I am not much of an economist, but the two thoughts that spring to mind:
The change you want to see, of people not needing to do as much work, is in fact happening (even if not as fast as you might like). The first clean chart I could find for US data was here, showing a gradual fall since 1950 from ~2k hours/year to ~1760 hours/year worked. This may actually understate the amount of reduction in poverty-in-the-sense-of-needing-to-work-hard-at-an-unpleasant-job:
I think there has also been a trend towards these jobs being much nicer. The fact that what you’re referring to as a ‘miserable condition’ is working a retail job where customers sometimes yell at you, rather than working in the coal mines and getting blacklung, is a substantial improvement!
I think there has also been a trend towards the longest-hours-worked being for wealthier people rather than poorer people. “Banker’s hours” used to be an unusually short workday, which the wealthy bankers could get away with—while bankers still have a lot more money than poor people, I think there’s been a substantial shift in who works longer hours.
The change you want to see, viewed through the right lens, is actually somewhat depressing. I would phrase what you are looking for as a world where society has nothing to offer people that is nice enough they are willing to work an unpleasant job to produce it.
If you have the choice between ‘work long hours to get enough food to live’ or ‘work short hours and starve’, it makes sense to call that ‘poverty’. If you have the choice between ‘work long hours to be able to have a smartphone, internet, and cable TV’ or ‘work short hours, still have shelter, clothing and food, but not have as much nice stuff’, I would call that ‘work is producing nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it’.
On your definition of ‘poverty’, Disneyland makes the world poorer. Every time someone takes on extra hours at work so they can take their kids to Disneyland, you account the unpleasant overtime work as an increase in poverty, and do not account the Disneyland trip on the other side of the ledger. This seems wrong.
On your definition of ‘poverty’, Disneyland makes the world poorer.
I think the comparison with Disneyland misses the point. The essay measures poverty by the level of desperation people experience. People don’t typically work extra hours out of desperation to take their kids to Disneyland; they do it out of a desire for additional enjoyment. The 60-hour work week should be understood as working far more hours than one would if they weren’t desperate for essential resources.
Poverty is about lacking crucial resources necessary for living, not just lacking luxury items. Therefore, adding more Disneylands wouldn’t make people poorer, but people who are not poor might still strive for better things—from a position of security, not desperation. Interestingly, this aligns with your argument right above that “work produces nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it.”
Long answer: If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and can’t buy luxury items, it is reasonable to say that you needed to work 60 hours a week just to afford essential items. If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and also buy luxury items, it seems more reasonable to say that you worked [X] hours a week to buy essential items and [60-X] hours a week to buy luxury items, for some X<60.
If you ignore the fungibility of money, you can say things like this:
Bob works 40 hours a week. He spends half of this salary on essential items like food and clothing and shelter, and the other half on luxury items like fancy vacations, professionally prepared food, recent consumer electronics and entertainment, etc.
Now Bob has children. Oh no! He now needs to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford to send his children to a good school! This means he needs to work 60 hours a week to afford necessities!
But, even if we account a good school as a necessity, Bob’s actual situation is that he is spending 20 hours of labor on his personal necessities, 20 hours of labor on his children’s necessities, and 20 hours of labor on luxuries. He has the ability to work 40 hours a week for necessities. He is instead choosing to work 60 hours a week to afford luxuries.
That’s a reasonable choice for Bob to make! The modern world has some very nice luxuries indeed, and Bob can justifiably think it’s worth putting some extra hours in to get them, even if he doesn’t enjoy his job!
Yes, it would be better still if Bob could afford all the same luxuries with a 40-hour workweek. But don’t tell me that Bob is in the same position as a coal miner who had to work 60-hour weeks to put food on the table and heat his house in winter, and don’t try to use this to argue that there hasn’t been any improvement in poverty.
And as the world gets richer still, there are two ways this could manifest:
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to work less.
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to have more luxuries.
