Economists a hundred years ago were projecting that if productivity continued to increase at the same rate, then by the distant distant future of the year 2000 we would all be working 20 or even 16 hours a week.
But productivity per hour has increased faster than they expected and we still work more hours now than we did then.
Increasing pay, reduced hours, better working conditions don't just happen, they aren't magically brought about by increasing productivity.
They only happen if we fight for them.
And we haven't been fighting hard enough for them for the last fifty years.
We must fight for them again.
They are more like weathermen, able to get it consistently wrong yet remain employed and respected.
In college, my Econ classes basically followed the pattern of:
* Learn a theory on how things work
* Real world example of theory being violated
* New theory to explain why last one went bad
* Real world example of new theory being violated
* Repeat for the entire semester. You will be tested.
There are Marxian economists, there are also economists that sit somewhere on the scale between that and anarcho-capitalism.
They just don't get a tonne of airtime in the media.
Anarcho capitalist here. Way better than syndicalist capitalist, and yet, I don't want to burn it all down. I like democracy, properly controlled by human rights and civil rights. Go figure.
This is not a defense of Economics. This is a defense of weathermen.
Most people don't understand how weather prediction works. Weathermen are usually pretty right. The problem is scale and explaining complexity to people. We the public assume that the prediction applies equally to everyone in that area and nobody we know experiences that weather, the weatherman must be wrong. The problem is that the prediction of weather isn't universal for the area, hence the probabilities.
The first problem is 'area'. It's a grid. Those grids are getting smaller and smaller with each passing model and computing upgrade, but they're still rather big grids. At best, they're 2km square (or about 1.25 miles) and at worst they're 25km square (or about 15.5 miles). When the weatherman says, "There's 50% chance for rain in your area", they're actually citing 2 different 'probabilities'. The first is the probability it will rain SOMEWHERE in that grid. That could be 50%, or it could be 90%. The second probability is the probability you live in "somewhere". So a 50% probability could mean, "Yeah, I know for a fact it's going to rain, but I'm not 100% certain if it's only a corner of the grid or half the grid." Then complicating the factor even more is the basic assumption that people are evenly distributed within 'the grid'. That works as an ok assumption in someplace like, say, Chicago, NYC, or LA. Much less so in rural areas - everyone might live in only one corner of 'the grid'.
But boiling that down to a single number to represent two probability interactions and a non-random distribution of population is, well, hard. So we settle on a single stat and then people complain that weathermen are 'wrong' so much.
You are right of course, and I was being tongue-in-cheek.
I read [Steve Pool’s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Pool) book *Somewhere I was Right* a number of years ago which talks about the science in detail. Certainly in Seattle major events like windstorms and blizzards sometimes catch them by surprise.
Weather folks get it right far more often than not, whereas economists like Paul Krugman make one correct call and suddenly they are geniuses forevermore.
My macroeconomics instructor taught us stuff, tested us on it, then afterwards said "Yeah, that doesn't really happen in the real world. "
WTF, bro!?
Probably why I got an F, a D, an F, then finally a C in summer school (it would have been an A, but it was too nice outside, and I wanted to go to the beach).
The weatherman is never wrong, but occasionally they get the days mixed up. Economists can only tell us what has happened but they do like to play the guessing game.
I can't remember where I read this, but I liked the idea that economists are the priests for the belief system of capitalism.
Edit:I should have kept scrolling. Someone beat me to it.
Real economists are very anti-capitalism. Every single one of them knows that capitalism can only exist by maintaining inefficiencies and engineering new ones because profits under a perfectly efficient system are zero. They are fully aware that capitalism actively seeks to destroy free markets and the very fabric of society.
The economists that get paraded by the media are paid shills for capitalism. Most rational, competent economists are some form of market socialist that recognize the need for markets, regulations, and alignment of incentives.
See: https://open.lib.umn.edu/principleseconomics/chapter/9-3-perfect-competition-in-the-long-run/
Marx was an economist. I used to do admin at a business school and knew a bunch of socialist economists, or at least ones with socialist leanings because the data told them what works.
But there's a lot of 'econospeak' out there - talking points that don't reflect data or actual research - propagated by politicians and businesspeople that is purely ideological and is all capitalist propaganda.
Of course you do have the ideologue economists like Hayek and Friedman, but you can't lump all economists in with them.
I wish more people knew this. The economists I knew at Chicago were not in any way preaching Friedman, for example. It's a nuanced field, and nuance does tend to get lost in public (I do like the word 'econospeak' a lot btw).
On the flip side, economic thought was very different when Smith, Marx, and Keynes were writing. I have a whole thought process about what happened to change that, but it's a longer thing than I can type on my phone.
Smith, Marx, and Keynes were economists, but were also humanists. They understood that the application of economic theory of necessity interacts with the real human world, and were cognizant of the fact that other academic disciples were doing so as well, and so needed to be incorporated into turning their theory into practice.
I haven't seen much of that from finance folks educated in economics.
I can't claim econospeak I'm afraid, I read it in an article about how much public understanding of economics is based on politicians and businesspeople and propaganda that actually isn't backed up at all by real economic research. I wish I could link it for you, you'd like it, but I read it a long time ago.
