Yes. I know about the unions. Average hours for people working used to be 100 hours a week 7 days a week. Went down to 90 hours, then 80 hours, then 70 hours 6 days a week. Kept going down to 40 hours. (thankyou mr union).
But that was how long ago? Why have not average hours kept going down?
I read in a book called ‘Affluenza’ ( Affluenza: when too much is never enough, Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss) that a lot of the futurists from the 1950s and 1960s were predicting that people in the early 21st century would be working only 15-20 hours per week to keep the same standard of living.
The book went a good way to answering my OP. But it is not definitive. That is why I posted my OP.
Of course, I am a very disillusioned futurist. I took futurism seriously when I was younger until I started learning that straight line extrapolations of the world - which is what futurists always wind up doing because anything else is too complicated - never work.
Just because average working hours went down in the past, no one should ever extrapolate that average working hours should continue to go down in the future. It’s necessary to look at why working hours went down, and in what industries, and under what circumstances, and in what countries, and in what time periods, etc. To look into the future you have to understand all the industries and circumstances and countries and time periods and their interrelationships and the changes that will take place and the inventions that haven’t been invented yet and the communications that don’t exist and the cultural changes that haven’t happened.
Nobody gets them right. Ever. They can’t. (Don’t tell me about people who seemed to get it right. They always fall into one of two categories. Either their predictions were so vague or so all-encompassing or so trivial that they can be retroactively made to predict anything, or they are part of a spectrum of predictions that gave every possible answer, one of which had to be right, but they are never right twice. The latter are often called economists.)
We don’t know today what future work days will look like. The reality will surprise us. That’s all that can be said.
Yeah, that’s not what you want to hear. And that’s not what people pay money to hear, which is why futurists, like astrologers, will always be with us.
And being that you’re in Michigan, you could probably also thank the unions for a large number of people that currently have a zero hour work day and risk having their unemployment checks running out. :rolleyes:
Think about it this way: Did working week times ALWAYS go down? What was the work week in the Roman Empire? What about in Egypt? Imperial China of 1000 AD?
It’s silly to think of things in the future as inevitably based upon what we’ve done for the last, oh, 200 years…
I agree. It is silly. I know futurists are almost always wrong.
But that does not mean my question has been adequately answered. Is there anyone who thinks it has been?
Unions didn’t decide to built the Edsel. Or huge cars in the 70’s so Japan ate the U.S’s lunch. Or SUVs now with gas at $3.00/gal. The US auto industry has made an astounding array of poor decisions over decades time. Meanwhile there is a plant in California run as a joint venture with Mitsubishi and GM, using union labor, and they’re making out fine.
Lots of jobs don’t work eight hour shifts. I worked at a factory where there were four shifts that worked twelve hours, the factory remaining open 24/7; you worked two days, two nights, three days, then two nights, two days, three nights, and so on. Many shiftwork jobs are similar.
Many professional positions don’t have “hours” per se.
And as has been pointed out, a day that lasts roughly eight hours is popular in part because it’s simply standardized. If you work as a purchaser there’s very little point in working at 6 PM when the office staff of your suppliers have gone home. Why would I pay you to make phone calls that won’t be answered? It simply makes sense to work hours that approximate the hours of other businesses you have to deal with. It’s jobs that DON’T involve dealing with other businesses, such as manufacturing, retail, food service and such that don’t work 8 to 5, because they’re not dealing with people who will predictably be available at those hours.
You can thank corporations with their mismanagement and short term thinking . Unions did not make the decisions about continually making large SUVs. They did not handcuff management for contracts they couldn’t afford. Unions have a small part of the responsibility.
And after reading the thread, I think the answer is pretty clear: There are MANY jobs that are NOT locked to the 8-hour day. And of the jobs which ARE locked to it, the reason seems to be that it is a lot more convenient/efficient to simply continue doing things the way we’ve been doing it.
But let’s try it a different way. The eight-hour day was a goal for people working heavy labor - mining, factory work, manual labor of all kinds. At one time this was the dominant type of job in the country. There had to be a balance point between not overworking people beyond their capacities and working long enough so that labor did not become a killing expense. (It is much more expensive to staff 4 six-hour shifts than 3 eight-hour shifts, because of training, replacements, sicktime, uniforms, tools, benefits and all the other aspects that are individual to a body.) The eight-hour day became a union standard, and then a legal standard. This spread it through the society.
Why did futurists think the hours would go down? They did a straightline extrapolation off of manual labor. With machines increasingly replacing workers, the balance point could shift to shorter hours and employers could still make money.
Labor is still a major expense of factory work, but capital costs are also huge. Manufacturing jobs are now down to 10% of the jobs in the U.S. Most manual labor jobs have been replaced by service jobs. In service work, labor is the one overwhelming category of expense. It makes sense to keep people in service working for as long as possible. The extrapolation of hours from manufacturing jobs no longer makes any sense.
The eight-hour day is still standard because market forces and collective bargaining made it an equilibrium point. It no longer has its original reason for being, but history keeps it as a standard, with overtime penalties for longer days. It is usually cheaper today to pay overtime to existing workers than to bring in extra workers to cover the additional hours. (That’s the reverse of creating six-hour days, as above.) Many jobs are not eight-hour jobs, but are nominally called that, and many more just aren’t eight-hour, period.
In food service, the object is to be there when other people aren’t working. We’re there way early to serve breakfast to the people who go to work at 8:00 or 9:00, and we’re there late to serve those same people dinner.
There is also no penalty for them if their prediction turns out to be wrong. Do they have to pay a fine, serve time in prison or even give their salary as a “futurist” back? No.
The other thing they like to do is make a prediction that is so far out into the future that they will be long dead by the time comes around for any one to check it. Its like, “Fifty years from now, New York will be under water because of global warming”.
And of course the whole reason that Nissan, Ford, Volkswagen, Chrysler, GM, Toyota, and others build plants in Mexico has nothing to do with work rules? It’s not even the labor rates, but the restrictive rules that necessitate unnecessary labor and hours and the inability to scale back production to demand as do the others. :rolleyes: But of course it’s all management’s fault, because that’s what capital-L Labor brainwashes their extortionees to believe.
