A few months ago, Japan decided to create a new holiday. The reason for this was stated as being that the Japanese people worked so many hours, they didn’t have time to act as consumers, and as such it was a drain on the economy.
Having lived in Japan, working every day from 6am to midnight, I can say that I certainly see how one can’t properly inject money back into the market as is. This limits almost all purchases to manga, cellphones, iPods, and other things to do on the train to and from work.
But more importantly, it means that there is an optimum number of hours that a person is free or at work for the greatest growth of the economy.
Do Americans have time to buy everything they could ever want? Do they have time to make those things? Where is the equilibrium?
Well, heres a table of average working time per country, and here’s a table of personal comsumption. Maybe there’s a correlation, but its not real obvious, in any case. Germany, Canada and the US are close to each other on the consumption chart, but are at the top, middle and bottom of the work time chart.
Which doesn’t mean in the particular case of Japan its a bad idea, but it probably isn’t generally true anyways.
Interestingly, I noticed Korea recently tried to end the 6 day work week, it would be interesting to see if that had an effect on personal consumption one way or the other, as their case seems close to that of Japan, but even more extreme.
I wouldn’t mind working 50 or even 60 hours a week if it wasn’t a mind-numbing marathon of office time, with holidays distributed in ridiculously uneven intervals on weird days of the week throughout the year. Let me break up my office time with long breaks at the time of my choosing, let me work at home, make sure there every holiday falls on a Friday or Monday, ensure there is one three-day weekend in alternating months, and three weeklong holidays per year, and you will get much more work out of me. Might as well, because I’m going to find ways to take the time I need anyway.
If you’re asking what is best for the hive, I’d think the answer is as many as possible, until the costs and inefficiencies of burning out your workforce start to outweigh the sheer volume of work. If this results in some of the production going unused, that suggests you’re producing the wrong things.
The more important question is what is best for the individual, which I’d say is the absolute minimum required to support your lifestyle and create a satisfactory nest egg for emergencies and retirement. If the Japanese are working 18-hour days either they’re horribly inefficient or they’re missing the point of working in the first place.
The quality of work drops after 8 hours. There is more waste. Then after 10 hours work is just a waste of time and money. I base that on a engineering study I read many years ago by General Motors, just before they put us on a 12 hour 7 day schedule.
I’ve read somewhere (sorry don’t have a cite) that in hunter-gatherer tribes 8 hours of work is the typical amount. It’s probably the natural amount of work time that humans have evolved to do.
I worked in a factory that operated 24/7, so they had a 2-2-3 schedule. Working 12 hours wasn’t really that bad there, but you only worked 2-3 days in a row before you got time off.
I don’t know if there was waste though. But people would show signs of wear at about 6-7 hours. So productivity going down wouldn’t surprise me. I know at the end of working 3 days in a row at 12 hours each, you were pretty mentally numb.
On another note, I know France shifted to a 35 hour workweek in the hopes that it would decrease unemployment. However it just ended up causing employers to raise productivity w/o hiring new people. But that is another factor in the work/life balance, the role of unemployment. A nation with 2 people working 40 hours a week each will have a lower unemployment rate than a nation with 1 person working 80 hours a week. As employment goes up, so does consumption.
I think you may be off substantially there. The evidence I’ve seen was closer to four hours, and those were pretty light, being mostly strolling around. HUnter-Gatherers simply can’t afford to use up the levels of energy we farmer/rancher cultures do.
There is a fascinating paper I wrote a column on once called the $200 hour. It reported on surveys that showed that once you got to about 50 hours a week you got so bad at what you were doing that after correcting your mistakes your productivity went down to 40. I worked for a while on a project where to prove to the bosses that we were working hard, they served dinner and everyone stayed until 9 pm, after starting work at 8am. Precious little real work got done after dinner, and the project was a disaster. But it looked like we were working.
I prefer working fewer twelve hours shifts rather than shorter shifts each day.