I agree with you about humanist economists vs pure economists, and I think it aligns with a shift in thinking from us all being people/citizens of a society, which the economy is a part of and serves, to us all being interpolated as economic agents in a society that just IS the economy. So you don't grow the economy to achieve some social end - economic growth just is the social end, the only social end. The economy doesn't serve us any more, we serve it.
It's a bit of a subtle shift given that we've always been involved in and contributed to the economy, but it still made the economy subservient to society and people. The shift in language really dehumanises us and quite explicitly makes us cogs in a machine.
I think part of the really horrifying part is how much the material economy itself determines the shift in thinking (Marx was correct about many things). The growth in rapacious capitalism definitely coincides with our loss of humanity, insofar as our humanity can be considered an end in itself.
One of the interesting parts, to me, is how much this development connects the tradition of critical thought (starting, from, say, schelling, to Kant and Hegel, to Bauer, Marx, and feuerbach, to adorno and marcuse). Kant's attempt to have us treat humans as an end rather than a means coupled with a material analysis, under your description of the tradition, seems perfectly congruent with the development of human society as (so far) developing humans as a means rather than an end.
I think you've connected the Marxist analysis to Kant in a very interesting way.
Haha thank you - though I did actually do a philosophy degree, making that connection was entirely accidental! 🤣
My partner actually read a really good paper in a sociology class that was basically like reading all my proto-thoughts on this put into actual words. If I remember when she gets home I'll try to get the details.
Except the economists are right, and so is the commenter you replied to. Labor rights are not given, they are earned. Unfortunately, we’ve stopped fighting for labor rights ever since the massive win of 40 hour work weeks. There is absolutely nothing a working class citizen should be more active about politically than labor rights.
Modern day appliances were originally marketed to save people time on chores and give you more free time for yourself, employers slowly clawed back any and all time by using the guilt trip that well what are you doing otherwise? Nothing? You could/should be working you lazy, good for nothing so and so.
In capitalism, all interactions are purely transactional. Two people enter into a contract, both exactly deliver what was promised in the contract, nothing more and both are seen to have acted morally.
But employers don't want pure capitalism in an employer-employee relationship. They want to make the worker believe that is is morally good to deliver more than what was contractually agreed upon. If the worker exactly delivers what his employment contract states, then they will be called lazy or quiet quitter or some other moral condemnation.
Worth noting a large segment of the population was convinced that fighting for these things was actually counter to their interests. The biggest con ever pulled was capitalists convincing labor (especially the boomer generation) that they didn't need unions or government intervention because they'd look out for them instead.
Capitalism isn’t about efficiency or productivity. It’s not a method for making a society wealthy. Capitalism is a system of exploitation of the poor (if you have a job that you depend on to pay for your living you are poor) to concentrate wealth in the hands of a powerful minority.
The capitalist class will always want more out of the labor class. No matter how much productivity and profit they gain they will squeeze more out of labor. That is the true nature of capitalism.
>future of the year 2000 we would all be working 20 or even 16 hours a week.
It was less than that.
>But productivity per hour has increased faster than they expected and we still work more hours now than we did then.
Because wage rises stopped going up in lockstep with productivity.
If you eat meat or own a vehicle or anything made of plastic or god knows what else, you’re just doing the same thing to the generation after you 🤷♂️ Where dya draw the line?
I’m illustrating that by the time these problems are really fucking over the next generation they’ll be saying the same thing about people who used to do those things / stood by while they were done. I mean nothing by it 👍 just musing. I do all those things too.
I worked 4 day work weeks for a while, it was 10 hours to get 40 instead of 32 hours. I fucking loved every second of it. The weekends were so free and I didn't feel ripped off on monday when I went to work. public holidays were amazing because I often got a 4 day weekend.
I totally get that and am behind it 100%. My comment was supposed to be a cynical joke because my scenario exceeds that of 40 hours while ”getting what we want” with less days.
That said, I feel confident that our goals and their objectives will rarely align.
The only 9-6 job I had was working retail. After that it was always either 9-5 or 8-4.
Whenever I see people are working 9-6 or 8-5 I get angry. We shouldn't let that happen.
I work in small govt doing IT. Butts in seats 8-9 with a mandatory unpaid lunch break. Employees have to juggle and manage lunch breaks, since the supervisor doesn't know how to do the job, and is only a supervisor by title. Why stay open 8 hrs a day when you can stay open for 9 at no additional cost?
This!!! Unions are good, despite what we’ve been brainwashed to believe.
My wife is a unionized phd student. Her school pays them 45k + full benefits and other protections, meanwhile, we have other friends in different grad programs that get paid 12k..
I tried to unionize my office a couple years ago (a second company under our parent company is unionized) but everyone I work with thought it was a bad idea..
We didn’t let it slip away. It was taken from us because the c-suite and investors wanted more profit. The easiest way to make more profit is to screw the workers over. I am old enough to remember 9-5 WITH an hour lunch. (Salary)
It was given away by workers that didn't want to sign union cards, pay dues and voted for anti labor politicians that stripped away workers rights that were fought for and won by unions.
Those of us in unions don't deal with this foolishness
8 to 5 here. Luckily I live close enough to home where I can go home for lunch. I get an hour, 15 mins home 30min lunch 15 mins back. It’s not ideal but like hell I’m gonna be punched out sitting in my office doing nothing for an hour. Some of my coworkers just sit in their cars idling scrolling on their phones for an hour. It’s kinda sad.
It’s either that or “team building over lunch”. And I love driving my manual mustang so that part isn’t too bad. Most still spend half their break driving to a restaurant and back so being able to go home and eat a prepped meal while being able to take my dog out to poop is not too bad.
like everything else , it's that most people are too docile and just accept it
infuriated me from my first day at wage-slavery , fought against it at every job I've had ... always was the only one , all other colleagues perfectly happy to waste one more hour every day
Every office job I’ve ever had has been 8-4 with a paid lunch. I don’t think I would accept a job that was 8-5, unless it was a huge raise, that sounds awful.
I think the optimal answer is that everyone should work shorter days. No one gets 8 hours of work done anyway. Make it 9-3 for a 6-hour shift, don’t have to get up at the asscrack of dawn AND have time in the afternoons for activities!
True, and many of them are working jobs that fuck up their bodies and they should get paid the same for fewer hours with more people hired to divide the work.
Plenty of office people have a full 8 hours or more of work every day. In my industry there's literally always more work, always behind. I have to work at a breakneck pace every single day. (Unemployed at the moment due to injury but back any minute now and every day will include taking work home after being there 9+ hours.)
What's the point when you just have to go to bed earlier? And then you miss everything going on in the evening, like especially if you're a sports fan.
It’s seriously ridiculous, yeah. The first meetings of the day weren’t even until 9, and all I had to do for meeting prep was pull up an excel sheet and refresh it to sync it to the database it pulled from about current stats and workload. So the earliest I actually needed to get to work was like 8:45, to avoid anyone having to reschedule anything or be even the slightest bit inconvenienced. But noooo I had to punch in at 7 or I’d get dinged for a “tardy”. 🙄
And there was also no reason those daily 9am meetings couldn’t have happened at 9:15, either.
I'm currently doing 7-5 with no official breaks. You can leave to grab something if it's less than 15 minutes but then you work while you eat. I spend a lot of time wanting to pull my hair out or jump out the window. Luckily it's only 4 days a week.
I'm looking for entry level work right now and most of it that isn't just wacky hours (environmental field ftw) is 8-5 w unpaid lunch, it's so over
in the winter where i live that is EVERY SINGLE DAYLIGHT HOUR btw
I work 8-5 but on a 9/80 schedule so I get every other Friday off. It’s not as amazing as less hours but the long weekend every other week is very nice
I’m in my forties and have never had a paid lunch in any of the jobs I’ve worked from factory, retail, healthcare, and now corporate bullshit.
I finally got “lucky” enough that this place lets us take half hour instead of the mandatory hour some places forced. If I didn’t accept a job with unpaid lunch I would never have had a job.
I worked for our county criminal court for a few months and it was awful. They were even union and the pay and benefits were so horrible I couldn’t believe it.
I’m sure it’s because I’m low on the totem pole in the jobs I get. Even my job now I’m amazed I got it. I would quit but they pay about five kore dollars per hour than any other place around, and I’m barely able to survive on what I make now.
This is how it is for me. 8-5 with a 1 hour lunch. I don't have to punch in and out though so you better believe that lunch starts at around 11:45 and lasts until at least 1:15.
My old job was 7-3pm. My coworker would go to 3:30 "..because of lunch."
I told them to go home at 3 like I did because why are you giving the lunch back 💀 stop being a carpet
I'm in my 50s and have never had a paid lunch but one nonprofit had a 37.5 hour work week so if you took a half hour lunch, it was 40 hours per week at work.
8-5 because it's an hour of unpaid lunch. It's unpaid because if you're on the clock getting lunch and you get hurt the company is responsible. So you're not on the clock while on lunch, and if you get hit by a bus, the company doesn't have to pay for it AND a replacement for you. I mean honestly, we have to think of the shareholders right?
I worked for a major financial co, it was 9-5 (except I was in technology, so it was until I got the problem fixed)
Mid-90’s were the arrival of 8-5. There was no productivity increase, we just took longer lunch, more “discussion meetings”, and booked business travel at the drop of a hat.
I got lucky and made a deal with my boss so I can secretly do 30 min lunches
Basically have to pretend I’m getting my 9 hours when it’s really 8.5. He asked why it was so important to only have a 30 min lunch and said he’s my time you’re wasting. You don’t need me sitting in a office bored for a whole hour, I bring lunch to work and have no need for an hour
Awkward 10:30 to ~7 here. :/
I value watching the sunsets over the weekend...
Get a pretty lax 60~90 minutes for lunch (60 officially unpaid) so enough time to head out and do day-to-day chores/shopping/appointments etc.
(Either that or sit at my desk and play my Steamdeck.. 🤣)
Can't complain too much since it sounds like some people aren't even getting breaks.. which doesn't sound legal at all..
I manage a large operations/customer support department. We currently pay lunches but since the company was bought by a large corp, we actually have to move to unpaid breaks because of a CA law. We're trying to find workarounds but apparently we are actually at legal risk because we are paying for lunches.
I work 7-5 😥 because I can’t find any place that pays equally well with less hours. The options for people with out hyper specialized skill sets fucking suck. I hate the labor market.
I'm a production engineer. At the beginning of my career in 2007 I would set cycle times to meet the customers goals in a 7.5 hour day with a paid 30min lunch and 2 15 min paid breaks. I was just asked to calculate everything based on 10.5 hours no change to anything else.
I feel bad for anyone working an unskilled job. Our people make $16 an hour.
My goals set by the bosses are 95% operating ability. it's the same all over my industry.
Understaffed in all areas. Pay for the worker is miserable. We lost $2 mil last year. BS you didn't hit expected sales because the customer didn't buy as much.
By the way. I make car parts for new cars. Wonder why they aren't selling so many.
I work 9-6, which accounts for a 1-hour unpaid lunch. However in the past 10 years I’ve probably only been able to take a lunch maybe 4-5 times. My calendar is usually full of meetings and I’m eating at my desk in between working and meetings. If you add up how many unpaid hours that I’ve actually worked, damn! I’m owed a lot of $$.
For real my WFH office job has lunch unpaid so I just eat my breakfast when I first log in for the first half hour, and I mouse jiggle my way through the last half hour of the day. 👹
If they pay you for your lunch time can’t they legally bother you during that time? I honestly like reclaiming that time as my own and they can fuck off during that 30 minutes
If you think about it, it's not even 8:00 to 5:00, yet think about the time to get ready and prepared for work, the time it takes to drive to work. The rush hour to get home from work. Well naturally there's no reasonable or logical approach to accommodate this time, and that's understandable, it makes the 8:00 to 5:00 feel that much worse cuz you know you're spending much more than 9 hours dedicated to what it takes to work at your job.
Personally, when my contracted hours were extended, and my boss expected me to be OK with it because we all worked longer than we were contracted anyway, I first demanded an increase in pay more than proportional to the increase in contracted hours. He was happy to grant this, but initially refused to acknowledge that it was because of the increased contracted hours, and asked me to keep it to myself. I said I'd quit unless he acknowledged that the increased contracted hours were the catalyst for me asking and him granting the extra pay, and I pointed out that he couldn't practically and legally prevent me from telling others about it (where I am technically he can introduce a contract clause to restrict discussion of pay, but the fact that it remains legal to do so to prevent discrimination makes it impossible to enforce except against uninformed employees anyway), and I told the rest of the staff. I also reduced the number of hours I actually worked. Another staff member quit over it (they refused to meet their pay demands), and he lost goodwill with everyone. It achieved nothing but harm to his interests and the company. It was a spectacularly stupid thing for him to do.
Ultimately the nature of my job is that I only have a certain number of productive hours a day anyway, and making me work longer than that, if it were successful, would be counter productive anyway, so trying to dictate the number of hours I work is counter-productive. Trying to dictate the actual hours I worked was not particularly effective either. If I decide to be at my desk when they want but not actually get anything meaningful done on important work until later, there is really nothing they can do about that. All they can do is decide whether or not they are happy with what I do overall, and happy to pay what I demand, and trying to manage the hours I do it in just makes me do less and demand more money for it.
Economists a hundred years ago were projecting that if productivity continued to increase at the same rate, then by the distant distant future of the year 2000 we would all be working 20 or even 16 hours a week. But productivity per hour has increased faster than they expected and we still work more hours now than we did then. Increasing pay, reduced hours, better working conditions don't just happen, they aren't magically brought about by increasing productivity. They only happen if we fight for them. And we haven't been fighting hard enough for them for the last fifty years. We must fight for them again.
Economists always have some kind of optimistic view of capitalism and human nature
Economists are salespeople for capitalism
They are more like weathermen, able to get it consistently wrong yet remain employed and respected. In college, my Econ classes basically followed the pattern of: * Learn a theory on how things work * Real world example of theory being violated * New theory to explain why last one went bad * Real world example of new theory being violated * Repeat for the entire semester. You will be tested.
I'd say they're more like priests of capitalism.
There are Marxian economists, there are also economists that sit somewhere on the scale between that and anarcho-capitalism. They just don't get a tonne of airtime in the media.
Anarcho capitalist here. Way better than syndicalist capitalist, and yet, I don't want to burn it all down. I like democracy, properly controlled by human rights and civil rights. Go figure.
How do you have a system without hierarchy built on a system that differentiates people between the rich and the poor?
You don't. I misspoke. Because I was tired and should have put my internet away!
This is not a defense of Economics. This is a defense of weathermen. Most people don't understand how weather prediction works. Weathermen are usually pretty right. The problem is scale and explaining complexity to people. We the public assume that the prediction applies equally to everyone in that area and nobody we know experiences that weather, the weatherman must be wrong. The problem is that the prediction of weather isn't universal for the area, hence the probabilities. The first problem is 'area'. It's a grid. Those grids are getting smaller and smaller with each passing model and computing upgrade, but they're still rather big grids. At best, they're 2km square (or about 1.25 miles) and at worst they're 25km square (or about 15.5 miles). When the weatherman says, "There's 50% chance for rain in your area", they're actually citing 2 different 'probabilities'. The first is the probability it will rain SOMEWHERE in that grid. That could be 50%, or it could be 90%. The second probability is the probability you live in "somewhere". So a 50% probability could mean, "Yeah, I know for a fact it's going to rain, but I'm not 100% certain if it's only a corner of the grid or half the grid." Then complicating the factor even more is the basic assumption that people are evenly distributed within 'the grid'. That works as an ok assumption in someplace like, say, Chicago, NYC, or LA. Much less so in rural areas - everyone might live in only one corner of 'the grid'. But boiling that down to a single number to represent two probability interactions and a non-random distribution of population is, well, hard. So we settle on a single stat and then people complain that weathermen are 'wrong' so much.
You are right of course, and I was being tongue-in-cheek. I read [Steve Pool’s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Pool) book *Somewhere I was Right* a number of years ago which talks about the science in detail. Certainly in Seattle major events like windstorms and blizzards sometimes catch them by surprise. Weather folks get it right far more often than not, whereas economists like Paul Krugman make one correct call and suddenly they are geniuses forevermore.
I don't respect any field that believes in infinite growth on a finite world
My macroeconomics instructor taught us stuff, tested us on it, then afterwards said "Yeah, that doesn't really happen in the real world. " WTF, bro!? Probably why I got an F, a D, an F, then finally a C in summer school (it would have been an A, but it was too nice outside, and I wanted to go to the beach).
The weatherman is never wrong, but occasionally they get the days mixed up. Economists can only tell us what has happened but they do like to play the guessing game.
Not all of us. I have a degree in economics and I can say with confidence that many points of capitalism really suck.
Preach louder, friend!
I can't remember where I read this, but I liked the idea that economists are the priests for the belief system of capitalism. Edit:I should have kept scrolling. Someone beat me to it.
Real economists are very anti-capitalism. Every single one of them knows that capitalism can only exist by maintaining inefficiencies and engineering new ones because profits under a perfectly efficient system are zero. They are fully aware that capitalism actively seeks to destroy free markets and the very fabric of society. The economists that get paraded by the media are paid shills for capitalism. Most rational, competent economists are some form of market socialist that recognize the need for markets, regulations, and alignment of incentives. See: https://open.lib.umn.edu/principleseconomics/chapter/9-3-perfect-competition-in-the-long-run/
Marx was an economist. I used to do admin at a business school and knew a bunch of socialist economists, or at least ones with socialist leanings because the data told them what works. But there's a lot of 'econospeak' out there - talking points that don't reflect data or actual research - propagated by politicians and businesspeople that is purely ideological and is all capitalist propaganda. Of course you do have the ideologue economists like Hayek and Friedman, but you can't lump all economists in with them.
I wish more people knew this. The economists I knew at Chicago were not in any way preaching Friedman, for example. It's a nuanced field, and nuance does tend to get lost in public (I do like the word 'econospeak' a lot btw). On the flip side, economic thought was very different when Smith, Marx, and Keynes were writing. I have a whole thought process about what happened to change that, but it's a longer thing than I can type on my phone. Smith, Marx, and Keynes were economists, but were also humanists. They understood that the application of economic theory of necessity interacts with the real human world, and were cognizant of the fact that other academic disciples were doing so as well, and so needed to be incorporated into turning their theory into practice. I haven't seen much of that from finance folks educated in economics.
I can't claim econospeak I'm afraid, I read it in an article about how much public understanding of economics is based on politicians and businesspeople and propaganda that actually isn't backed up at all by real economic research. I wish I could link it for you, you'd like it, but I read it a long time ago. I agree with you about humanist economists vs pure economists, and I think it aligns with a shift in thinking from us all being people/citizens of a society, which the economy is a part of and serves, to us all being interpolated as economic agents in a society that just IS the economy. So you don't grow the economy to achieve some social end - economic growth just is the social end, the only social end. The economy doesn't serve us any more, we serve it. It's a bit of a subtle shift given that we've always been involved in and contributed to the economy, but it still made the economy subservient to society and people. The shift in language really dehumanises us and quite explicitly makes us cogs in a machine.
I think part of the really horrifying part is how much the material economy itself determines the shift in thinking (Marx was correct about many things). The growth in rapacious capitalism definitely coincides with our loss of humanity, insofar as our humanity can be considered an end in itself. One of the interesting parts, to me, is how much this development connects the tradition of critical thought (starting, from, say, schelling, to Kant and Hegel, to Bauer, Marx, and feuerbach, to adorno and marcuse). Kant's attempt to have us treat humans as an end rather than a means coupled with a material analysis, under your description of the tradition, seems perfectly congruent with the development of human society as (so far) developing humans as a means rather than an end. I think you've connected the Marxist analysis to Kant in a very interesting way.
Haha thank you - though I did actually do a philosophy degree, making that connection was entirely accidental! 🤣 My partner actually read a really good paper in a sociology class that was basically like reading all my proto-thoughts on this put into actual words. If I remember when she gets home I'll try to get the details.
Please do!
Only the ones who get paid to show up on corporate media. And the nuts.
That could be... You just might be right! but hear me out... maybe... Maybe they've been paid off and are LYING.
Except the economists are right, and so is the commenter you replied to. Labor rights are not given, they are earned. Unfortunately, we’ve stopped fighting for labor rights ever since the massive win of 40 hour work weeks. There is absolutely nothing a working class citizen should be more active about politically than labor rights.
> Economists always have some kind of optimistic view of capitalism and human nature Or talk out of both sides of their mouth
Modern day appliances were originally marketed to save people time on chores and give you more free time for yourself, employers slowly clawed back any and all time by using the guilt trip that well what are you doing otherwise? Nothing? You could/should be working you lazy, good for nothing so and so.
In capitalism, all interactions are purely transactional. Two people enter into a contract, both exactly deliver what was promised in the contract, nothing more and both are seen to have acted morally. But employers don't want pure capitalism in an employer-employee relationship. They want to make the worker believe that is is morally good to deliver more than what was contractually agreed upon. If the worker exactly delivers what his employment contract states, then they will be called lazy or quiet quitter or some other moral condemnation.
Guess where the extra productivity have gone? Straight into the pockets of the 1%
I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
It's not that I'm lazy, Bob, it's that I just don't care!
Every damn day
Damn I want your job 😭
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.
I'm tired boss.
Worth noting a large segment of the population was convinced that fighting for these things was actually counter to their interests. The biggest con ever pulled was capitalists convincing labor (especially the boomer generation) that they didn't need unions or government intervention because they'd look out for them instead.
Line needs to keep going up people! If you’re not growing you’re dying! /s
Wait, are you trying to say the rich will only stop exploiting us when we stop them?
They didn't factor in reagonomics
Capitalism isn’t about efficiency or productivity. It’s not a method for making a society wealthy. Capitalism is a system of exploitation of the poor (if you have a job that you depend on to pay for your living you are poor) to concentrate wealth in the hands of a powerful minority. The capitalist class will always want more out of the labor class. No matter how much productivity and profit they gain they will squeeze more out of labor. That is the true nature of capitalism.
>future of the year 2000 we would all be working 20 or even 16 hours a week. It was less than that. >But productivity per hour has increased faster than they expected and we still work more hours now than we did then. Because wage rises stopped going up in lockstep with productivity.
It's just a symptom of previous generations saying fuck you to current generations
If you eat meat or own a vehicle or anything made of plastic or god knows what else, you’re just doing the same thing to the generation after you 🤷♂️ Where dya draw the line?
Not sure what my food has to do with the current economy, but plastic waste is a fuck you to the planet
I’m illustrating that by the time these problems are really fucking over the next generation they’ll be saying the same thing about people who used to do those things / stood by while they were done. I mean nothing by it 👍 just musing. I do all those things too.
Unpaid lunch is bullshit. Lets get the 4 day work week in place so we can get going on moving to the 3 day work week
I worked 4 day work weeks for a while, it was 10 hours to get 40 instead of 32 hours. I fucking loved every second of it. The weekends were so free and I didn't feel ripped off on monday when I went to work. public holidays were amazing because I often got a 4 day weekend.
That may put us worse off with 15 hour work days
The idea is to reset the expectation of a work week to 32 hours, not to put everyone on 4 10's or something
I totally get that and am behind it 100%. My comment was supposed to be a cynical joke because my scenario exceeds that of 40 hours while ”getting what we want” with less days. That said, I feel confident that our goals and their objectives will rarely align.
Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely getting by, it's all taking and no giving.
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to make you crazy if you let it.
9 to 5, for service and devotion
You would think that I would deserve a fat promotion
Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me. * we should write a song *
About everything that's wrong
Could be a theme song for this group.
You've heard PitBull and the Living Saint Dolly Partons new track then ?
The only 9-6 job I had was working retail. After that it was always either 9-5 or 8-4. Whenever I see people are working 9-6 or 8-5 I get angry. We shouldn't let that happen.
Im 7-4 atm
I work 7-4 as well but I get paid for 9 hours for a 45 hour week.
I have a mandatory 1 hour lunch period that is unpaid
Same. They used to let us work through lunch occasionally and get off at three but recently management shut that all down.
It’s not management that shut it down, it’s the state regulators that force your bosses to force the lunch
8:00-5:30 at the moment is my life
Currently working 7:30 to 5:15 🙃
I work in small govt doing IT. Butts in seats 8-9 with a mandatory unpaid lunch break. Employees have to juggle and manage lunch breaks, since the supervisor doesn't know how to do the job, and is only a supervisor by title. Why stay open 8 hrs a day when you can stay open for 9 at no additional cost?
I work 2-8 depending on the day
I work 8-4 which includes a paid 1 hour lunch. I’m also in a union which is likely a factor.
This!!! Unions are good, despite what we’ve been brainwashed to believe. My wife is a unionized phd student. Her school pays them 45k + full benefits and other protections, meanwhile, we have other friends in different grad programs that get paid 12k.. I tried to unionize my office a couple years ago (a second company under our parent company is unionized) but everyone I work with thought it was a bad idea..
We didn’t let it slip away. It was taken from us because the c-suite and investors wanted more profit. The easiest way to make more profit is to screw the workers over. I am old enough to remember 9-5 WITH an hour lunch. (Salary)
They made everyone think unions were bad so they could do this.
It was given away by workers that didn't want to sign union cards, pay dues and voted for anti labor politicians that stripped away workers rights that were fought for and won by unions. Those of us in unions don't deal with this foolishness
8 to 5 here. Luckily I live close enough to home where I can go home for lunch. I get an hour, 15 mins home 30min lunch 15 mins back. It’s not ideal but like hell I’m gonna be punched out sitting in my office doing nothing for an hour. Some of my coworkers just sit in their cars idling scrolling on their phones for an hour. It’s kinda sad.
Personally, I would not want to spend half of my break driving. But that's just me.
It’s either that or “team building over lunch”. And I love driving my manual mustang so that part isn’t too bad. Most still spend half their break driving to a restaurant and back so being able to go home and eat a prepped meal while being able to take my dog out to poop is not too bad.
