In Europe its possible but never in America. Ok, I should never say never, but im pretty sure we wont see that in decades in America.
The machine is eternally hungry.
Every little luxury we have with working, from safety to days off, is paid for in blood.
My union had been fighting for 32 hours for years. Right when I retired, the college agreed to 36.
Of course not. It needs to be legislated, just like the 40 hour workweek and worker safety laws. Is there anybody who really thinks companies will voluntarily disadvantage themselves against their competitors?
It’s not just that technology doesn’t shorten labour time on it’s own. It’s that technology disrupts the status quo.
A union uses strikes, sabotage, work stoppages, and everything they can to get an agreement that only a master weaver is allowed to sell woven products, and that anybody who wants to become a master weaver must first serve a 7 year apprenticeship. Then weaving machines are invented. The disruption isn’t merely that a master weaver can make a woven product in a much shorter time and the additional profit goes to the owner of the machine. It’s that now the owner of the machine is hiring orphan children to run, clean and fix the machines and the master weavers are unemployed. And, the government, rather than enforcing the laws about 7 years apprenticeships pass new laws to make the destruction of machines punishable by the death penalty.
New technology doesn’t just mean that workers have to fight to get better treatment than they currently have. It means an uphill fight just to get the same level of treatment they had before the introduction of that new technology. Just to give a simple example of something that happened within the last few decades: from 5pm to 9am people were off work, and weekends were free. Then phones, cell phones smart phones, etc. meant that it was much easier to get in touch with an employee during those hours. Now many people’s time off isn’t truly free time because they can be forced into working (even if it’s just replying to a message) during their time off.
What amazes me is how many people believe they will get universal basic income from the pedophile tech bro overlords who don’t pay taxes are actively gutting the meager safety net and worker protections we have. The cognitive dissonance is staggering
I would worry more about what conditions come with that UBI. They can make you agree to anything.
They all seem to just be lies dangled over everyone’s heads to keep them working into the grave.
30 hour workweek should have been 40 or 50 years ago. 30 would be late. We should be moving down to 20 about now.
I think you mean “we should be fighting hard for a 20 hour work week now, as hard as our ancestors fought for an 8 hour work day, and we should be willing to die for the cause, the way they died for theirs.”
It should not even take that much. A big issue was unions somewhere in the 80’s or even in the 70’s stopped looking to shorten hours in favor of increased wages with overtime. The membership were easily swayed by time and a half. This lead to the reversal of the 40 hour week. More than 40 became more normal than 40. Of course then over time they have gotten rid of access to time and a half and more defining of roles as exempt.
I want more people to think though
“If this tool makes me produce double, and I get paid the same, who’s keeping all that new value?”
If your productivity doubles, they will lay off half the people, and all gains disappear upwards. It’s already happening.
Maintenance workers, the engineers who designed the machine, everyone above who keeps it running.
Plants get shut down yearly for maintenance, stuff need to be lubed, replaced, upgraded etc.
Those contractors are gonna be making 3x what you do. Sure they’re keeping some extra profit, but their expenses also go up proportionally too. Millwrites here make over $50 an hour, the company charges out at $100+ per man hour. Maintenance is friggen expensive on machines.
All you need is 2-4 weeks off a year, and they save money while you’re off. Machines always cost money.
If that was true, if it was a wash to get the new tool for the owner, they wouldn’t do it. That’d be silly.
Upgrading someone from pen and paper to a laptop with LibreOffice is probably going to dramatically (let’s say 4x) increase their productivity, without a corresponding 4x increase in maintenance cost.
You know companies have whole branches deticated to computer support and cyper security, right?
Or do you think that before laptops businesses had their own divisions of Quill-Certified Problem Solvers and Paper-Based Troubleshooting Engineers?
And you think that costs more than the productivity gains from having the computer?
No. I think the computer industry is more expensive and creates more jobs than all the paper and pen industries have trough the history.
Jokes on you, I get paid for my five weeks of holidays.
Which is likely less than your full time rate, or it’s accounted for in total yearly “salary”. You’re paying for it somehow, even if it’s making a dollar less instead.
And think more the lowly workers, the ones that only get 2 weeks, and that’s because they’re forced to by laws.
Lowly workers? I had five weeks paid as a dishwasher. Make unions strong and reap the benefits.
They have their own issues, as described in my story in another comment.
They made a company waste millions of dollars replacing a job, than forced them to remove the machine and reinstate the worker.
They create problems where they are none, than celebrate when they win.
You are also fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re not paying for that time off another way. Most people would rather have the higher hourly rate.
I like the time off. I like having the ability to plan a trip every year (near or far), and not having to worry about how my bills are going to get paid.
