The 40-Hour Work Week Is a Thing of the Past | Hacker News Reader

The 40-Hour Work Week Is a Thing of the Past

blogs.wsj.com

28 pointspmcpinto11 comments

From the article, I saw this line: "That finding suggests corporate leaders need to think more about employees’ well-being, Ms. Twaronite said."

I can think of one way to force them to be more responsive to their workers' well-being: a union.

This is an organizational method that's had a lot of success in the past, and works well in other countries. It's a way for workers to band together and demand changes to the business that benefits them, and can be structured however the workers decide it.

It doesn't have to be a "your pay is tied to seniority and it's impossible to fire louts" kind of thing; everyone involved gets a chance to have their say in how it works. (though, of course, not everyone uses it, just like how not everyone votes when they have the chance to.)

I only bring this up because Ms. Twaronite seems to have a lot of faith in corporate leaders to be good to their workers. It's those corporate leaders who put their workers in this "your hours are going up, your salary stays the same" hard spot in the first place.

What would make them change their minds now?

Sometimes I think about how even the number 40 is totally arbitrary. If we made the norm 30, would things be that different? It's such a sad thought that ~half (if not more) of the time we are alive, we spend at work, mostly doing something we don't like. Then I look at this from a cosmic prospective, where we live in this tiny little planet inside a huge universe we barely know anything about, and yet we were able to create a system of living with one another that requires us to do something we don't want to most of the time!

Oh it's heartbreaking to think about. This, now, in the 2010s, is the world we've allowed to happen (or been complicit in building).

I saw this in an article someone sent me recently: ".. a 1965 Senate subcommittee predicted we would be working 14 hours a week by the year 2000, with at least seven weeks of vacation time."

Well, that didn't happen, though our businesses are far more productive than they've ever been in history.

Can anyone offer a defense of the continued 40-hour work week, the lack of paid vacation (or people's general unwillingness to use it?), and the way all those productivity gains have all benefited a very, very tiny amount of people?

Not a defense, but I feel part of it is due to the value we place in our society in on being busy, see: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tra...

It's not just in the workplace that we equate being busy with being important.

That reminds me of a lecture by Murray Rothbard regarding the matter of productivity and religious beliefs. He noted that Catholicism although sees idleness as a sin, it doesn't confuse leisure time with it. Whereas Protestants of the time of the Reformation (and there after to some extent) saw leisure as idleness (thus a sin).

It makes me wonder how much religion has affected our social norms even today beyond the obvious question of prohibitions on certain sexualities, drinks, and the like.

"and the way all those productivity gains have all benefited a very, very tiny amount of people? "

The quality of life has been rapidly increasing for the entire planet. Visit ourworldindata.org and view all 16 of the data entries.

I'm talking about the U.S. While it's great that other countries have experienced a benefit, I don't really want to see Americans keep working the way we have been, so that the tiny slice of ultra-wealthy in our country can continue to enrich themselves.

And...since this article is about overwork--and how we're putting in longer hours--I really don't see what the point is in bringing up developing nations' economic status, except to try and distract us from how much harder we're working.

This is the saddest thing. Not only have we set up this system of living, but we've also acclimated to it, in the manner of Stockholm Syndrome, to the point where many reflexively defend it and excoriate those who propose living differently.

[And of course 40 hours/week is totally arbitrary! It wasn't determined by science or principle (a nice round multiple of 10 like that (in our arbitrary time units of 24-day hours and 7-day weeks)...). It's just the milepost the labor movement happened to get to before, for other reasons, ceasing to exist as a force of note. Before the standardization of the 40 hour workweek, you could surely hear perfectly analogous arguments for the objective naturality of the 50, or 60, or whatever, hour workweek as you would now for 40.]

We have constructed a big prison and some fools get it "run it" but even they still have to work there. It isn't just work, it is commuting, having a lawn, having a house just like the neighbors. Our free will is illusory when the box the particle is in only has a handful of states. The depth and breadth of possibilities for existence are huge but we have constrained them to a very narrow swath. Blue pill, red pill.

I think this is a side effect of globalization, work your 40 hours plus with full work load. There are difficulties being sick and still keep up with your tasks and being with family or you will be outsourced to some cheaper labour who will be happy to work the crappy hours for less pay than you. Further global corporations evade paying tax by shifting profits to cheap tax countries and putting losses where the tax is higher. So by globalization we have gotten more stressful work places and created tax loop wholes which the big corps use and avoid contributing back to society to pay their fair share of taxes.

This is what happens when the government represents corporations rather than the individual. Voters have a small effect compared to lobbyists for large corps. Is there also an effect in the US that individual states compete against each other in providing better environments to employers. The other extreme from this is a state that is anti business and has no jobs, but there has to be some middle ground. The Occupy Wall Street movement was useless, they should have created a political party and got some power.

Employees compete against each other, the two guys/gals in your office who work 80 hours a week will be put ahead of those who only work 40. If you don't want to lose your job in the next round of redundancies, you'd better be running faster on your treadmill than the next guy! Unions are dead everywhere except some specialised industries.

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