Does anybody remember those old films from the 1950s that would make predictions for the year 2000? I distinctly remember that doing the “daily grind” would be a distant memory by the year 2000, for our every need and whim would be answered by fancy machines, robots, and other tech gizmos. By 2000 we should have been complaining about having to work more than 2 hours a day. So why does it seem we working even harder and longer than we were in the 1950s? And while I’m at it, I also distinctly remember that we should be flying around in personal aircraft like George Jetson instead of getting 8 miles a gallon with crappy SUVs. What happened to the glorious future I should be basking in right now???
I don’t know but this book offers some interesting potential answers to the questions you pose:
I think 2 factors come into play.
- Our living standards & expectations inflate with technology, kinda like how computers will never be fast enough because our expectations of software inflate with them.
- People often overlook the fact that technology creates its own labor industry.
The problem with working two hours a day is that you are only going to be paid for two hours a day.
Those who continue to work 40 hours a week will have much more money than those who work 10 hours a week. The makers of the labor-saving robots (of the Jetsons variety, when and if we ever get them) want to make as much money as they can, so (perhaps ironically) to afford one you have to work longer.
Another issue is that the type of work that many of us do has changed, rather than the quantity of work we do. Robots have replaced many dangerous and/or tedious production line jobs. Instead of hiring factory workers, a company can now use that payroll budget to hire staff to help the business in other ways, either to keep up with, or to move ahead of, the competition. Same with the typing pool payroll budget.
Technology has made it so that many office jobs only require 2 - 3 hours of work a day. The problem is that the company still expects those employers to be there 35 - 40 hours a week. I work in IT business consulting doing a lot of business automation work. I can’t count the number of times some already underworked employee has come to me with a report they would like to automate or something. I can usually help them. There goes another half hour of work a day for them. Some office workers work exceptionally hard. Many just kill time most of the day because computers have automated previosly time-consuming tasks.
Reducing the work week would require substantial adjustments to the economy. For instance, some have suggested reducing/eliminating income tax (then your employer can pay you a lot less, because you won’t have to pay a portion to the gummint). If there was a guaranteed annual income, or some other way to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met independently of their paid labour, then I imagine many people would work fewer hours.
If people’s lifestyles were cheaper then they wouldn’t need to work as much. However, many people wouldn’t accept a “cheaper” lifestyle and would continue to work as much as possible.
And some people need all the hours of work that they can get just to keep food on their tables. There has been a major disconnect between the amount of money that people need, the amount that people get paid for work, and the value of the work that they do.
Work also plays a role in people’s lives beyond paying for people’s basic needs. Look at how many people get really bored and unhappy after their retirement. Look how many people go bonkers during periods of unemployment (I know I do, and it’s only partly because of the frustration of job-hunting). People need things to fill their time.
I believe that even if we all had jobs that required 2 hours of time a week and paid for everything we needed, we’d still go find job-like activities to do (whether volunteering for a charity, or becoming an expert in some activity that interest us, etc).
In fact, there’s an odd problem in some corners of the bureacracy - underwork. Government employees work for a while, then things change and they are left without much to do, either because of regulatory changes or whatnot. They get some busywork, but not enough to keep them actually busy. So they wait for a while with little to do because they don’t want to quit, and no one wants to fire them since eventually they’ll get some work.
I think we are overlooking the obvious.
The people who made those predictions were very, very bad at predicting the future. Ridiculously, hopelessly out of touch with the real world. They were basing the prediction on some kind of utopian view that completely ignored the way people really behave.
No one who has ever seen how people drive cars would ever predict we would all one day be flying personal aircraft.
From the 50s onward, middle class Americans increasingly did office work. They did not associate this work with the labor done by people who typically joined unions. As a result the unions lost power. Now employers have all the power, and they of course want as much work as they can get for as little money as possible, so wages aren’t rising (but everything else is) and people increasingly work either 40+ hours full time or find such work as they can get via contract and temp jobs and such without benefits.