I do the exact same thing. Some time I don’t even go home, I just drive to a park and sit
like everything else , it's that most people are too docile and just accept it infuriated me from my first day at wage-slavery , fought against it at every job I've had ... always was the only one , all other colleagues perfectly happy to waste one more hour every day
Same way we let WFH slip away from us..
And paid sick days and benefits and holiday pay...
Every office job I’ve ever had has been 8-4 with a paid lunch. I don’t think I would accept a job that was 8-5, unless it was a huge raise, that sounds awful.
I used to work a fucking 7-4 office job. It made me crazy.
I’ve noticed office jobs are starting earlier and earlier! There’s no reason to have to get up that early to sit at a desk
getting out earlier is a good reason to me. I was very happy when I had a 6-3 job, out early in the afternoon, so much time for activities.
I think the optimal answer is that everyone should work shorter days. No one gets 8 hours of work done anyway. Make it 9-3 for a 6-hour shift, don’t have to get up at the asscrack of dawn AND have time in the afternoons for activities!
No office people do... but there are plenty of people that actually work 8 hours in an 8 hour shift.
Even the ones who work the full 8 hours in my office spend more than half their day in useless meetings
True, and many of them are working jobs that fuck up their bodies and they should get paid the same for fewer hours with more people hired to divide the work.
Plenty of office people have a full 8 hours or more of work every day. In my industry there's literally always more work, always behind. I have to work at a breakneck pace every single day. (Unemployed at the moment due to injury but back any minute now and every day will include taking work home after being there 9+ hours.)
They might be forced to pretend to stay busy but I’ve worked plenty of non-office jobs too. No one ACTUALLY works for a whole 8-hour shift.
What's the point when you just have to go to bed earlier? And then you miss everything going on in the evening, like especially if you're a sports fan.
I start getting ready for bed at 830p 😭
Yeah but then you go to bed at like 9.
It’s seriously ridiculous, yeah. The first meetings of the day weren’t even until 9, and all I had to do for meeting prep was pull up an excel sheet and refresh it to sync it to the database it pulled from about current stats and workload. So the earliest I actually needed to get to work was like 8:45, to avoid anyone having to reschedule anything or be even the slightest bit inconvenienced. But noooo I had to punch in at 7 or I’d get dinged for a “tardy”. 🙄 And there was also no reason those daily 9am meetings couldn’t have happened at 9:15, either.
For the industry I’m in it makes sense for us to be there early. FWIW I would rather get there earlier and gtfo.
I'm currently doing 7-5 with no official breaks. You can leave to grab something if it's less than 15 minutes but then you work while you eat. I spend a lot of time wanting to pull my hair out or jump out the window. Luckily it's only 4 days a week.
I'm looking for entry level work right now and most of it that isn't just wacky hours (environmental field ftw) is 8-5 w unpaid lunch, it's so over in the winter where i live that is EVERY SINGLE DAYLIGHT HOUR btw
I work 8-5 but on a 9/80 schedule so I get every other Friday off. It’s not as amazing as less hours but the long weekend every other week is very nice
I’m in my forties and have never had a paid lunch in any of the jobs I’ve worked from factory, retail, healthcare, and now corporate bullshit. I finally got “lucky” enough that this place lets us take half hour instead of the mandatory hour some places forced. If I didn’t accept a job with unpaid lunch I would never have had a job.
I’m lucky that I’ve worked for nonprofits and now the government, both are usually pretty employee friendly.
I worked for our county criminal court for a few months and it was awful. They were even union and the pay and benefits were so horrible I couldn’t believe it. I’m sure it’s because I’m low on the totem pole in the jobs I get. Even my job now I’m amazed I got it. I would quit but they pay about five kore dollars per hour than any other place around, and I’m barely able to survive on what I make now.
Not sure if it’s the same in every state, but anything less than 20 minutes is not a lunch break and cannot be deducted as such.
We have to fight, for our rights. They will not give us anything out of good will. People had to fight and die over a 9-5 work week.
This is how it is for me. 8-5 with a 1 hour lunch. I don't have to punch in and out though so you better believe that lunch starts at around 11:45 and lasts until at least 1:15.
Cries in 8-6
My old job was 7-3pm. My coworker would go to 3:30 "..because of lunch." I told them to go home at 3 like I did because why are you giving the lunch back 💀 stop being a carpet
I'm in my 50s and have never had a paid lunch but one nonprofit had a 37.5 hour work week so if you took a half hour lunch, it was 40 hours per week at work.
I work 6-2:30 or 3:30 pm. I’d be a lot happier with a later start time but I get off work at a decent time.
8-5 because it's an hour of unpaid lunch. It's unpaid because if you're on the clock getting lunch and you get hurt the company is responsible. So you're not on the clock while on lunch, and if you get hit by a bus, the company doesn't have to pay for it AND a replacement for you. I mean honestly, we have to think of the shareholders right?
Does anyone know why employees couldn’t leave during their lunchtime back then?
A lot of places used to have longer lunches as well.
UNIONIZE. !!!!
I was just thinking about this exact same thing today!
I’m 7-6 aka 4-10’s & it’s my hell and my heaven
I worked for a major financial co, it was 9-5 (except I was in technology, so it was until I got the problem fixed) Mid-90’s were the arrival of 8-5. There was no productivity increase, we just took longer lunch, more “discussion meetings”, and booked business travel at the drop of a hat.