Much better for my mental health than to work those weeks and not have anything to look forward to.
the contractor getting over double is a bad deal for the worker unless they are providing significant infrastructure like complex expensive tools and vehicles and such.
Thanks, Industrial Revolution…
Despite having full industrial machines, some workers here in a milk factory work for 24h in a row and rest for 48h, mathematically it’s the same as working 8h a day but who tf does that to their workers? another tomato factory I worked at kicked most of their workers and increased work time to 12h a day, everyday, even weekends, no shitty breaks, only 30min for lunch; bosses really don’t care, whether they have machines or not, they just don’t care for us.
If anything we’re back sliding in the other direction and I think one of the most troubling things I’ve noticed is that workers don’t see unions as workers fighting together but another organization they can complain to.
It’s something of a joke that office workers do maybe 2-3 hours of work a day.
Or, at least, they did. And now offices are playing the “how many people can we lay off before the system collapses” game
It’s not a joke, there’s been studies done that prove it. Its closer to 50/50 iirc though. So 4 hours of an 8 hour shift is wasted.
But that also includes stuff like meetings and water cooler talk. Socializing has its benefits, but hard to quantify.
It’s not a joke, there’s been studies done that prove it.
I mean, more that it’s a joke that we have to sit in an office for 8+ hours to do 3 hours of work.
So 4 hours of an 8 hour shift is wasted.
I think it’s unreasonable to call it “wasted”. Like telling a pro-athlete “if you’re not running the ball continuously for every minute of the game you’re wasting your potential”.
Some of it is socializing (which has knock on benefits). Some of it is simply resting/recovery (because intellectual labor takes real energy and people get exhausted). Some of it is bureaucracy.
The real gains of IT are in the speed of data transfer and processing. That saves human labor to a degree, but it also proliferates the labor. Excel allows every Mom & Pop accounting firm to do what required an army of NASA “computers” 60 years ago. But because everyone is doing this level of rigorous, high speed accounting, it actually requires more overall work, not less.
The individuals in question are no more or less efficient today. They were taking coffee breaks, long lunches, and clocking out early to play golf at NASA, too.
I think it’s unreasonable to call it “wasted”. Like telling a pro-athlete “if you’re not running the ball continuously for every minute of the game you’re wasting your potential”.
Marathon runners take no breaks. If you’re requireing constant breaks due to mental fatigue, like any other muscle training and work it.
How do you think tradesman handle working 8 hour shifts with only a 30 minute break? They’re constantly on their feet, being physical, they are also doing calculations, looking around at their surroundings in case something is wrong or going to happen. It’s a physically and mentally straining job, and they do it for a full shift. It’s hilarious when office workers bring up the mental part, like craftsmen don’t have to use their brain. Nice one.
So yes, it is in fact wasted, and objectively so.
Marathon runners take no breaks.
Marathon runners take breaks between every marathon. Runners can require nearly a month of downtime between races in order to perform optimally.
How do you think tradesman handle working 8 hour shifts with only a 30 minute break?
So yes, it is in fact wasted.
Resting isn’t wasted time any more than sleeping is.
Right, but they handle the full shift of their duties in that time, and get their REST after. They get no breaks.
Thank you, that’s a union job, makes my point quite well, other tradesman would be canned for doing that. They can go a full shift without breaks.
Resting and breaks are wholefully different things. Everyone needs rest between shifts, but if you can’t perform your shift without breaks, why are you there?
Thank you, that’s a union job
That’s just a job. If you think people are working harder without a union, you’d be surprised. More often they’re being paid less to do less work, because the workers aren’t trained by their veteran peers to manage themselves.
The suffocating bureaucratization of the corporate world tends to make work sites more difficult and dangerous to navigate, tires people out more quickly, and ends up with exactly this kind of “six guys staring at a hole in the ground while one guy works” dynamic - because corporate only delegated one shovel for six people, to save money.
ends up with exactly this kind of “six guys staring at a hole in the ground while one guy works” dynamic - because corporate only delegated one shovel for six people, to save money.
Nope.
Each one has their role, and can’t start till the one before is done. But it’s too difficult to coordinate and people don’t like sitting around at home not being paid. So they just pay everyone to stand around. Or the job would take 2 weeks instead of a week, but things have to get done “fast”.
It’s why union jobs cost 10x as much as private, and do the exact same job.
On a normal jobsite, the plumber could dig his own hole, and sweep up after, but now that’s 3 different jobs done by 3 different people and different rates as well.
I mean many of them could, and probably would increase profits if they did. But yeah, most won’t.
Or Henry Ford oddly enough
That was back before it was ruled illegal to not always prioritize profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Biggest mistake in history