Working more than 35-40 hours per week makes me feel like crap, in general. It’s a psychological thing, not really a physical thing - although when I have to work on my feet for hours it can be quite wearing.
I think you’re a little off here as well. The reason their workload is light (around 20 hours per week in most studies) is because they easily gather/hunt enough nutritious food in a few hours work per day to spend the rest of their time doing other things. They don’t usually choose to do anything strenous, but that’s not for lack of energy. We tend towards laziness in our natural enviroment, like most large predators.
Life isn’t always easy due to other factors; high infant and child mortality, and no medical treatment for injuries and parasites. But they have ample leisure time and in general, good health in adulthood - none of the cancer, heart disease, and diabetes modern civilizations have.
Neat. And it sort of makes sense, up to a certain point the limiting factor on the number of dollars I spend on leisure activity is limited by how much money I have, not how much free time. But at some point, I get to a place where I put so much time working that getting an Xbox or whatever doesn’t make any sense even if I can afford it and really want it, since I won’t be able to put even a minimal amount of time into playing it.
Of course, its only suggestive. There are plenty of confounding factors. Poverty, for example, probably has more to do with why Mexicans work long hours and don’t spend much money.
This shows one of the big problems with comparative GNP figures, for example. I bought a house with enough of a yard to take care of that it would take me 5 -7 hours a week to keep it in trim. If I do that, there is no effect on GNP. However, I work long enough hours that finding 5-7 hours to do yard work is difficult and unappealing. I therefore pay someone to do the work for me. GNP therefore is increased by the amount I pay that person, despite there being no more production occuring in the economy.
So as to your question, if you drop work hours, then some forms of consumption increase, but others fall. More consumption goods are bought, but fewer “home-production-replacement” goods and services are purchased - how this balances out isn’t automatically clear.
I have worked 8 hour shifts with weekends off and 12 hour shifts 4 days on and 4 days off. I developed health problems from working 4 -12 hour shifts.
Humans are not machines. It was the industrial revolution that started our 40 hour week. Corporate economics that instituted the cost cutting 12 hour shifts to eliminate 3 shift. Now we have shipped all our cheap labor overseas which makes it even harder. Less hours and less money for the average American.
I do agree when I worked 48 hours a week I had less time to spend shopping. I didn’t get home till 7:30 pm and ate fast food a lot. I think the Europeans have a far better work schedule and more vacations then we do.
As the only person in our two-person household who looks after the household, I try very hard not to work 40 hour work weeks, because all the house stuff still needs to get done. Just because I don’t get paid for it doesn’t mean that cooking, cleaning and shopping isn’t work. My husband works eight-hour days/40 hour weeks, but when he’s finished working, he’s finished - his evenings and weekends are completely his own. That said, I think five days a week is too much - I think four on, three off would be a better balance.
I was a single parent and sometimes looking back I don’t know how I pulled it off. I was too busy to stop and too tired to care! I felt like a rat on a wheel. Today my kids are out on their own and I work 4 hours a day between two jobs. I can handle this at my age. I like the concept of 4 on, three off. As long as they are 8 hour days. Then you have enough time to really relax.
What health problems did you get? I know I suffered from a variety of joint problems when working 12 hours, but didn’t know how much of that was due to the duration of my work hours or the conditions.
My standard work day is 10-12 hours, though not necessarily in one stretch. If it was physical work, I can see a difference, but I am not sure there is a standard amount of white collar work after which health deteriorates. Productivity may well do…
Repetitive strain injuries are almost ubiquitous in office environments, as are back problems. We don’t think of bad wrists, elbows and backs when we think of on-the-job injuries, but they are incredibly common (and cause a lot of life-changing pain, problems, and lost productive time).
Sorry, not denying that there can be white collar injuries. I just don’t think 10-12 hours rather than 8 is going to be the cause of them, rather than offices whoch are poorly laid out for ergonomic purposes.