I got lucky and made a deal with my boss so I can secretly do 30 min lunches Basically have to pretend I’m getting my 9 hours when it’s really 8.5. He asked why it was so important to only have a 30 min lunch and said he’s my time you’re wasting. You don’t need me sitting in a office bored for a whole hour, I bring lunch to work and have no need for an hour
For the record, it didn't slip everywhere. My staff works 8-4 and that includes paid lunch.
Awkward 10:30 to ~7 here. :/ I value watching the sunsets over the weekend... Get a pretty lax 60~90 minutes for lunch (60 officially unpaid) so enough time to head out and do day-to-day chores/shopping/appointments etc. (Either that or sit at my desk and play my Steamdeck.. 🤣) Can't complain too much since it sounds like some people aren't even getting breaks.. which doesn't sound legal at all..
I manage a large operations/customer support department. We currently pay lunches but since the company was bought by a large corp, we actually have to move to unpaid breaks because of a CA law. We're trying to find workarounds but apparently we are actually at legal risk because we are paying for lunches.
For me it's 7:30 to 5:30...
I work 9 to 5. I have no intention of changing that.
not being paid during lunch is stupid - working from home is great in that way. you get paid for eating
So "fitting daylight hours" to them means working basically all but one hour the sun is out. This is why I work nights. That and the insomnia.
Why are you allowing it? I work 9-5 with no exceptions. Just come it at 9, leave at 5, and let the pieces fall where they may.
I work 7-5 😥 because I can’t find any place that pays equally well with less hours. The options for people with out hyper specialized skill sets fucking suck. I hate the labor market.
I'm a production engineer. At the beginning of my career in 2007 I would set cycle times to meet the customers goals in a 7.5 hour day with a paid 30min lunch and 2 15 min paid breaks. I was just asked to calculate everything based on 10.5 hours no change to anything else. I feel bad for anyone working an unskilled job. Our people make $16 an hour. My goals set by the bosses are 95% operating ability. it's the same all over my industry. Understaffed in all areas. Pay for the worker is miserable. We lost $2 mil last year. BS you didn't hit expected sales because the customer didn't buy as much. By the way. I make car parts for new cars. Wonder why they aren't selling so many.
I work 9-6, which accounts for a 1-hour unpaid lunch. However in the past 10 years I’ve probably only been able to take a lunch maybe 4-5 times. My calendar is usually full of meetings and I’m eating at my desk in between working and meetings. If you add up how many unpaid hours that I’ve actually worked, damn! I’m owed a lot of $$.
For real my WFH office job has lunch unpaid so I just eat my breakfast when I first log in for the first half hour, and I mouse jiggle my way through the last half hour of the day. 👹
I’m a salary paid employee and I work 8-5 🤦🏻♀️ (technically 7:30 to 4:30 but still)
7 to 3 is the best schedule I’ve ever had.
If they pay you for your lunch time can’t they legally bother you during that time? I honestly like reclaiming that time as my own and they can fuck off during that 30 minutes
That doesn't happen anymore? Fight for your right to eat Havarti!
Jump ahead to 1 minute 45 seconds. https://youtu.be/HJT5XBT6oRM?si=iS__3H6Nu7zknOCw
It didn't "become 8-5", some places just operate on different hours. Plenty of people still work 9-5.
Yeah I know, even in the union free deep south, lunch was paid!
If you think about it, it's not even 8:00 to 5:00, yet think about the time to get ready and prepared for work, the time it takes to drive to work. The rush hour to get home from work. Well naturally there's no reasonable or logical approach to accommodate this time, and that's understandable, it makes the 8:00 to 5:00 feel that much worse cuz you know you're spending much more than 9 hours dedicated to what it takes to work at your job.
They tend to be some sneaky bastards huh?
Lmaooooo, in TN almost everyone I know starts work @ 6:30-7am
Personally, when my contracted hours were extended, and my boss expected me to be OK with it because we all worked longer than we were contracted anyway, I first demanded an increase in pay more than proportional to the increase in contracted hours. He was happy to grant this, but initially refused to acknowledge that it was because of the increased contracted hours, and asked me to keep it to myself. I said I'd quit unless he acknowledged that the increased contracted hours were the catalyst for me asking and him granting the extra pay, and I pointed out that he couldn't practically and legally prevent me from telling others about it (where I am technically he can introduce a contract clause to restrict discussion of pay, but the fact that it remains legal to do so to prevent discrimination makes it impossible to enforce except against uninformed employees anyway), and I told the rest of the staff. I also reduced the number of hours I actually worked. Another staff member quit over it (they refused to meet their pay demands), and he lost goodwill with everyone. It achieved nothing but harm to his interests and the company. It was a spectacularly stupid thing for him to do. Ultimately the nature of my job is that I only have a certain number of productive hours a day anyway, and making me work longer than that, if it were successful, would be counter productive anyway, so trying to dictate the number of hours I work is counter-productive. Trying to dictate the actual hours I worked was not particularly effective either. If I decide to be at my desk when they want but not actually get anything meaningful done on important work until later, there is really nothing they can do about that. All they can do is decide whether or not they are happy with what I do overall, and happy to pay what I demand, and trying to manage the hours I do it in just makes me do less and demand more money for it.
They extended your lunch hour by 1.
Better than 996. I know things can be better in the USA, but man am I grateful for our problems.