The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don’t you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!
(Observe how the top comment on MoJo and the first comment on the Guardian both mention that crazy bearded German with his theories about how employers will collectively find a way to wring more and more out of the workers as the technology allows them more reach, while the pay stays more or less the same. He sounds a bit less crazy now, eh?)
While you’re at it, please take time to read Oscar Wilde’s wonderful utopian essay that Hatherley quotes. I do not entirely share his hopes of better social interaction and a more decent status assignment in the absense of material need, but hell, there’s definitely something to his words.
Related, a roundup of a heated exchange on workers’ rights between Crooked Timber and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
Past economists are simply wrong about human nature. They look at humans in far mode and assume that they would agree to enjoy more leisure and de-escalate materialist status competition. In fact, humans, even wealthy humans, perceive status competition in near-mode as existential struggle. They’re willing to work very hard, sacrificing leisure and quality of life, to avoid losing relative status. The fact that we continue to work hard is a fact about human nature not a fact about employee-worker power dynamics per se.
Falsfiable prediction: if a four-day work week were instated, and cultural norms shifted away from work and productivity as the primary domain of status competition, people would redirect the vast majority of their freed-up effort into status-boosting leisure activities, such as exotic travel or conspicuous altruism, much like high-school students diligently doing the “right” extracurriculars.
This. I’m not an expert in economics, but much of what little I’ve seen is maths based on assumptions strongly reminiscent of assuming that a fluid has zero viscosity, with very little comparisons of theoretical predictions with empirical data.
From what I’ve heard, people are willing to work very long hours if they get time and a half for overtime. Caveat: I’m not sure how much of this is that they have to take the work as a condition of keeping their jobs. (American?) unions seem to be at least as likely to push for time and a half for overtime as they are to push for shorter work weeks.
On the other hand, Europeans aren’t exactly revolting to get longer, better paid work weeks.
My claim is not that workers want longer work-weeks per se. It is that they are willing to work hard to maintain their relative status. The primary domain of status-seeking may certainly shift, from work to academic competition or social/sexual competition or conspicuous altruism.
Status-seeking is the main urge, but in the aggregate people are relatively indifferent about what domain it takes place in.
The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don’t you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!
You seem to be confusing productivity and drudgery. Productivity is the amount of “value” you produce by working, drudgery is the amount of disutility you experience while working. Marx’s mistake was assuming that these two quantities were always the same and that therefore “progress” consists of forcing workers to endure more drudgery. In reality progress consists of increasing productivity per unit of drudgery.
Marx’s mistake was assuming that these two quantities were always the same and that therefore “progress” consists of forcing workers to endure more drudgery. In reality progress consists of increasing productivity per unit of drudgery.
No no no; the stereotype of Marx as disregarding the wonders of technical progress is basically a lie. This is literally the exactopposite of what Marx was saying in Das Kapital and elsewhere. Let me give a crude summary with anachronistic terms.
Marx believed that due to technical progress, relentless automation and improving labour organization—all of which he could observe as profoundly transformative during his own lifetime—industrial productivity per unit of time would eventually become so enormous that, logically, some combination of the following has to ensue in most industries: 1) the amount of real wealth that workers take home as salary would skyrocket, giving them socioeconomic leverage and a position of power over the “bourgeois”—the production organizers and the beneficiaries of financial rent (two somewhat conflicting kinds of capitalists). 2) working hours would shrink as much less man-hours and effort are needed to attain a desired absolute amount of production or, most importantly, 3) - the relative share of value that the workers end up with would decrease even as their absolute real wages slowly increase or stagnate. Instead, ever more of the value generated by industries would go to the owners and shareholders, to waste or to the ever-expanding corporate bureaucracy. Marx thought that expecting 1) and 2) was unrealistic as they run against capitalists’ direct economic and political self-interest. Therefore, 3) would escalate until it becomes just obscene and the workers can’t help but notice how their share of the pie is ever shrinking. Hence, escalating political conflict along economic lines (“class struggle”).
