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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Why we don't have a 10 hour work week.

I am not an economist, but it feels like there is an easy and obvious solution to why we don't have a 10 hour work week despite increased economic productivity.

Let's say I work 40 hours a week. I get paid 100k per year. Now, let's say I negotiate with my employer a deal to work only 20 hours a week. How much should I get paid?

The answer, of course, is much less than 50k. Although I will be doing half as much work, the overhead of my employment (health care, HR, managing me) has not decreased by 50%. Perhaps, depending on that overhead, the value of my half-time employment is now only 25k a year, or maybe even 0!

Let's take this a step further. Let's say I'm a surgeon that trains for 10 years and then works for 30 years after training. Let's assign a cost of 1 to the training years and a benefit of 1 to the working years. The surgeon has a net value of 20. If now, he only works half as much, his net value doesn't go to 10, it goes to 5. We now need to train 4 times as many surgeons.

People naivëly assume that, as a society, we have a choice to work half as much and be half as rich. I don't think this is the case. By working half as much, we might see a 75% or more reduction in material prosperity.

This is obvious when we look at who works. Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more. People who earn more per hour tend to work more hours. They get highly compensated for additional labor, and are therefore more incentived to perform it. This is as it should be. A society where the highly skilled work fewer hours is one that seems a massive decline in standard of living (as per the surgeon example above) Expensive assets need to be utilized more completely than cheap, replaceable assets. We can afford it if the poor work few hours. In fact, in the United States and other western countries this is already the case.

This obviously has huge implications for inequality. Too reduce inequality, we have to reduce the rewards that high-income people get for their labor. But this will cause a large reduction in the hours worked by high skilled people and will cause a much larger decrease in GDP than the reduction in hours. By tolerating inequality, we can have a much higher level of economic output, and thus more money to be spent on social welfare programs. The costs to reduce inequality are very high indeed.

What you say about the overhead of work definitely makes sense, and I agree, but my question would be, why have we decided as a society that a 40 hour workweek is the general standard? How did we come to that particular number? Why is it that most employers don't require a 60 or 80 hour workweek instead, even if only implicit? Why are almost all work places willing to tolerate 40 hours as the optimal balance between overhead and productivity?

I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each. I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.

I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each.

This was explicit in some of labor movement arguments for the 8 hour workday. For example, Wikipedia has this banner reading

8 hours labour

8 hours recreation

8 hours rest

I'm so glad I get to spend my 8 hours of recreation commuting, paying bills, dealing with house issues, cleaning, shopping, etc.

At the time the 8 hour day campaign was going on, your wife would have done most of those things. Commuting is an obvious exception, but according to my relatives on the working-class side of the family, typical working class commutes were much shorter then than they are now. (My grandfather was able to cycle home, eat, and cycle back to work within his lunch hour).

Well what's the alternative?

Well, I guess if they factored the fact that everyone has to manage their own life into the equation, and devoted some time to that, too. Or at least commuting time. 7 hours of work, 7 hours of recreation, 1 hour commuting, 1 hour dealing with other shit, and 8 hours sleep. Or something.

I work from home, what do I get?

You get to masturbate during staff meetings, what more do you need?

Dunno. I'm not claiming to have a perfect system or anything. I just think that if the "8 hours for ___" system is really why things are the way they are (and I have heard that referenced before as a reason), then it seems pretty shitty that so much of people's time is prespent on stuff that doesn't make them happy or better off in any way. It can certainly be difficult to manage one's life on so little time per day, and still feel happy and like life is worth living, that you're not just frittering away your life doing chores, with no recreation to speak of.

Of course, it's fucking criminal that commute time comes out of "recreation" time and not "labour" time.

If my coworker buys a condo that's a two hour series of public transportation transfers to our work, should he get to work half days every day?

And me paying much more for my house and car that affords me a 20 minute commute. Shall I work a full day to pick up his slack?

No, he should get paid for his time commuting though, or he probably shouldn't have that job.

Why should he give up an additional four hours of his time per day -- half his recreation time! -- for free?

He's getting $100k/yr for ~2000 hours at his desk. You are getting the same. The fact that it takes him 3000 hours of work (and you only 2100) to reach those 2000 desk-hours is immaterial. If he doesn't like getting paid $33.33/hr (vs your $47.62), he should find a different job.

EDIT: for the other half of your solution: Should he be banned from a mutually-acceptable job at $33.33/hr with 12-hour days, just because the wage must be $47.62 for that position?

The fact that it takes him 3000 hours of work (and you only 2100) to reach those 2000 desk-hours is immaterial.

No, it's not. It's the most material fact of all! Work should not be so able to cut into a person's free time! This should not be so accepted! Shed your slave morality and work to live, not live to work!

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It's a trade off no matter what. Currently he is trading that time for the luxury of his home arrangement at the budget he likes. Alternatively he can keep the time and pay more, or keep the time and money and live somewhere crappier.

So he's going to get paid the equivalent of half a senior engineer's salary to wait two hours each way each day because he bought a condo in the city and takes public transportation.

I will work as much as him but not get paid that extra 50% total pay amount because I chose to buy a place reasonably close to work.

Choose to live near work or choose to burn personal time traveling to work. If someone values their own time so very little that they get a place far from work, then no one owes them any money. We certainly don't need the perverse incentive of paying people to have extra long commutes.

So he's going to get paid the equivalent of half a senior engineer's salary to wait two hours each way each day because he bought a condo in the city and takes public transportation.

That time is not his own, so yes, he should be compensated for it.

I will work as much as him but not get paid that extra 50% total pay amount because I chose to buy a place reasonably close to work.

And you are being paid in four hours of time per day.

Choose to live near work or choose to burn personal time traveling to work. If someone values their own time so very little that they get a place far from work, then no one owes them any money. We certainly don't need the perverse incentive of paying people to have extra long commutes.

On the contrary, it's you who doesn't value your time, as you spend it on work, willingly, without asking for recompense. And we don't need to be wasting our lives on ever-longer commutes from cheaper outlying towns into designated economic activity areas, either. Maybe the employer can implement remote working if it bothers them so much?

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Because he could have chosen to live across the street from his place of work. Commutes are basically a self-imposed Georgist tax of sorts.

I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.

In the US, until relatively recently, there was a 6 day work week. From Wikipedia:

In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.[12] In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday, due to pressures stemming from the October Revolution,[citation needed] which witnessed the ruling class persecuted for not giving the laborers dignifying conditions. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed, but it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide.[12]

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