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>I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push

>I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. Hanlon's razor applies here. As does Chesterton's Fence for that matter The 40 hour work week was won in actual blood from labor activists long before any of us were conceptions. The fact that we still live within it, is simply a proof of counter-revolution being pervasive such that the world has structured itself around this. We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor. Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.
- vidarh 4y ago
  While that is true to a limited extent, labour is doing much better in plenty of countries where people have demanded - and gotten - far more than in the US also post-globalisation. Labour has lost power mainly in those countries where people bought into the employers narrative and stopped or scaled back the fighting. Much of it correlates with media ownership support or hostility - e.g. in Norway the second largest media group was founded by the unions and remains owned by a charitable foundation, and so there has consistently been a strongly pro-union voice in media.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    My question is why didn’t US labor try things like that? It seems to me that in the early radio era this was possible.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Good question, and I don't know. There certainly were newspapers etc. aligned with organized labour in the US too, but I don't think anything as organized. Many other places as well now have relatively weak unions forced to deal with a largely hostile press (UK being one) andd could have benefited from something similar.
- komali2 4y ago
  > Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding. I find this argument often used in defense of nationalism or protectionism, which is why it's interesting when the nationalists will turn around and argue against this same argument when you reveal its true nature restated, which is: Labor, as predicted by Marx and other socialist philosophers, lost power with the rise of global capitalism. Just as Kropotkin wrote, capitalism goes country to country, forcing locals of each place to depend on it for goods as well as extracting from them cheap labor until they industrialize and become a part of the global middle class, the sustaining of which requires finding a new place to pillage for cheap labor. As the transnational organizations doing this (say, Chiquita, or maybe BP) grow, as you said, their global political power increases, and not just because under this system, political power can be tied directly to capital volume. But because people like Marx and Kropotkin wrote this and argued in favor of the worker taking back power, suddenly the nationalists are saying "wait wait no, we wanted to use this argument to get more nationalist government power, not more global working class power!"
  - lr4444lr 4y ago
    Is that a bad thing? To raise one nation after another into the middle class?
    - komali2 4y ago
      I think yes because that's not exactly what happens, local capital class members will leverage political power to do things in nations that try opt out of global capitalism like staging coups or refusing to trade at all. See Venezuela, Cuba, Guatamala, Congo, etc. Furthermore there's no guarantee the locals will actually be "brought into the middle class." It's entirely likely a nation will get simply stuck as a cheap labor force for other nations indefinitely, see India and the Philippines. Finally, the cycle doesn't just end at "nation is done being exploited for cheap labor and instead now had a middle class and imports cheap labor," there's late stage capitalism which is where the usa is at where the inherent contradictions cause systemic collapse. See: the American crises in healthcare, infrastructure, housing, homelessness, individual savings, and rapidly plummeting incomes. Then of course the obvious question: what happens when there's no more cheap labor to exploit? Or the other side of the question: what happens when automation has driven the value of human labor down to pennies? Capitalism doesn't have an answer for these questions because under a capitalist system (and indeed some Marxist ones too), you must justify your existence through labor and labor utility.
roenxi 4y ago
Intertia is a big part of the 40 hour standard; I'd anticipate legal structures that start penalising companies that offer different hours. One of the situations I hear a lot of chatter about is people working 2+ jobs because they can't find the hours to make ends meet. Picking on US retail hours, there seems to have been a 2nd quiet revolution that has gotten the average hours down to 30/week without quite as much bloodshed [0]. It isn't that obvious that the efforts of labour activists have had that much impact. It is unlikely that they have managed to hold back the laws of supply and demand over the long term. If companies got much better results at 60 hours/week or 20 hours/week that is how long people would be working. Eg, look at how quickly we ended up with mass working form home. It has been a possibility for ~20 years, and it took one shock and suddenly it seems to be embedded as far as it is likely to go. No bloodshed. That is a much bigger win than a 40 hour workweek. I'll sign whatever hours you want me to pretend to work if I can do it from my bedroom. 168 hour/week contract WFH? Works for me I suppose. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAERT/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAERT/