In the first world, we’ll see Bob working fewer hours. In the second world, we’ll see Bob working the same hours but having more nice things. Both are improvements! But which improvement we get depends on how nice the things our society can produce get. The more new nice things our society can produce, the more likely Bob is to continue working 60-hour weeks to get modern luxuries, rather than working shorter hours and accepting 1980s-era luxuries.
This argument would cease to hold water if there were a substantial number of people working 60 hours a week who genuinely weren’t spending substantial portions of their income on luxuries. I think this was true in the US even in the relatively recent past, that sizeable numbers of the people working 60 hours a week in 1945-1975 e.g. never left the state they were born in, prepared all their own food, had very limited access to entertainment, etc. I don’t think it’s true today: I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.
The relation between time and money is sometimes not linear.
I would be happy to work 2⁄3 time for 2⁄3 of my current salary (doing things similar to what I am doing now), but I don’t see such option on the job market. Most employers are “40 hours, or go away”. The ones who offer part-time jobs typically pay way below the market salary, and still think they are doing you a favor.
(To generalize, this is my objection against the concept of “revealed preferences”—sometimes the options we imagine intentionally rejected by other people were never real for them in the first place.)
A large part of the family budget is “money passing through your hands”. You get a salary. You pay for the mortgage, electric power, gas, car insurance, etc. Include some humble amount of food and occasional new clothes and shoes, and… if you have an average income, it is possible that maybe 90% of your salary is already gone at that moment. The remaining 10% are yours to spend as you wish.
My point is that the budget of average people has much less slack than it may seem—at one moment you have a little discretionary spending, the next moment your expenses somehow increase by 15% (your car breaks, you get sick and need some expensive treatment, etc.) and suddenly your salary is not enough even for the necessities. Maybe the people who work 60 hours a day would actually only need to work 50 hours a day to make ends meet, but such option may not be available on the job market.
Anecdotal evidence about the life of people working 60 hours a day: Nickel and Dimed
I read Nickel and Dimed (2001) several years ago and I thought it was very good. A couple of things I remember that are relevant to the discussion.
Ehrenreich did not find a shortage of part-time work. My recollection is that the problem was the opposite: employers would only offer up to 30 hours of work a day, for regulatory reasons. So Ehrenreich often had to pick up two such jobs to attempt to earn enough money, which increased her costs. I agree that non-linear compensation is common at higher income levels, especially in knowledge work where there are increasing returns to marginal labor.
Ehrenreich discussed with her fellow employees how they were making ends meet. A common answer was that they lived with relatives, friends, or partners, allowing them to save money on housing, food, and transit, relative to Ehrenreich and also giving them a small safety net. From the perspective of Ehrenreich’s co-workers, she was paying extra to live by herself. She failed to make ends meet largely for that reason.
I think the crux here is the “relative” poverty aspect. Comparison with others is actually really important, it turns out. Going to Disneyland isn’t just a net positive; not going to Disneyland can be a negative if your kids expect you to and all their friends are. A lot of human activities are aimed at winning status games with other humans, and in that sense, in our society of abundance, marketing has vastly offset those gains by making sure it’s painfully clear which things make you rich and which aren’t worth all that much. So basically the Poverty Restoring force is “other people”. No matter the actual material conditions there’s always going to be by definition a bottom something percentile in status, and they’ll be frustrated by this condition and trying to get out of it to earn some respect by the rest of society.
I think there has also been a trend towards the longest-hours-worked being for wealthier people rather than poorer people.
The data bears this out, at least for the United States. The top 10% of earners generally work an average of 4.4 hours/week more than the bottom 10% of earners in the US, although worldwide it seems they work 1 hour/week less, on average.
I have to think that this is one of those hard areas to get a consistent measure of a comment thing. For example, is the 3 hour lunch meeting with a client really the same as the 3 houts a factory worker put in or the three hours recorded by a software engineer records for a specific project worked on?
I suppose we can say in each cases there is some level of “standing around” rather than real work. But I do suspect that the types of work don’t as one climbs the income ladder you start seeing more of the gray areas because the output of the effort becomes less directly measurable.
I also think that in the OP one of the factors in work was the unpleasant nature of the effort. While hardly universally true I have to speculate that at the higher income levels a larger percentage of people are doing things they find both interesting and enjoyable than hold at lower levels.
But clearly those hypothesis would likewise by challenging to evaluate as well.
at the higher income levels a larger percentage of people are doing things they find both interesting and enjoyable than hold at lower levels
How much autonomy someone has at work already makes a huge difference, even if it is a similar kind of work. I write computer programs both at work and in my free time, and the experience is incomparable, even if the programming language is the same, and the things I do at home are often more complicated.
If someone offered to pay me as much as is my current salary (or even 30% less), under the condition that I will keep working, but on projects of my own choice and at my own pace, plus I have to work 1 more hour every day, I would be quite happy to accept the deal.
The whole article is about Amazon employees being on the clock while they are using the bathroom. Spending more time in the bathroom reduces the productivity/per hour on their KPIs and thus they are incentivized against spending time in the bathroom.
Typically, a salaried white collar worker can turn up to work and use the bathroom at the start of the day, and it is counted as working hours, whereas a blue collar worker will use the bathroom before starting work (for the reasons you give about KPIs) and so it is not counted as working hours. Similarly for lunch break and end of shift. As a result the white collar worker will have a larger proportion of bathroom time counted as “working hours”, given the same time spent in the bathroom.
Maybe your point is that this is a difference of degree, not a difference in kind? True, but differences of degree matter for the working hour trends being discussed. If measured working hours stay the same but workers spend more of their bathroom hours during working hours then this is an effective increase in free time.
The relevant figure wouldn’t be the current value so much as its derivative: I don’t know how that situation has changed over time, and haven’t put in the effort to dig up information on what that data looked like in 1950.
I agree; I share your intuition that the reverse was the case in the past (the poor working longer hours than the rich), so the numbers being what they are today bears out the conclusion that the change has been towards the rich working more than the poor. Unfortunately, I just haven’t been able to find a ton of data explicitly focusing on this exact question (as opposed to a ton of related ones grouped together by Our World In Data). Best I could come up with was this Economist article from 2014 (beware paywall):
the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be richer, had a bit more leisure time than men who had only completed high school. But by 2005 the college-educated had eight hours less of it a week than the high-school grads. Figures from the American Time Use Survey, released last year, show that Americans with a bachelor’s degree or above work two hours more each day than those without a high-school diploma. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006, but fell for high-school dropouts. The rich, it seems, are no longer the class of leisure.
[Edit: Oops, I misread the UI. I retract this comment!]
@sunwillrise I hope you’ll forgive me singling you out, you’re certainly not the only person to make what seems to me to be the same mistake, but it seems to me that your use of the “I checked, it’s true” react is a misfire here. I think the react makes sense for factual claims that are well-operationalized and where some independent fact-checking occurred. The text you highlighted with that react is an attempted reframe of someone else’s position — a reframe is not a claim about the part of the world that the original person is talking about, it’s a claim about someone’s position. I think the appropriate react to communicate your epistemic state is to “agree” react to the statement starting from “I would phrase”, indicating that you concur that this is an accurate restatement.
(I think the meaning of the “I checked, it’s true” react in this context would be “I checked with the person who this is a paraphrase of, and they concurred that this was an accurate reframe of their position”.)
I’m… confused? I thought the part I had reacted to was this:
I think there has also been a trend towards the longest-hours-worked being for wealthier people rather than poorer people.
Which seems like a well-operationalized factual claim that I looked up sources for (and then linked in my 2 other comments here). I’m not sure what this has to do with paraphrasing someone’s position; are you saying that react should be used only for paraphrasing others, or what? Or that my sources were inadequate (which is a somewhat reasonable criticism, FWIW)?
Perhaps you thought this was a react to the entire comment, as opposed to an inline react? I’m not sure why it showed up that way, but you can see in the text above the names of those who reacted and anti-reacted that the react was only to that part of aphyer’s comment.
Darn it, I misread the UI. When I hover over the react, it only shows me the bold section of the following quote as being reacted-to:
I would phrase what you are looking for as a world where society has nothing to offer people that is nice enough they are willing to work an unpleasant job to produce it.