Oh, and Marx predicted formal technical knowledge to play an ever-increasing role in the creation of value in most industries, as opposed to physical effort, access to natural resources or personal craftsmanship and mastery. I’m not going into the implications of that; read some Zizek or something.
Also, in a Marxian view, companies naturally tend to form bloated oligopolies and, despite their relative inefficiency, dominate the market. They become more secure against governments and exert massive influence on their policy, shaping the ‘consent manufactories’ like the media and the academia along the way. If the state has a power vacuum in some area, they’ll seize dominance over it; if state power is in the way, they’ll subvert it. Eventually TNCs and lobbies, not “public” governments become the primary agents of global politics—hence imperialism, violent takeover of resources, outsourcing-as-slavery and other pretty things. “Capital cannot abide a limit to profit”, Marx said—but it leads capitalists to actions that are irrational in the long term. Nowdays, I would add advertising as wasteful zero-sum signaling for the industry and conspicious consumption as wasteful zero-sum signaling for the customers to this list of complaints.
(So either Marx was absolutely, utterly wrong on what “value” is, and what it means for a society to become wealthier—or capitalism is by nature unbelievably wasteful and getting ever more so. Which does not by itself imply that knowledge or implementation of a better system is currently possible. Unlike e.g. Hayek, Marx basically didn’t view prices, specifics of consumer demand, etc as the objective driving factors of an economy, saying that industrial production, corporate growth and finance have their own powerful logic. This, and some alleged inconsistencies, is what he’s slammed for by neoclassical ecnomists—not his thoughts on inequality, his revolutionary politics or such.)
P.S. I’m not much of a Marxist, I’m just trying to explain some of his more empirical thoughts without the strawman treatment that he gets in America.
P.P.S. Yeah, looks like the theory of value is the main point of contention for all the Marxist and Marxian theorizing out there. E.g. here’s a discussion, and at first glance people are trying to argue rationally about economics, but it’s really rather hard to parse.
We’re working to pay off all the government enabled rent seekers, starting with land rent, sales of natural resources, intellectual property, government licensed occupations and industries, and finally, government workers themselves. And then we’re working under regulatory regimes that cripple productive capacity and destroy wealth.
So yes, people are a lot more productive, but there is little of the wealth they produce left for them after the rent seekers have taken their cut and the bureaucracy has finished flushing most of the leftovers down the toilet.
Are you claiming that corporations like Microsoft don’t have huge rent-seeking elements that have little to do with “government” regulation? Or that those rent-seeking elements (i.e. elements that optimize away the production of utility for society in lieu of utility for themselves) don’t include top executives, huge PR/advertising departments and such?
If e.g. a global supermarket chain reached an agreement with its several “competitors” (and I use the word loosely) to “set industry standards of team-building” (use a unified strategy of emotional manipulation towards personnel, like paternalism and engendering status competition), “share information on human resources” (spy on potential troublemakers’ conversations, blogs, etc), “work closely and productively with unions” (keep local union leadership on a short leash to avoid dangerous examples while throwing bones like “gender awareness”) and “maintain a healthy relationship with the media” (no explanation needed) -
-would it really need a large government lobby to cover its ass while doing all that, even in today’s America? Indeed, I believe that they’re already doing much of this all over the world.
Your scenario presumes that said cartel covers all the corporations in the industry, otherwise employees would go to places with better working conditions, unless the the places with worse working conditions paid more to compensate.
That was my attempt to describe what is essentially a 3-dimensional labor supply function in words, hope it wasn’t to confusing.
How’s this for an idea: Continue with the current system of market capitalism until humanity is wealthy enough to have colonized a few planets, then switch to socialism and kick back.
I see it as delayed gratification on the societal level.
In brief: capitalism is not defined as “unpleasant thing that creates lots of wealth” and socialism is not defined as “pleasant thing that costs lots of wealth”. Not AT ALL. There are vast issues at stake in any choice which can be framed as “capitalism vs socialism”, and none of those is “how much wealth would it take”. We already have MANY times enough spare wealth for no-one in the world to starve, yet somehow people still do.
Of course, but wealth production and happiness certainly trade off against one another, don’t they? E.g. if corporations get their employees to be more productive, those employees will (likely) produce more wealth and be less happy.
You could imagine a production-possibility frontier representing the maximum levels of economic growth and happiness that are achievable. In some cases, taking steps to increase economic growth will also incidentally increase happiness. (E.g. if your employees are working 80-hour weeks, decreasing the number of hours they work will make them both more productive and more happy.) But it seems unlikely that the societal configuration that’s optimal for economic growth and the societal configuration that’s optimal for current happiness are the exact same societal configuration.
An argument for optimizing for economic growth, possibly at the expense of current happiness, goes something like: economic growth tends to be exponential, and pushing even harder for it will probably increase the multiplier in the exponent, so the returns you get for optimizing for it will snowball exponentially. And it’s easy to see how these returns could trivially be converted in to happiness later on if the growth takes the form of automating the heck out of everything.
Of course, economic growth isn’t obviously good. I’m definitely interested in whether economic growth is a net positive or negative, because knowing this would influence a lot of my everyday life decisions. For example, is it a bad idea to make an edit improving Wikipedia?
We already have MANY times enough spare wealth for no-one in the world to starve, yet somehow people still do.
Sure, but it seems likely that switching to an economic system where everyone was guaranteed food and shelter would significantly hamper economic growth. BTW, I recommend this tangentially related article.
Keynes, who is having a come back these days, was also in favour of a reduced week, based on the assumption that the prosperity societies have would lead to less work.
We can certainly afford it, but if 40 hours is more efficient than 30 hours, in a competitive framework the former will triumph. Of course, theres a reasonable amount of evidence (as I understand it) that beyond short pushes to get stuff done, stretching the working day reduces productivity: this is one of the reasons companies excepted union demands for an 8 hour day.
It is kind of weird that we have a 5 day working week and not a 6 day or 4 day week if you think about it. One suspects that thats a cultural creation rather than an inevitable one.
in a competitive framework the former will triumph
In what kind of a competitive framework? If, say, all the trade unions within a nation insist upon a 30-hour week, it would indeed maybe reduce the industry’s output a little - but wouldn’t the best and brightest/most conscious workers from the other nations either move there, giving the employer superior human resources, or have a strike at home and enable the same kind of thing for themselves?
The question is, who tells, or broadly hints, the workers what to ask for? (and here the buck is certainly away from the Left—c’mon, look at how useless it has been, nowdays it can’t tell the workers to stand up for anything!)
The workers don’t ask for anything. If all the trade unions insisted on a 30-hour week, it would probably happen, but there’s no real incentive for anyone to try.
but wouldn’t the best and brightest/most conscious workers from the other nations either move there, giving the employer superior human resources, or have a strike at home and enable the same kind of thing for themselves?
The incentives are higher for the best and brightest workers to move to where they are allowed to work more. Remember their opportunity cost for not working is much higher than that of the average or below average worker.
If you are good at what you do and get paid more for it than others, let alone if you are competing for prestige within your field, you have an incentive to move to the more work heavy culture. Perhaps we even see this in the real world with migration of top talent from say Europe to the US.
The typical mind fallacy is an important error to watch out for when considering policy. Many people feel they would prefer to work 30 hours instead of 40 hours or that they wouldn’t respond to certain perverse incentives, so they assume no one else will.
Yeah, you’re partly right. I was kinda mixing up two plausible consequences here—many of the “elite” workers might, in the hypothetical organized-labor-world, actively seek out higher wages even at the cost of leisure or worse conditions, while the “average” or “mediocre” ones in their line of work—or even most, if their line of work hardly allows an “elite” except as a foreman post (which was dangled in front of me after my slightly Kafkaesque stint of stocking shelves at department stores) - would prefer to stay where they are and bargain for a combination of 1)more of effective free time, 2)better conditions and 3)higher pay, instead of allowing themselves to be collectively hypnotized by 3) at the expense of 1) and 2).
Um, in fact, to rely on a cached thought—haven’t Italian workers been known for strong unionization, not-too-high wages by European standards and a rather carefree/relaxed attitude? Fun fact: work-to-rule is called an “Italian strike” in Russian.
It really depends on the field. If you get someone to work 10 less hours at mcdonalds, you are literally getting 25 percent less out of employing that person, and you need to make up the shortfall with more employees. On the other hand, office work is so independent of hours that many people can work at home with no enforcement just fine.
Yeah, the burger-flippers are exploited in a really hardcore and efficient way, no kidding. It’s exemplarly of how far modern capitalism can go in full view of its 1st world clients. (Do read “Manna”!) I’d also argue that they’re emotionally abused through all the phoney “team-building” and such, but that’s another matter.
But hey, that’s exactly where organized labor could find a good spot to make a stand—“We’re working as hard as we possibly can, we’re not some big fucking happy family, treat us like adults!”. Mcdonalds itself is known for trying various HR tricks (“Not bad for a McJob!”) to defuse serious discontent, but lesser fast food chains might indeed have cause to fear such industry-wide organization. A better and more infamous example is Walmart.
You’re welcome. It’s an interesting topic for considering how ems might evolve: can a roughly human architecture work nonstop? Or will ems have to make tradeoffs between reloading a ‘clean’ brain every X seconds and being able to learn from work?
Here’s a few left-wing, subversive provocations to get you started:
It’s the 21st century – why are we working so much? - again, everything by Owen Hatherley is worth reading.
The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don’t you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!
(Observe how the top comment on MoJo and the first comment on the Guardian both mention that crazy bearded German with his theories about how employers will collectively find a way to wring more and more out of the workers as the technology allows them more reach, while the pay stays more or less the same. He sounds a bit less crazy now, eh?)
While you’re at it, please take time to read Oscar Wilde’s wonderful utopian essay that Hatherley quotes. I do not entirely share his hopes of better social interaction and a more decent status assignment in the absense of material need, but hell, there’s definitely something to his words.
Related, a roundup of a heated exchange on workers’ rights between Crooked Timber and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
80% confidence on the following:
Past economists are simply wrong about human nature. They look at humans in far mode and assume that they would agree to enjoy more leisure and de-escalate materialist status competition. In fact, humans, even wealthy humans, perceive status competition in near-mode as existential struggle. They’re willing to work very hard, sacrificing leisure and quality of life, to avoid losing relative status. The fact that we continue to work hard is a fact about human nature not a fact about employee-worker power dynamics per se.
Falsfiable prediction: if a four-day work week were instated, and cultural norms shifted away from work and productivity as the primary domain of status competition, people would redirect the vast majority of their freed-up effort into status-boosting leisure activities, such as exotic travel or conspicuous altruism, much like high-school students diligently doing the “right” extracurriculars.
Checkable test: When the 40-hour work week was instated, is this what happened?
Alternative check: When France moved to the 35-hour work week (12 years ago), what happened?
This. I’m not an expert in economics, but much of what little I’ve seen is maths based on assumptions strongly reminiscent of assuming that a fluid has zero viscosity, with very little comparisons of theoretical predictions with empirical data.
From what I’ve heard, people are willing to work very long hours if they get time and a half for overtime. Caveat: I’m not sure how much of this is that they have to take the work as a condition of keeping their jobs. (American?) unions seem to be at least as likely to push for time and a half for overtime as they are to push for shorter work weeks.
On the other hand, Europeans aren’t exactly revolting to get longer, better paid work weeks.
Maybe there’s no “human nature” on this question?
My claim is not that workers want longer work-weeks per se. It is that they are willing to work hard to maintain their relative status. The primary domain of status-seeking may certainly shift, from work to academic competition or social/sexual competition or conspicuous altruism.
Status-seeking is the main urge, but in the aggregate people are relatively indifferent about what domain it takes place in.
One thing to check would be how much people sleep in countries that have legal requirements for relatively short work weeks.
But correlation is still not causation. Maybe people sleep more if they have more free time to fill without health implications.
You seem to be confusing productivity and drudgery. Productivity is the amount of “value” you produce by working, drudgery is the amount of disutility you experience while working. Marx’s mistake was assuming that these two quantities were always the same and that therefore “progress” consists of forcing workers to endure more drudgery. In reality progress consists of increasing productivity per unit of drudgery.
No no no; the stereotype of Marx as disregarding the wonders of technical progress is basically a lie. This is literally the exact opposite of what Marx was saying in Das Kapital and elsewhere. Let me give a crude summary with anachronistic terms.
Marx believed that due to technical progress, relentless automation and improving labour organization—all of which he could observe as profoundly transformative during his own lifetime—industrial productivity per unit of time would eventually become so enormous that, logically, some combination of the following has to ensue in most industries:
1) the amount of real wealth that workers take home as salary would skyrocket, giving them socioeconomic leverage and a position of power over the “bourgeois”—the production organizers and the beneficiaries of financial rent (two somewhat conflicting kinds of capitalists).
2) working hours would shrink as much less man-hours and effort are needed to attain a desired absolute amount of production
or, most importantly, 3) - the relative share of value that the workers end up with would decrease even as their absolute real wages slowly increase or stagnate. Instead, ever more of the value generated by industries would go to the owners and shareholders, to waste or to the ever-expanding corporate bureaucracy. Marx thought that expecting 1) and 2) was unrealistic as they run against capitalists’ direct economic and political self-interest. Therefore, 3) would escalate until it becomes just obscene and the workers can’t help but notice how their share of the pie is ever shrinking. Hence, escalating political conflict along economic lines (“class struggle”).
Oh, and Marx predicted formal technical knowledge to play an ever-increasing role in the creation of value in most industries, as opposed to physical effort, access to natural resources or personal craftsmanship and mastery. I’m not going into the implications of that; read some Zizek or something.
Also, in a Marxian view, companies naturally tend to form bloated oligopolies and, despite their relative inefficiency, dominate the market. They become more secure against governments and exert massive influence on their policy, shaping the ‘consent manufactories’ like the media and the academia along the way. If the state has a power vacuum in some area, they’ll seize dominance over it; if state power is in the way, they’ll subvert it.
Eventually TNCs and lobbies, not “public” governments become the primary agents of global politics—hence imperialism, violent takeover of resources, outsourcing-as-slavery and other pretty things. “Capital cannot abide a limit to profit”, Marx said—but it leads capitalists to actions that are irrational in the long term. Nowdays, I would add advertising as wasteful zero-sum signaling for the industry and conspicious consumption as wasteful zero-sum signaling for the customers to this list of complaints.
(So either Marx was absolutely, utterly wrong on what “value” is, and what it means for a society to become wealthier—or capitalism is by nature unbelievably wasteful and getting ever more so. Which does not by itself imply that knowledge or implementation of a better system is currently possible. Unlike e.g. Hayek, Marx basically didn’t view prices, specifics of consumer demand, etc as the objective driving factors of an economy, saying that industrial production, corporate growth and finance have their own powerful logic. This, and some alleged inconsistencies, is what he’s slammed for by neoclassical ecnomists—not his thoughts on inequality, his revolutionary politics or such.)
P.S. I’m not much of a Marxist, I’m just trying to explain some of his more empirical thoughts without the strawman treatment that he gets in America.
P.P.S. Yeah, looks like the theory of value is the main point of contention for all the Marxist and Marxian theorizing out there. E.g. here’s a discussion, and at first glance people are trying to argue rationally about economics, but it’s really rather hard to parse.
