The 40 hour work week - Society is changing. Should our work schedules change too?

[AskeDead]

Monday in the 4HL, how we holdin up fellas

 

[BPD Gunt Rider]

I would have tolerated wageslavery if it stuck at 40 hours per week. But, every job I had, it kept bumping up to about 60 hours per week.

I don't care if you somehow like your job and you're making good money, waste enough days where your life is only driving back and forth to work and coming back home to an empty house. Most of your weekends become doing errands and maintenance on your house. You'll break down eventually.

I don't know the solution, if anything society continues to further push us away from that with Clown World depopulation nonsense.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

I actually didn't know this. The way they taught it to me in school was that it was a win for the rights of the people to give them more leisure time so they could go out and watch baseball. Of course in hindsight I don't doubt that I was lied to at all.

Well, I'm oversimplifying a little. Even before that you had workers asking for "8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest".

But the point is that it was tuned for an early industrial economy. We no longer have one. Even if we were still industrial, processes and machinery have changed massively.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

The 40 hour work week isn't the issue, the issue is that we still work that 40 hour week but on average are worse off now than we were in 1980.

"Productivity" goes up, GDP goes up, corporate profit goes up, but wages stagnate. Maybe people wouldn't be feeling so fucking lost and disconnected if their job allowed them to take a decent vacation every year, they weren't worried about making ends meet, etc.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

I'm an office drone on a medical office. It sucks, but people get sick every day. We close on the weekends, and don't work on most federal, and some, local holidays.

Depending on how the day's going, I can finish my shit 2-3 hours before 5 PM, other days are terrible and might get stuck after 5. I'd say I'm productive for 2 hours in the morning, and 3 in the afternoon.

Working with people is horrible.

 

[BULLY HUNTER_78]

And there has been study after study showing that the average person only does like 2-3 hours of work in an 8 hour workday anyway. The Pareto Principle applies here, the only people doing shit in any given job are the top 10/5/1% because these are the people with ambition and high IQs

Gonna have to strongly disagree that people with high IQs are wageslaving the hardest. They’re most likely to develop a system to do the least work and extract the most wealth from a company… unless they’re the owner I suppose.

 

[The Blue Morpho]

Gonna have to strongly disagree that people with high IQs are wageslaving the hardest. They’re most likely to develop a system to do the least work and extract the most wealth from a company… unless they’re the owner I suppose.

By doing shit I meant doing work of significance, which is what the Pareto Principle is all about. In any field or business where the work is primarily intellectual there is a cognitive elite doing almost all the work of significance. If the job is digging ditches or data entry then genuinely intelligent people try and leave such positions ASAP before they off themselves.

 

[The Last Stand]

I don't care if you somehow like your job and you're making good money, waste enough days where your life is only driving back and forth to work and coming back home to an empty house. Most of your weekends become doing errands and maintenance on your house. You'll break down eventually.

I don't know the solution, if anything society continues to further push us away from that with Clown World depopulation nonsense.

Have the cost of living adjusted accordingly, change the work culture so that employee turnover/burnout reduces, hire bosses that treat their employees like actual people, cut down on this DIE policy nonsense.

That said, I'll keep that in mind. I'd imagine it'd be more relaxing to chillax by yourself during your days off to reciprocate

Working with people is horrible.

Retail workers have to deal with the worst of it.

 

[Netizennameless]

Zoomers bitching about it now might also just be some political op too,

Both parties want zoomers to shut the fuck up and work. With that said i have to defend zoomers now. They can't express themselves for shit, but they are seeing a bad deal and being told it's amazing. They still see no hope for a future, so why would they ever buy in and work hard?

get the youngest voting block fired up about said issue, see how it lands, make it a talking point in 2024 to avoid talking about anything important. I think everything is a conspiracy though so take that with a grain of salt.

I don't think that's it. The corporate megadonors are mostly dem now, and so is the youth vote. The dems in office don't want to hurt their masters.

To the zoomers, if there is a silver lining it is that you have more opportunity than ever. Ignore the bullshit and learn a trade. After you get good, start your own business and own your own future. It will be hard, but so is the wage cage. The only difference is hope for a better future when you are the owner.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Spending 8 hours a day every weekday doing a repetitive task a robot could do sorta sucks.

In other words working full time in fast food or in a factory or the like is a crappy job.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

Spending 8 hours a day every weekday doing a repetitive task a robot could do sorta sucks.

In other words working full time in fast food or in a factory or the like is a crappy job.

What kind of factory are you talking about? There’s a really wide range I don’t think you’re appreciating. Like, where do you think F-35s come from, a lab?

 

[Mr. Manchester]

Both parties want zoomers to shut the fuck up and work. With that said i have to defend zoomers now. They can't express themselves for shit, but they are seeing a bad deal and being told it's amazing. They still see no hope for a future, so why would they ever buy in and work hard?

I went to visit my folks for lunch today and had the same conversation with my Dad. He pretty much expressed the same concern that you did. Why would they give a shit in the first place? When the boomers were working 40 hours a week they got a house, a new car every 3 years and enough expendable income to take a family of 4 to Disney World without it really affecting their pocketbook, now the Disney vacation alone would bankrupt some guy working those hours. Then look at my Grandfather, who did factory work in a small town after the war and could do all that with a pension waiting for him at the end.

Those small towns are dead or prison towns because all the car plants sold out and left, by the way. Death is the preferable alternative in that case.

So if I was a zoomer, I'd be asking what the point even is? 40 hours a week for next to nothing? Now there's whispers of a draft except I don't think they'll come home with the same welcome or help my Grandfather did. The boomers learned that was gone after Vietnam. Got drafted, went to hell then got spit on and ended up scarred and homeless and called nazis when they came back. At least some of the boomers will say, "thank you for your service" every now and then. The millennials who fought in a the same shithole they want the zoomers to go into didn't even get that, they just got ignored.

Dad raised another interesting point. The 40 hour work week was put in place to encourage employment because there weren't as many jobs to go around. These days they're all over the place but they just happen to be shit. It's much more costly to hire someone now compared to say the 1960s. There's more taxes, more benefits they have to provide, legal costs to make sure you're not going to get felted over some bullshit law etc. At that point a lot of companies are fine with just having workers get paid overtime instead of taking on the risk of a new hire. I mentioned working a 70 hour week, that happened at the start of my job and the extra pay, where all things held equal, it would have made more sense to just hire another person to take up those hours, but they didn't because it was more cost efficient to have a ding dong like me come in for 30 extra hours. I can't imagine that it would make much difference if they lowered the OT threshold to 32 hours.

That all being said, I want to be supportive. I grew up with my generation being called spoiled brats who wanted something that was easy to get for them. Gen X grew up with boomers saying they were so retarded that they had to sign their name with an X, hence the name. 40 hours is fine, but only if it's worth it. Maybe it just isn't anymore.

 

[Fascist Kirk]

I learned from the boomers, zero day work weeks, have latina x do the labor, fuck the kids, you only live once after all ai will do it all soon anyway

 

[Netizennameless]

So if I was a zoomer, I'd be asking what the point even is? 40 hours a week for next to nothing? Now there's whispers of a draft except I don't think they'll come home with the same welcome or help my Grandfather did. The boomers learned that was gone after Vietnam. Got drafted, went to hell then got spit on and ended up scarred and homeless and called nazis when they came back. At least some of the boomers will say, "thank you for your service" every now and then. The millennials who fought in a the same shithole they want the zoomers to go into didn't even get that, they just got ignored.

I am an elder millennial. I saw the same things that zoomers are seeing now, just not quite as bad. I went back and forth on whether to try or mail it in, and I landed on working hard. I have no specific loyalty to a company, but I reasoned that I could work hard and use that to build my skillset. I always took the lowest salary they offered and didn't bother to negotiate. I could have made more, but I entered the workforce during the great recession. There were always 100+ candidates competing for every job I applied to. Having promise + being cheap to hire meant companies were more likely to take a risk on me. If a company treated me poorly, I would stay for a year or two for resume stability and then leave for a promotion. I managed a 1 income household with a wife and child at 19, humbly but still possible in a major city.

I say all this to say that a zoomer in the same circumstances I came up in, I can't fathom how they could make the math work. Even cutting out every possible luxury and only spending on core necessities.

 

[Fields Of Rye]

Gonna be a bit of an ass here but every job that’s an 8 hour, on the dot, whatever schtick is basically garbage work you can do on autopilot and I think subconsciously we all know it,

The shit I do I can basically leave whenever the fuck I want as long as it’s ready by a deadline and if I tried to do that 8 hours straight I’d literally have died in an electrical accident. Then again some days go for 12 hours and I’ve got people running me coffee and I know I’m not getting out of there until midnight, and I’ll be back at 6 the next day.

Medical, legal, chemical, all these jobs basically will allow you to tell the scheduler to suck it to a certain amount because people rarely end up to that point without work management skills. Usually they absolutely clown on the 40 hour work week and have to be forced to stop.

This is particularly why I fucking hate medical residency fags who bitch as if they didn’t know, They are forced to rock like 100 hour work weeks as zombies and spend 70% of that tweaking in the break room or staring at monitors.

Yeah, doing nothing since three is a drag, but would you rather be on call knowing the fate of your night is currently in the hands of a fat, nasally, freshly hired fag you saw watching Bluey before his shift?

 

[Osama Bin Laden]

don't care for 40 hour work weeks but i really like seeing my paycheck every 2 weeks

 

[ToroidalBoat]

There’s a really wide range I don’t think you’re appreciating.

garbage work you can do on autopilot

What makes jobs more bearable is working towards a goal, rather than small tasks over and over for a quota or a predetermined shift.

 

[Fields Of Rye]

What makes jobs more bearable is working towards a goal, rather than small tasks over and over for a quota or a predetermined shift.

Yeah but shredding paper is bearable but ultimately an autopilot job. Assembly line is it’s own kind of hell but “wooo spreadsheet complete” isn’t a great improvement

 

[Georgio Cocklord]

Both parties want zoomers to shut the fuck up and work. With that said i have to defend zoomers now. They can't express themselves for shit, but they are seeing a bad deal and being told it's amazing. They still see no hope for a future, so why would they ever buy in and work hard?

It's a terrible fucking deal across the world unfortunately, me being from a third world country I essentially have to work at least 12 hours a day and have done both in my previous and current job. Granted I have a decent pay, around 600 dollars a month which is alright in my place with an uptick of 1-5% a year. But the problem comes in how the market has been completely raped to the dirt. If I were to live by myself, I'd have to blow close to half my pay on rent alone, a quarter on necessities if I were to live off ramen and army rations and possibly spend a bit more on stuff like maintenance and electricity. My parents were able to do much more 25 years ago with the same amount of monetary value (currency has been destroyed by inflation) at the time, albeit with a bit of help. It's fucking depressing but at least I'm able to live in comfort with my family currently.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

There isn't really an alternative to 40 hour week work. Even with commute you still have couple of hours for leisure and the full weekend, the real issue is interacting with any government bureaucracy that basically eats up an entire day.

Ideally people could work on daily tasks instead and if they finish they can go home early, though you can be sure it will be abused. In the end the biggest issue is the low trust community and meaningless work for corpos making the work itself extremely unappealing.