It turns out that’s actually the text referred to by the other react (the “misunderstands position” react, which makes sense in context). I don’t know why the relevant section (“I think there has also been a trend...”) isn’t highlighted when I hover over your react.
Anyway, I retract the above, my apologies for the mistake!
I am not much of an economist, but the two thoughts that spring to mind:
The change you want to see, of people not needing to do as much work, is in fact happening (even if not as fast as you might like). The first clean chart I could find for US data was here, showing a gradual fall since 1950 from ~2k hours/year to ~1760 hours/year worked. This may actually understate the amount of reduction in poverty-in-the-sense-of-needing-to-work-hard-at-an-unpleasant-job:
I think there has also been a trend towards these jobs being much nicer. The fact that what you’re referring to as a ‘miserable condition’ is working a retail job where customers sometimes yell at you, rather than working in the coal mines and getting blacklung, is a substantial improvement!
I think there has also been a trend towards the longest-hours-worked being for wealthier people rather than poorer people. “Banker’s hours” used to be an unusually short workday, which the wealthy bankers could get away with—while bankers still have a lot more money than poor people, I think there’s been a substantial shift in who works longer hours.
The change you want to see, viewed through the right lens, is actually somewhat depressing. I would phrase what you are looking for as a world where society has nothing to offer people that is nice enough they are willing to work an unpleasant job to produce it.
If you have the choice between ‘work long hours to get enough food to live’ or ‘work short hours and starve’, it makes sense to call that ‘poverty’. If you have the choice between ‘work long hours to be able to have a smartphone, internet, and cable TV’ or ‘work short hours, still have shelter, clothing and food, but not have as much nice stuff’, I would call that ‘work is producing nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it’.
On your definition of ‘poverty’, Disneyland makes the world poorer. Every time someone takes on extra hours at work so they can take their kids to Disneyland, you account the unpleasant overtime work as an increase in poverty, and do not account the Disneyland trip on the other side of the ledger. This seems wrong.
I think the comparison with Disneyland misses the point. The essay measures poverty by the level of desperation people experience. People don’t typically work extra hours out of desperation to take their kids to Disneyland; they do it out of a desire for additional enjoyment. The 60-hour work week should be understood as working far more hours than one would if they weren’t desperate for essential resources.
Poverty is about lacking crucial resources necessary for living, not just lacking luxury items. Therefore, adding more Disneylands wouldn’t make people poorer, but people who are not poor might still strive for better things—from a position of security, not desperation. Interestingly, this aligns with your argument right above that “work produces nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it.”
Short answer: Money is fungible.
Long answer: If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and can’t buy luxury items, it is reasonable to say that you needed to work 60 hours a week just to afford essential items. If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and also buy luxury items, it seems more reasonable to say that you worked [X] hours a week to buy essential items and [60-X] hours a week to buy luxury items, for some X<60.
If you ignore the fungibility of money, you can say things like this:
Bob works 40 hours a week. He spends half of this salary on essential items like food and clothing and shelter, and the other half on luxury items like fancy vacations, professionally prepared food, recent consumer electronics and entertainment, etc.
Now Bob has children. Oh no! He now needs to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford to send his children to a good school! This means he needs to work 60 hours a week to afford necessities!
But, even if we account a good school as a necessity, Bob’s actual situation is that he is spending 20 hours of labor on his personal necessities, 20 hours of labor on his children’s necessities, and 20 hours of labor on luxuries. He has the ability to work 40 hours a week for necessities. He is instead choosing to work 60 hours a week to afford luxuries.
That’s a reasonable choice for Bob to make! The modern world has some very nice luxuries indeed, and Bob can justifiably think it’s worth putting some extra hours in to get them, even if he doesn’t enjoy his job!
Yes, it would be better still if Bob could afford all the same luxuries with a 40-hour workweek. But don’t tell me that Bob is in the same position as a coal miner who had to work 60-hour weeks to put food on the table and heat his house in winter, and don’t try to use this to argue that there hasn’t been any improvement in poverty.