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor. Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.

vidarh 4y ago
While that is true to a limited extent, labour is doing much better in plenty of countries where people have demanded - and gotten - far more than in the US also post-globalisation. Labour has lost power mainly in those countries where people bought into the employers narrative and stopped or scaled back the fighting. Much of it correlates with media ownership support or hostility - e.g. in Norway the second largest media group was founded by the unions and remains owned by a charitable foundation, and so there has consistently been a strongly pro-union voice in media.
- ticviking 4y ago
  My question is why didn’t US labor try things like that? It seems to me that in the early radio era this was possible.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Good question, and I don't know. There certainly were newspapers etc. aligned with organized labour in the US too, but I don't think anything as organized. Many other places as well now have relatively weak unions forced to deal with a largely hostile press (UK being one) andd could have benefited from something similar.
komali2 4y ago
> Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding. I find this argument often used in defense of nationalism or protectionism, which is why it's interesting when the nationalists will turn around and argue against this same argument when you reveal its true nature restated, which is: Labor, as predicted by Marx and other socialist philosophers, lost power with the rise of global capitalism. Just as Kropotkin wrote, capitalism goes country to country, forcing locals of each place to depend on it for goods as well as extracting from them cheap labor until they industrialize and become a part of the global middle class, the sustaining of which requires finding a new place to pillage for cheap labor. As the transnational organizations doing this (say, Chiquita, or maybe BP) grow, as you said, their global political power increases, and not just because under this system, political power can be tied directly to capital volume. But because people like Marx and Kropotkin wrote this and argued in favor of the worker taking back power, suddenly the nationalists are saying "wait wait no, we wanted to use this argument to get more nationalist government power, not more global working class power!"
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  Is that a bad thing? To raise one nation after another into the middle class?
  - komali2 4y ago
    I think yes because that's not exactly what happens, local capital class members will leverage political power to do things in nations that try opt out of global capitalism like staging coups or refusing to trade at all. See Venezuela, Cuba, Guatamala, Congo, etc. Furthermore there's no guarantee the locals will actually be "brought into the middle class." It's entirely likely a nation will get simply stuck as a cheap labor force for other nations indefinitely, see India and the Philippines. Finally, the cycle doesn't just end at "nation is done being exploited for cheap labor and instead now had a middle class and imports cheap labor," there's late stage capitalism which is where the usa is at where the inherent contradictions cause systemic collapse. See: the American crises in healthcare, infrastructure, housing, homelessness, individual savings, and rapidly plummeting incomes. Then of course the obvious question: what happens when there's no more cheap labor to exploit? Or the other side of the question: what happens when automation has driven the value of human labor down to pennies? Capitalism doesn't have an answer for these questions because under a capitalist system (and indeed some Marxist ones too), you must justify your existence through labor and labor utility.

roenxi 4y ago

Intertia is a big part of the 40 hour standard; I'd anticipate legal structures that start penalising companies that offer different hours. One of the situations I hear a lot of chatter about is people working 2+ jobs because they can't find the hours to make ends meet. Picking on US retail hours, there seems to have been a 2nd quiet revolution that has gotten the average hours down to 30/week without quite as much bloodshed [0]. It isn't that obvious that the efforts of labour activists have had that much impact. It is unlikely that they have managed to hold back the laws of supply and demand over the long term. If companies got much better results at 60 hours/week or 20 hours/week that is how long people would be working. Eg, look at how quickly we ended up with mass working form home. It has been a possibility for ~20 years, and it took one shock and suddenly it seems to be embedded as far as it is likely to go. No bloodshed. That is a much bigger win than a 40 hour workweek. I'll sign whatever hours you want me to pretend to work if I can do it from my bedroom. 168 hour/week contract WFH? Works for me I suppose. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAERT/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAERT/