if they don't want to, and can still make a living. Either way, it's much much better. Why don't those geniuses compare preindustrial age with socialist success stories such as today's North Korea or Venezuela?
• ivanhoe 7y ago
  It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you had to do everything manually, no running water, no electricity, no farming machinery, no supermarkets. They even had to make their own cloths as textile was extremely expensive, and I've read that weaving was one of the activities that was taking any free moment to medieval women, it was extremely time consuming. The pace of life was slower, that for sure, and perhaps the average working hours were indeed shorter (in winter especially because of shorter daylight), but they worked way harder than most people have to today.
  • danieltillett 7y ago
    Exactly. Hard physical work is real work - sitting at a desk tapping on a keyboard is a dream.
    • WilliamEdward 7y ago
      This seems like gatekeeping work.
    • lostjohnny 7y ago
      it's a different job. it's equally hard, one could argue it's not equally heavy, but many athletes today exercise way more than what the typical medieval "drunk till the early morning ready to beat his wife and kids" farmer did.
      • danieltillett 7y ago
        While many athletes do work hard, it is one thing to work hard when you are well fed and another when you are starving. I have done both hard physical and keyboard tapping jobs in my life and I have no wish to go back to doing hard labor.
• rgblambda 7y ago
  I'm surprised no one has mentioned "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber. He goes into detail on why and how people have so much work to do yet so little of it translates into practical or social value.
• TheAlchemist 7y ago
  "Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner." I would argue it's a flawed thinking then. If you are required to be there for 16 hours, even if you work only every second hour, I consider it 16 hours of work - you cannot do anything in between anyway. It's a bit like your if job is to sell cars and your boss only counts your time when there is a customer there and you are talking to him.
  • marcosdumay 7y ago
    "There" was near home. Those activities were done with family and friends.
• tempodox 7y ago
  They had other gods to serve besides Mammon, and that was part of public life. Today, the only god left to be taken seriously, is Mammon. Serving him earns you respect. Every other deity, pity at best.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    There's huge conferences for enthusiasts for Cosplay, Science Fiction, Comic Books and on and on. They take one another seriously. So maybe in the main that's true, but there are many subcultures that don't pity one another?
• thewarrior 7y ago
  They also spent less time reading Hacker News while doing it.
• IG_Semmelweiss 7y ago
  The author clearly misses the mark. Not all hours are created equal. Or is it physical labor under the sun, constant exposure to the elements or a furnace more "leisurely" ...than sitting on a desk with air conditioning? This kind of comparison is exactly what gets you into financial crisis. Reading the data is only 1 side of the equation. Understanding its implications is, sadly, a major failing of most academics outside of risk management
• ryanmercer 7y ago
  Pre-industrial workers worked, they didn't sit on their butts at a keyboard in air conditioning.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Agreed. And fully half of them were farmers, who worked like nobody's business.
• dash2 7y ago
  This is from a 1993 book. There's no mention of the pretty pleasant 16-21 years that most Americans spend in education, compared to preindustrial labourers starting work before age 11. Or of the concept "retirement", which would have been hard for medieval peasants to imagine. There's also this pertinent commentary from 1995: https://www.clevelandfed.org/~/media/content/newsroom%20and%20events/publications/economic%20commentary/1995/ec%2019950115%20the%20myth%20of%20the%20overworked%20american%20pdf.pdf https://www.clevelandfed.org/~/media/content/newsroom%20and%... "The central message of this Economic Commentary is that the presumption of declining leisure is in fact a fallacy. Previous studies purporting to have uncovered such a fact have not adequately disentangled time spent in home production..."
  • tryitnow 7y ago
    I think it's very hard to "pretty pleasant" - I'm glad that your educational experience was that way, but for a lot of people education is a form of work. In fact, I would bet most students would prefer work to education - and indeed many vote with their feet and drop out of education. Heck, even on HN there are many of us who hated "education" - it wasn't pleasant at all. As for retirement, well that's an unfair comparison, life expectancy at middle age was a lot lower in pre-industrial times, mostly as a result of poor public health knowledge and practice. Furthermore, there was de facto retirement as families and communities took care of elders - but who knows how that related to retirement today. The author of this book probably doesn't know and you certainly don't know. The Cleveland Fed's Economic Commentary is absolutely positively not pertinent. It is comparing the 1950s to the 1980s, not pre-industrial labor to industrial labor. Did you just google "myth of XYZ" and copy and paste the first result without reading it? And by the way, even on its own merits that Economic Commentary is pretty suspect. It doesn't look like it takes into consideration commute times, time spent shopping, time spent on administrative overheard like paying bills figuring out insurance payments and the whole host of bureaucratic non-sense that a market economy requires customers to engage - all of that is work, it's not leisure and it needs to be accounted for.
