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