Whoever invented the eight hour five day work week is Satan.
Unions. Unions won the five day eight hour workweek after heavy, sometimes bloody conflicts with employers. Before that it was common for workweek to be 10 or 12 hours a day.
Too many people are ignorant of the role Unions played in American history. I assume they were brought up in places where the GOP controls the schools.
I was actively taught in high school that “unions were nice, but not necessary any more, they get in the way of all our very cool free trade!”
Obviously, my thinking on that has changed a whole lot, but both my partner and I got fed that kind of rhetoric straight out of text books.
Technically, if your shift is long enough and timed properly, you can have daytime going in and coming out.
God bless unions. Now can they negotiate a four day work week?
The bad news is their power has been systematically eroded for a long time. The good news is they’ve made a bit of a comeback in the last couple of years. Hopefully this trend continues.
Grieved something recently and won a 3K payout and a workload change. It was great.
Before that it was common for workweek to be 10 or 12 hours.
10-12 hours per day*, dangerous typo
Fixed
The idea came from a British guy called Robert Owen in the 19th century. It was a huge step forward in workers rights seeing as it was fairly normal for factories to work from sunrise to sunset to try and maximise their output.
Typical working hours were 10-18 hrs a day 6 to 7 days a week
I’m not saying I love working 8hrs a day and modern society can definitely do better but this was a positive step forward in history and should be celebrated… celebrated isn’t quite the right word but I hope you get what I mean
Yeah, anyone calling the creator of the 40-hour work week “Satan” is obviously ignorant of the history of labour.
As you said, we can definitely do better, but at the time it was (quite literally) revolutionary.
Yup, we need to get 6 hour 4 days a week now, so people in 2100 can call us satanic for wasting so many hours working.
Reminded me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo
It is more made to debunk the idea that capitalism has given humanity more leisure time. But relevant here too because makes the case that historically people worked even less than the ‘typical’ week we have today.
It makes me wonder if the reason we mostly feel like working 40+ hours is too much is because people really don’t seem to have worked that much until the industrial age.
I really liked that video. I’m always cautious of stuff like this, which can easily become a fallacious appeal to history, but I think this video effectively avoids that territory. Like, it’s useful to consider how things used to be different and how things became this way, without presenting the former as a solution for the latter.
100% agreed - there is a lot of garbage on youtube and it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Appreciated for what it was at the time. I get you.
You do realize that it was invented by people fighting desperately for work to not be 10 hours a day 6 days a week, yes?
Nah, man. Satan is the man who made 8 hours a day look like a fantastical demand back then.
Labor unions are the Satan to which you are referring. Labor unions brought you many infernal things: the weekend, lunch breaks, paid vacation, social security, minimum wage, FMLA, 8-hour work days, OSHA, sick leave, child labor laws, etc.
Satan indeed!
Op, you don’t seem aware that getting the work week down to this took a very concerted effort
While I agree, the amount of productivity that’s increased since the 5 day work week was established has made it reasonable to once again change the norm. That, or pay workers equivalent to the increase in productivity that has happened. It’s all going somewhere.
Source for productivity gains?
Thanks for backing me up
We can keep applying yet more effort. This is better than 6 day work week, but we can do even better
Sure, but it seems ignorant of said progress when op referred to it as created by Satan.
Not if you think of Satan as a questioner of authority and bringer of change. We could use another Satan
Lol yes but I don’t think that’s what they meant.
Keep in mind that once upon a time it was 6 days and 14 hours per day.
Keep in mind that before that, people worked much less in winter and still less than today in summer
Admittedly, they were completely at the mercy of disease, herd migration, had no plumbing, buried astounding numbers of their children, were not the apex predator, didn’t have mattresses and when injuries happened they often healed poorly and painfully.
And if I worked less hours in my office job, all that would return?
Your office job is incompatible with the pre-agrarian lifestyle you described earlier.
You don’t get modern luxuries AND the minimal hours required as a hunter gatherer, just as I can’t get the speed of my car AND the cardiovascular benefits of my bike simultaneously.
He’s not talking about “pre-agrarian;” even medieval peasants got more time off than we do today.
Yeah I don’t think so …
We can both acknowledge progress and an extreme lack of what that progress should/could have been.
All you have to do is look to countries like China and even Japan where people literally work themselves to death.
Should we be working 40 hours a week? No but let’s not pretend that the situation has only gotten worse…
You’re a crab in a bucket and so wrong.
If you need to work to afford to live, you’re being lied to about what’s possible for a healthy and functioning modern society to thrive.
Don’t forget that in order for capitalism to stay alive, it requires poverty, manufactured scarcity and obsolescence.
You should question why billionaires even exist in what you consider to be a just and modern society. You should also look up a visual representation of just how much larger 1 billion is from whatever your gross annual income is if you still think it’s reasonable that they do exist.
The person you’re responding to gave no reason to think this mountain of accusations
What a shitty take. Go learn what the normal conditions were BEFORE the 8/day 5/week standard.
Just because things were worse in the past doesn’t mean they can’t be better in the future.
You are very right, it’s just that saying “whoever invented the thing that’s better than what was before is Satan” is kinda unfair to be people who fought for the 8/8/8 system. The focus should be onto whom hinder or even regress progress
Yeah, a better sentiment would be “whoever is still demanding that we work the 8/8/8 system in the current economy is Satan. Our forefathers fought to improve working conditions, we should fight too”