We’re working to pay off all the government enabled rent seekers, starting with land rent, sales of natural resources, intellectual property, government licensed occupations and industries, and finally, government workers themselves. And then we’re working under regulatory regimes that cripple productive capacity and destroy wealth.
So yes, people are a lot more productive, but there is little of the wealth they produce left for them after the rent seekers have taken their cut and the bureaucracy has finished flushing most of the leftovers down the toilet.
Are you claiming that corporations like Microsoft don’t have huge rent-seeking elements that have little to do with “government” regulation? Or that those rent-seeking elements (i.e. elements that optimize away the production of utility for society in lieu of utility for themselves) don’t include top executives, huge PR/advertising departments and such?
If e.g. a global supermarket chain reached an agreement with its several “competitors” (and I use the word loosely) to “set industry standards of team-building” (use a unified strategy of emotional manipulation towards personnel, like paternalism and engendering status competition), “share information on human resources” (spy on potential troublemakers’ conversations, blogs, etc), “work closely and productively with unions” (keep local union leadership on a short leash to avoid dangerous examples while throwing bones like “gender awareness”) and “maintain a healthy relationship with the media” (no explanation needed) -
-would it really need a large government lobby to cover its ass while doing all that, even in today’s America? Indeed, I believe that they’re already doing much of this all over the world.
Your scenario presumes that said cartel covers all the corporations in the industry, otherwise employees would go to places with better working conditions, unless the the places with worse working conditions paid more to compensate.
That was my attempt to describe what is essentially a 3-dimensional labor supply function in words, hope it wasn’t to confusing.
How’s this for an idea: Continue with the current system of market capitalism until humanity is wealthy enough to have colonized a few planets, then switch to socialism and kick back.
I see it as delayed gratification on the societal level.
In brief: capitalism is not defined as “unpleasant thing that creates lots of wealth” and socialism is not defined as “pleasant thing that costs lots of wealth”. Not AT ALL. There are vast issues at stake in any choice which can be framed as “capitalism vs socialism”, and none of those is “how much wealth would it take”. We already have MANY times enough spare wealth for no-one in the world to starve, yet somehow people still do.
Of course, but wealth production and happiness certainly trade off against one another, don’t they? E.g. if corporations get their employees to be more productive, those employees will (likely) produce more wealth and be less happy.
You could imagine a production-possibility frontier representing the maximum levels of economic growth and happiness that are achievable. In some cases, taking steps to increase economic growth will also incidentally increase happiness. (E.g. if your employees are working 80-hour weeks, decreasing the number of hours they work will make them both more productive and more happy.) But it seems unlikely that the societal configuration that’s optimal for economic growth and the societal configuration that’s optimal for current happiness are the exact same societal configuration.
An argument for optimizing for economic growth, possibly at the expense of current happiness, goes something like: economic growth tends to be exponential, and pushing even harder for it will probably increase the multiplier in the exponent, so the returns you get for optimizing for it will snowball exponentially. And it’s easy to see how these returns could trivially be converted in to happiness later on if the growth takes the form of automating the heck out of everything.
Of course, economic growth isn’t obviously good. I’m definitely interested in whether economic growth is a net positive or negative, because knowing this would influence a lot of my everyday life decisions. For example, is it a bad idea to make an edit improving Wikipedia?
Sure, but it seems likely that switching to an economic system where everyone was guaranteed food and shelter would significantly hamper economic growth. BTW, I recommend this tangentially related article.
Poll to find out what people mean by socialism
Keynes, who is having a come back these days, was also in favour of a reduced week, based on the assumption that the prosperity societies have would lead to less work.
We can certainly afford it, but if 40 hours is more efficient than 30 hours, in a competitive framework the former will triumph. Of course, theres a reasonable amount of evidence (as I understand it) that beyond short pushes to get stuff done, stretching the working day reduces productivity: this is one of the reasons companies excepted union demands for an 8 hour day.