If Americans had formed unions of office workers, the dream cited by the OP would probably be much closer to fruition. And I am afraid that until the American people get considerably less lazy and stupid wrt their own welfare, they’ll continue to get used pretty much as employers want to use them.
The underworked will all get fired sooner or later.
http://www.eh.net/encyclopedia/?article=whaples.work.hours.us
there have been changes from the later middle ages to today but not many from the 50s to today. As people make more money they discover more technologies. Plus some expenses go up faster than the rate of inflation like education, healthcare or real estate so people can’t get by comfortably with only working two hours a day.
I suppose the first part of this is true if you define ‘office work’ as ‘non-manufacturing’. We are certainly in a post-industrial phase where many of our manufacturing type jobs have gone overseas where labor is cheaper.
After that though I have to disagree, unless you have some proof to back some of your statements up. You claim wages over all aren’t rising yet costs are…so it should be pretty easy for you to prove then that the standard of living in the population as a whole in the US is going down. Feel free to do so.
Are union workers in the US working significantly fewer hours than non-union workers in the same fields then?
As to the rest, i.e. ‘until the American people get considerably less lazy and stupid wrt their own welfare, they’ll continue to get used pretty much as employers want to use them’, this seems to have a bit of a disconnect to me. American’s work harder than most other people in the world, maintain a higher standard of living wrt the population as a whole than most (all?) other nations, yet they are ‘lazy and stupid’? Intersting concept. Certainly there are different ways of looking at standard of living. The French have more social benifits and work less (i.e. more paid time off, work fewer hours per week/year, etc)…and are less productive as a nation. And thats great for the French…they are happy with their system. Most American’s are happy with ours. Just because it doesn’t conform to YOUR expectations of whats right doesn’t mean American’s are ‘lazy and stupid’…it just means that your expectations are different than those of your fellow citizens, and perhaps it further means you have a ‘grass is greener’ outlook wrt the US vs some ideal you may be using as your model.
As to the OP: Why do many of us still work 40+ hours a week?
I’d say that the correct answer is that the folks who were making those predictions were simply in error…as most folks are who attempt to make predictions about what the future will be like. What has changed most in the US isn’t the amount of hours worked but the fundamental nature of the work itself over all. In the 50’s the US was still an industrial nation, with a heavy emphasis on manufacturing…so the majority of jobs were in those sectors. Today the US is a services oriented nation, so most jobs are in the service sectors. I’d say the majority of the jobs today weren’t even jobs envisioned when those predictions were being made…just like my guess is the majority of the jobs 50 years from now will be ones we don’t envision today (I won’t be around to see anyway :)).
It would take a fundamental change in our economy and how we work to meet a prediction of 2 hours work a day. Even in the quasi-socialist nations in Europe most oriented towards this kind of thing you don’t get 2 hours a day as the norm…more like 30-35hrs/week IIRC.
Its possible that in the future all manufacturing could be automated (or maybe we’ll have nano machines build everything we want from piles of raw materials or garbage). All this would do is close off manufacturing completely as a job (sort of like buggy whip production is today), and force people into other lines of work that couldn’t be automated. Only if things were to become completely static could you hope to automate ALL work, or even automate everything to the point where your most productive workers need only work 2 hours a day. If we ever get to the point where humans don’t need to work at all, or only work 2 hours a day, then there will have to be some fundamental changes to our economy and how we sell ourselves and our labor…one I can’t even begin to imagine.
-XT
Because all those robots, computers, personal hovercrafts, fancy schmancy automated things cost money. We have to work so we can buy the things that will let us do less work. And some poor schlub has to make, repair, sell all those things that we buy so we don’t have to work as much. It’s all a viscious cycle.
WTF was that? 99% of government jobs are regular old office jobs just like any other office job. I grew up in a household of government workers, and not once did they come home and say “Oh hey, no work today. We got to just sit around and talk!” Just like almost everybody on the Straight Dope, they have a job with deadlines and schedules and busy periods and whatever. The government really honestly doesn’t hire people to sit around. Please don’t just randomly slander a whole group with an absurd claim.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
I suppose the first part of this is true if you define ‘office work’ as ‘non-manufacturing’. We are certainly in a post-industrial phase where many of our manufacturing type jobs have gone overseas where labor is cheaper.
