Sadly, for most people in the world, the future of work is more likely to be 9-9-6. Clock in at 9am, leave at 9pm. Repeat 6 days a week, for the rest of your life until you can't work and no social safety net other than your family. This is what your overlords want.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a goal to have no/one income households; sounds great for QOL, but let’s not ignore the bulk of history & humanity.
Today, we've got machines to do the dishes and the laundry, refrigeration, and foreign slaves / wage-slaves to make our clothes and crops. Homemaking is less labor intensive today, and what could be more leisure time has been replaced with two-income houses.
And, for example, my great grandma was both a housewife and she had a job at a sweatshop. The single-income household wasn't really an option for the poor in the 40s, and I suspect that it's only been broadly available to the upper class.
Going into management and other paper pushing is pointless work sure, but many careers are very valuable and build upon skills and experience in that job with profession in that job as much as you want.
Even if retail or whatnot, having an identity outside of the home to give you self worth isn’t exactly unique to C-level execs. I think it’s quite patronizing to assume that’s the only route to self-actualization.
The larger point being that 2 parents working to cover child care costs seems impractical from a viewpoint that looks at that net, but that would exclude the fact that many people define identity, societal productivity, fulfillment and even enjoyment from their jobs outside the home.
It’s also means that you can continue advancing in your career so that when you don’t need full time child care you’re in a stronger position. Many women who leave work for years to parent have a very hard time getting hired.
They need to do this because the house that was affordable on one salary in the 80s now requires 2 salaries and childcare
Not everyone is like that, but I had to explain why we didn’t have childcare costs when we took a mortgage put last week (I work as in the original point - I work from home, I take the kids to school for 0830 and pick them up at 1530, in between I do things like the dishwasher (while boiling the kettle or making lunch) and do what I deem enough hours to fulfil the goals of my department.
The point is that they didn't need to trade their labor for money, and now they do.
Some women of the time had a choice: to enrol in a relationship with a man and toil for his household, or to toil for a paltry income; many needed to do both. Skydiving and stamp collecting were only options for the independently wealthy
You are assuming the US had a choice in whether its population has to start working in the latter part of XX century.
Single breadwinner thing, along with cheap quality housing for everyone, highway build up and other projects of massive scale of that era were mainly possible because every other relevant player in world economy was still rebuilding from losing most of its population and/or infrastructure, transitioning through a huge political shift, or Argentina.
It was never sustainable in the long run.
Once those resources ran out economy had to transition back to what is natural for it - everyone contributing.
"Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened"[1]
The sad fact of the matter is that most of the people who run things really don't give a shit about their workers, as long as they get rich.
Which is why I'm constantly amazed at there being any worker protections and limited working hours at all. Laws like that are the only thing that gives me any glimmer of hope at all.
[1] - https://www.vox.com/22455058/jobs-restaurants-office-employe...
TikTok has a 996 culture and is killing Facebook.
The only way out of this is through automation or potentially economic protectionism.
The inevitable fate of TikTok is to become more like FB than different, assuming that they are successful, because of the business model commonalities.
Because of, or despite?
Good to see a healthy dose of reality.
(sometimes I wonder what their background is, It looks like it's a bunch where their parents were from a poor socio-economic backgrounds, so that in their view when both couples are working for 40 hrs a week and paying off a mortgage is seen as 'progress' )
(my last startup venture was in this space)
I agree, the best ways to do that include providing universal healthcare and basic income to all citizens, which would separate "work" from "survival". That's the only way I see to create a truly fair marketplace for work.
ubi would do something similar. it could never be big enough to change systemic issues, so would result in a funneling of the distributed wealth back to the capital holders, with no structural change other than inflation and rents going up.
so there’s no magic bullet. we need to make thousands of policy changes, all aimed at making markets fair and competitive foremost.