    • greyhair 7y ago
      Preindustrial you didn't spend time shopping, you spent time growing your own food and preserving it. You didn't spend time figuring out insurance, because there was no health care, at all. You didn't have bills because you paid up front, or you did without. The part about the commute though, I'll grant you that. During the last thirty five years, my commute was two and a half hours each day for eighteen years. They rest has been reasonable, but that eighteen was awful.
• greyhair 7y ago
  It all depends on what you did for a living. Case in point, agriculture. Averaged over a year, maybe it wasn't too bad, but during planting and harvesting, the day didn't end. And animals need feeding and care through the day, so that was an anchor if you were raising animals.
• pyzon 7y ago
  "Wage slave" is a term that should return to the popular vernacular. It very accurately describes the relationship most Americans have with employment.
• earth2eca 7y ago
  it is a shell game. I spent the best years of my life, my 20s and early 30s, building a career that was formidable and lauded by peers and colleagues, in a contracting industry. a nervous breakdown from work/life dysfunction led me to graduate studies in contemplative Tibetan Buddhist psychology. I have not worked a day in five years. there are mediating circumstances of privilege, position and inherited /accumulated wealth that have permitted me to choose not to partake in the power-oriented dynamics and economics of the modern "free market" wherein one has no choice but to subjugate free will unto the institutionalized corporation (at center of Western life) and its requisition of children consumers--who lack free will or organized behavioral/stimulus response to reject consumerization behavior mod. Therein the slaves remain working for unseen pharaohs and praying for unnecessary Saviors.
  • simplecomplex 7y ago
    Someone else is working for you instead (unless you saved this money). Whoever pays your bills is your boss. If the pay is contingent on attending graduate school then it’s actually a job.
• simplecomplex 7y ago
  Here are numbers in question: 13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours 14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hour 1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours 1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours 1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours 1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours 1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
• JTbane 7y ago
  If anyone has read "Walden Two" by B.F. Skinner, it promotes an interesting premise of work that is assigned based on how tasteful or distasteful it is. For example, gardening only counts for 0.25 credits per hour, while cleaning counts for more. Also, all workers are assigned a small portion of manual labor to stay in shape.
• papito 7y ago
  I was lucky enough to get 4 months severance once - thanks you stronger New York labor laws, and I took 3 of those months off. I have to say, going to back to a 10 to 6:30 gig was torture. I am still not recovered from it. Once you see the Matrix, the day to day slog to your retirement becomes meaningless. Don't enter the Matrix.
• ixtli 7y ago
  An owners only real goal (sometimes enshrined in law!) is to increase private profits for himself. At a certain point you run out of ways to do with for a single product or service so you're left with reduction of labor to lower margins. So in a way we can consider this article to be a very clear documentation of what people mean when they say capitalism is "efficient."
• yogthos 7y ago
  In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell is a timeless classic on the subject: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
• leftyted 7y ago
  I don't think this is about "your employer owning you". I also don't think this is about capitalism (which is just private property, economic freedom, and a government to enforce those two things). Instead, I think the pressure to work so much comes from society, which wields incredible control over all of us. More specifically, I believe that the 40-hour work-week is a consequence of the ascension of wealth creation as the primary goal of our societies. Past civilizations, rich and poor, did not see the creation of wealth as their raison d'etre. Modern civilizations do and, as a result, we're sacrificing everything else (autonomy, privacy, free time, family, etc) at the altar of wealth-creation. It's not all bad: wealth makes people's lives better. But there are downsides (like overwork, the feeling that you have no control over your life, the feeling that your life lacks meaning, lack of meaningful social relationships, and so on). I'm borrowing this argument from Hannah Arendt. I find her incredibly convincing: she sees this whole process as having kicked off with the Reformation, which resulted in the expropriation of ecclesiastical property in Europe that had been serving as the commons. Since then, we've never had much of a commons and wealth creation has slowly become the primary goal.