It is kind of weird that we have a 5 day working week and not a 6 day or 4 day week if you think about it. One suspects that thats a cultural creation rather than an inevitable one.
In what kind of a competitive framework? If, say, all the trade unions within a nation insist upon a 30-hour week, it would indeed maybe reduce the industry’s output a little - but wouldn’t the best and brightest/most conscious workers from the other nations either move there, giving the employer superior human resources, or have a strike at home and enable the same kind of thing for themselves?
The question is, who tells, or broadly hints, the workers what to ask for? (and here the buck is certainly away from the Left—c’mon, look at how useless it has been, nowdays it can’t tell the workers to stand up for anything!)
The workers don’t ask for anything. If all the trade unions insisted on a 30-hour week, it would probably happen, but there’s no real incentive for anyone to try.
My point exactly. It seems that the Market Fairy hasn’t told them they could’ve bargained for a better deal.
The incentives are higher for the best and brightest workers to move to where they are allowed to work more. Remember their opportunity cost for not working is much higher than that of the average or below average worker.
If you are good at what you do and get paid more for it than others, let alone if you are competing for prestige within your field, you have an incentive to move to the more work heavy culture. Perhaps we even see this in the real world with migration of top talent from say Europe to the US.
The typical mind fallacy is an important error to watch out for when considering policy. Many people feel they would prefer to work 30 hours instead of 40 hours or that they wouldn’t respond to certain perverse incentives, so they assume no one else will.
Yeah, you’re partly right.
I was kinda mixing up two plausible consequences here—many of the “elite” workers might, in the hypothetical organized-labor-world, actively seek out higher wages even at the cost of leisure or worse conditions, while the “average” or “mediocre” ones in their line of work—or even most, if their line of work hardly allows an “elite” except as a foreman post (which was dangled in front of me after my slightly Kafkaesque stint of stocking shelves at department stores) - would prefer to stay where they are and bargain for a combination of 1)more of effective free time, 2)better conditions and 3)higher pay, instead of allowing themselves to be collectively hypnotized by 3) at the expense of 1) and 2).
Um, in fact, to rely on a cached thought—haven’t Italian workers been known for strong unionization, not-too-high wages by European standards and a rather carefree/relaxed attitude? Fun fact: work-to-rule is called an “Italian strike” in Russian.
25 percent less output seems like more than a little to me
It would obviously be much less than 25%, if you think about the typical blue-collar worker’s day a little.
It really depends on the field. If you get someone to work 10 less hours at mcdonalds, you are literally getting 25 percent less out of employing that person, and you need to make up the shortfall with more employees. On the other hand, office work is so independent of hours that many people can work at home with no enforcement just fine.
Yeah, the burger-flippers are exploited in a really hardcore and efficient way, no kidding. It’s exemplarly of how far modern capitalism can go in full view of its 1st world clients. (Do read “Manna”!) I’d also argue that they’re emotionally abused through all the phoney “team-building” and such, but that’s another matter.
But hey, that’s exactly where organized labor could find a good spot to make a stand—“We’re working as hard as we possibly can, we’re not some big fucking happy family, treat us like adults!”. Mcdonalds itself is known for trying various HR tricks (“Not bad for a McJob!”) to defuse serious discontent, but lesser fast food chains might indeed have cause to fear such industry-wide organization. A better and more infamous example is Walmart.
″...stretching the working day reduces productivity”
AFAIK, it reduces productivity per hour; I’m not sure at what point it reduces overall productivity.
ETA: will look this up later, if no one else gets there first.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.html comes to mind. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/why-work-hour-limits.html also includes some interesting links.)
Thanks!
You’re welcome. It’s an interesting topic for considering how ems might evolve: can a roughly human architecture work nonstop? Or will ems have to make tradeoffs between reloading a ‘clean’ brain every X seconds and being able to learn from work?