And as the world gets richer still, there are two ways this could manifest:
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to work less.
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to have more luxuries.
In the first world, we’ll see Bob working fewer hours. In the second world, we’ll see Bob working the same hours but having more nice things. Both are improvements! But which improvement we get depends on how nice the things our society can produce get. The more new nice things our society can produce, the more likely Bob is to continue working 60-hour weeks to get modern luxuries, rather than working shorter hours and accepting 1980s-era luxuries.
This argument would cease to hold water if there were a substantial number of people working 60 hours a week who genuinely weren’t spending substantial portions of their income on luxuries. I think this was true in the US even in the relatively recent past, that sizeable numbers of the people working 60 hours a week in 1945-1975 e.g. never left the state they were born in, prepared all their own food, had very limited access to entertainment, etc. I don’t think it’s true today: I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.
The relation between time and money is sometimes not linear.
I would be happy to work 2⁄3 time for 2⁄3 of my current salary (doing things similar to what I am doing now), but I don’t see such option on the job market. Most employers are “40 hours, or go away”. The ones who offer part-time jobs typically pay way below the market salary, and still think they are doing you a favor.
(To generalize, this is my objection against the concept of “revealed preferences”—sometimes the options we imagine intentionally rejected by other people were never real for them in the first place.)
A large part of the family budget is “money passing through your hands”. You get a salary. You pay for the mortgage, electric power, gas, car insurance, etc. Include some humble amount of food and occasional new clothes and shoes, and… if you have an average income, it is possible that maybe 90% of your salary is already gone at that moment. The remaining 10% are yours to spend as you wish.
My point is that the budget of average people has much less slack than it may seem—at one moment you have a little discretionary spending, the next moment your expenses somehow increase by 15% (your car breaks, you get sick and need some expensive treatment, etc.) and suddenly your salary is not enough even for the necessities. Maybe the people who work 60 hours a day would actually only need to work 50 hours a day to make ends meet, but such option may not be available on the job market.
Anecdotal evidence about the life of people working 60 hours a day: Nickel and Dimed
I read Nickel and Dimed (2001) several years ago and I thought it was very good. A couple of things I remember that are relevant to the discussion.
Ehrenreich did not find a shortage of part-time work. My recollection is that the problem was the opposite: employers would only offer up to 30 hours of work a day, for regulatory reasons. So Ehrenreich often had to pick up two such jobs to attempt to earn enough money, which increased her costs. I agree that non-linear compensation is common at higher income levels, especially in knowledge work where there are increasing returns to marginal labor.
Ehrenreich discussed with her fellow employees how they were making ends meet. A common answer was that they lived with relatives, friends, or partners, allowing them to save money on housing, food, and transit, relative to Ehrenreich and also giving them a small safety net. From the perspective of Ehrenreich’s co-workers, she was paying extra to live by herself. She failed to make ends meet largely for that reason.
I think the crux here is the “relative” poverty aspect. Comparison with others is actually really important, it turns out. Going to Disneyland isn’t just a net positive; not going to Disneyland can be a negative if your kids expect you to and all their friends are. A lot of human activities are aimed at winning status games with other humans, and in that sense, in our society of abundance, marketing has vastly offset those gains by making sure it’s painfully clear which things make you rich and which aren’t worth all that much. So basically the Poverty Restoring force is “other people”. No matter the actual material conditions there’s always going to be by definition a bottom something percentile in status, and they’ll be frustrated by this condition and trying to get out of it to earn some respect by the rest of society.
The data bears this out, at least for the United States. The top 10% of earners generally work an average of 4.4 hours/week more than the bottom 10% of earners in the US, although worldwide it seems they work 1 hour/week less, on average.
I have to think that this is one of those hard areas to get a consistent measure of a comment thing. For example, is the 3 hour lunch meeting with a client really the same as the 3 houts a factory worker put in or the three hours recorded by a software engineer records for a specific project worked on?
I suppose we can say in each cases there is some level of “standing around” rather than real work. But I do suspect that the types of work don’t as one climbs the income ladder you start seeing more of the gray areas because the output of the effort becomes less directly measurable.
I also think that in the OP one of the factors in work was the unpleasant nature of the effort. While hardly universally true I have to speculate that at the higher income levels a larger percentage of people are doing things they find both interesting and enjoyable than hold at lower levels.
But clearly those hypothesis would likewise by challenging to evaluate as well.
How much autonomy someone has at work already makes a huge difference, even if it is a similar kind of work. I write computer programs both at work and in my free time, and the experience is incomparable, even if the programming language is the same, and the things I do at home are often more complicated.
If someone offered to pay me as much as is my current salary (or even 30% less), under the condition that I will keep working, but on projects of my own choice and at my own pace, plus I have to work 1 more hour every day, I would be quite happy to accept the deal.
Note that there are plenty of things that count as “working hours” when white-collar workers do them but not when blue-collar workers do them.
Can you give examples?
Using the bathroom.
The whole article is about Amazon employees being on the clock while they are using the bathroom. Spending more time in the bathroom reduces the productivity/per hour on their KPIs and thus they are incentivized against spending time in the bathroom.
Typically, a salaried white collar worker can turn up to work and use the bathroom at the start of the day, and it is counted as working hours, whereas a blue collar worker will use the bathroom before starting work (for the reasons you give about KPIs) and so it is not counted as working hours. Similarly for lunch break and end of shift. As a result the white collar worker will have a larger proportion of bathroom time counted as “working hours”, given the same time spent in the bathroom.
Maybe your point is that this is a difference of degree, not a difference in kind? True, but differences of degree matter for the working hour trends being discussed. If measured working hours stay the same but workers spend more of their bathroom hours during working hours then this is an effective increase in free time.
The relevant figure wouldn’t be the current value so much as its derivative: I don’t know how that situation has changed over time, and haven’t put in the effort to dig up information on what that data looked like in 1950.
I agree; I share your intuition that the reverse was the case in the past (the poor working longer hours than the rich), so the numbers being what they are today bears out the conclusion that the change has been towards the rich working more than the poor. Unfortunately, I just haven’t been able to find a ton of data explicitly focusing on this exact question (as opposed to a ton of related ones grouped together by Our World In Data). Best I could come up with was this Economist article from 2014 (beware paywall):
[Edit: Oops, I misread the UI. I retract this comment!]
@sunwillrise I hope you’ll forgive me singling you out, you’re certainly not the only person to make what seems to me to be the same mistake, but it seems to me that your use of the “I checked, it’s true” react is a misfire here. I think the react makes sense for factual claims that are well-operationalized and where some independent fact-checking occurred. The text you highlighted with that react is an attempted reframe of someone else’s position — a reframe is not a claim about the part of the world that the original person is talking about, it’s a claim about someone’s position. I think the appropriate react to communicate your epistemic state is to “agree” react to the statement starting from “I would phrase”, indicating that you concur that this is an accurate restatement.
(I think the meaning of the “I checked, it’s true” react in this context would be “I checked with the person who this is a paraphrase of, and they concurred that this was an accurate reframe of their position”.)
I’m… confused? I thought the part I had reacted to was this:
Which seems like a well-operationalized factual claim that I looked up sources for (and then linked in my 2 other comments here). I’m not sure what this has to do with paraphrasing someone’s position; are you saying that react should be used only for paraphrasing others, or what? Or that my sources were inadequate (which is a somewhat reasonable criticism, FWIW)?
Perhaps you thought this was a react to the entire comment, as opposed to an inline react? I’m not sure why it showed up that way, but you can see in the text above the names of those who reacted and anti-reacted that the react was only to that part of aphyer’s comment.
Darn it, I misread the UI. When I hover over the react, it only shows me the bold section of the following quote as being reacted-to:
It turns out that’s actually the text referred to by the other react (the “misunderstands position” react, which makes sense in context). I don’t know why the relevant section (“I think there has also been a trend...”) isn’t highlighted when I hover over your react.
Anyway, I retract the above, my apologies for the mistake!
Here, you can go hunt down the people who used the react that way on this comment instead.