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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30997 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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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!

Alright? Equalizing it to 2000 hours dedicated to the job instead of 2000 hours at your desk doesn't change much.

You are each dedicating 2000 hours per year towards work. He is doing 1000 hours of commuting and 1000 hours at his desk, while you are doing 100 hours of commuting and 1900 hours at your desk. Under our current system, you might be offered a salary of $95k (equivalent to $50 per hour at your desk), for an hourly equivalent of $47.50 including commute time. Your coworker might be offered $50k (again, $50/desk-hr), for an hourly equivalent of $25.00 including commute time.

Do you think the offers should both be equal? What about if it was 1900 hours of commuting and 100 hours at a desk?

Again, as I've said elsewhere, I think both should spend equal amounts of time at their desk, meaning their contracted hours, and both should be compensated for whatever time spent commuting, since that's time spent in service of their job. That's literally it. I'm aware that this might make businesses prioritise local workers or switch to WFH wherever possible, and that's fine. It just does not seem right that a job is able to effectively rob me of 14 hours per week where I can't do what I need to or want to. If the 8/8/8 guidelines are to be believed, and I have an hour commute, that's effectively stealing 2 hours of recreation and setting me at 8/6/10. And "recreation" also includes shopping, chores, doctors appointments and whatever else, so free time is being further eroded by these unavoidable things. Why would I accept having more stolen from me, for free?

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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?

Do you have any job openings? I'd like to work for you. I'm looking forward to receiving your formal offer letter!

On a totally irrelevant, tiny little matter, I happen to have a three hour and fifty nine minute commute each way. I expect the standard compensation still, but it appears that all I can provide for you is two minutes worth of work each day.

Wilfully misunderstanding everything I've been saying doesn't make you appear smart, it makes you appear a clown.

You'd have to work remotely, leave your house at 4:01am, or not have the job. I expect you'll be choosing to leave at 4:01 and return home just in time to have two entire, luxurious minutes of recreation before sleeping, since that's apparently a completely reasonable thing to expect of people and definitely not a complete waste of fucking life?

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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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