After that though I have to disagree, unless you have some proof to back some of your statements up. You claim wages over all aren’t rising yet costs are…so it should be pretty easy for you to prove then that the standard of living in the population as a whole in the US is going down. Feel free to do so.
Gee, this is the third time in two days that someone has asked me to refute them using easily-found cites:
First, wages are static. From this paper from the Economic Policy Institute we have the following bits:
When you combine this:
with this:
You get a fairly grim picture of life for the middle and lower classes in the last couple of decades. But union workers have done better than others:
Advantages of Unionized Workers
There’s laziness and then there’s laziness. You can work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week at a low-paying job and not be concerned with your own welfare, or that of your family. You have a job. You make money. You can barely afford to buy food and your tarpaper shack gets drafty in the winter and your kids look hungry all the time … but you’re working. I would call that being lazy and stupid about one’s own welfare. Lotta working people like that. They think holding a job means they don’t have to do anything else.
Most Americans are dumb. That does not mean I should emulate them, or you, either.
If you or anyone else is upset about getting 8 MPG in their SUV, there is quite literally nobody else to blame but the person who bought it. There are an ever-increasing number of cars on the market that get good gas mileage, and many of them are substantially cheaper to buy than large SUVs.
As far as the flying cars, well, that was always a lot of fantastic hooey meant to get people to watch those lame movies.
Wow, surprisingly viscious thread.
I just wanted to say that I would pay more for **Rosie the Robot ** than I ever would for a car. I can buy a cheap car that does almost everything a Hummer does but I can’t hire a live in maid for less than $20,000 I think. So If Rosie cost $50,000 she would be a good purchase. My house is almost always a mess. We really need a maid and cannot find a cleaning lady that we can afford. Our Budget would only be about $60 a week or $3200 per year. So far it seems like in our area, the cleaning services are $120 per visit.
Sorry to only reply to the OP. I leave the social issues to everyone else.
But you know, considering how technology has advanced, that live-in maid you’re shooting for should really only be cleaning for two hours a day. 
Well the obvious reason we don’t have personal flying cars and robotic maids is that they simply haven’t been invented yet.
The generaly misconception that people have is that society has a finite amount of work that needs to be done. Once a task has been automated, that frees up resources to work on other things. It also creates new work in manufacturing, installing and maintaining the automated systems. And there’s always other work that can be performed.
msmith got it. There’s a “law” floating around the Internet that says “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Essentially, the very logistical foundation of 99% of human societies is designed so that as time goes on, we make it easier for people to create and support more people, which takes more work. That logistical foundation is agriculture. For tens of thousands of years, humanity was a gatherer/hunter race. There are some, very few though, who still do this, which is why I said 99%. One example I came across recently is the !Kung, who still gather and hunt all of their food. Every single one of them has an average daily intake of 2,335 calories and 96.3 grams of protein, and the combined average of all the work that the adults did (finding/hunting food and associated activities, as well as activities that correlate to housework) is 42.3 hours per week.[sup]1[/sup] Look at America, where we put in 40 to 60 hours at our workplace alone, and then spend the whole weekend on housework. So their whole population eats as well as the wealthiest of agriculural societies, and they manage to feed everyone while we have massive poverty problems, and they do less work. Thousands of years ago, most of humanity adopted agriculture rather than accept the population limitations of foraging. Of course, now we’re finding that maybe agriculture can’t support over 6.25 billion people (and counting) after all …
[sup]1[/sup]Lassiter, Luke Eric. Invitation to Anthropology. 2002: Altamira Press. pp. 105-106.
FWIW I love my work and I get paid pretty well for it. And I’ve read polls indicating I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I think the current growth in wealth and which means we don’t have to work so much for necessities leads to an important existential question: What do we want to do with all those hours? I bet there are lots of people who don’t have a good answer to that question?