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

[Dr. Ricearoni]

Ok, so hear me out. I'm sure we've all seen the articles. Zoomers complaining about the 40 hour work week, if they're lucky. Many people work even longer hours. I know it's easy to just call them lazy, especially if you're an older kiwi, but as a zoomer myself I think they might be onto something. It's not the quality of the work that's become worse, it's the quality of everything else. A 40 hour work week must've sounded amazing when it became the standard 80 years ago. But 80 years ago working for 40 hours bought you a house, put dinner on the table for you, your kids and your stay at home wife who does all the cooking and cleaning and takes care of said children. Nowadays, you're all alone, or if you manage to sink your nails into a girl you can halfway tolerate, guess what, she's working 40 hours too.

So where's your time for leisure? Where's your time for love? There's hardly a moment to relax. And if you do find the time, where can you even go? You could go to the bar but even those are no fun anymore. People don't interact socially anymore. All you have is the digital world. Can we blame kids for being addicted to their phones when every other place to hang out has been taken from them? Can't even go to the YMCA anymore without getting molested by a tranny.

Not to mention all this shit costs money, and quite a lot of it with how inflation is rising and pay isn't. Nobody I know owns a house. They all rent shitty apartments and have no savings because all of their money goes straight to paying off all the things they don't own. Society shackles them in debt slavery. There is no opportunity anymore. I can hardly blame kids for wanting to be retarded influencer types who shake their asses for elderly pedophiles online, it's just about the only way to rise out of this bullshit. Young people don't get considered for jobs, or raises, or promotions. The boomers pulled up all the ladders and stubbornly cling to them all the way to the nursing home.

Personally I'm fine working 40 hours a week. It gives me something to do I guess and I've more or less given up, but nobody can find fulfillment anymore. And when this system beats you into the ground, all they do is put you on meds and tell you to get back to work. You wanna know why zoomers are all crazy pill popping autistic schizos? It's because boomers gave the diagnosis and wrote the damn prescription. But that's just my perspective on the matter and I'm sure plenty of people will think I'm just whining. Maybe they're right. I'm just tired of it all. Anyway, what do you think? Shorter hours, higher pay, etc., discuss em here and if you think Zoomers are just babies or if things really should change.

 

[Drkinferno72]

If you can finish your work early, why do you need to spend the full eight hours at a cubicle?

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

If you can finish your work early, why do you need to spend the full eight hours at a cubicle?

At my job, if I finish all my work early I'm expected to start working on other people's work. I was denied a raise this year because when finished with my work I'd instead stop working and wait for more to come in. After that I just stopped finishing my work early and haven't heard a complaint since.

 

[The Last Stand]

If you can finish your work early, why do you need to spend the full eight hours at a cubicle?

So you could get your full eight hour paycheck.

Shorter hours, higher pay, etc., discuss em here and if you think Zoomers are just babies or if things really should change.

To me, it's more of a mix of adjusting pay WITH inflation and knowing your potential worth as a person TO make the job and pay worth it. Some companies refuse to while piling more work on you.

 

[Drkinferno72]

At my job, if I finish all my work early I'm expected to start working on other people's work. I was denied a raise this year because when finished with my work I'd instead stop working and wait for more to come in. After that I just stopped finishing my work early and haven't heard a complaint since.

That's why you pace yourself if they won't let you go early

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

So you could get your full eight hour paycheck.

Most people in those jobs are salaried, though. It makes no difference if you're there for 1 hour or 11 hours as long as the assigned work gets done on time. If it's a constant situation that's a sign you're overstaffed but having some flexibility on this is good for productivity and training and incentivizes efficiency.

It's absurd that with all of these advances in technology and productivity that people are working as much or more than they were 75-100 years ago.

 

[The Blue Morpho]

At my job, if I finish all my work early I'm expected to start working on other people's work. I was denied a raise this year because when finished with my work I'd instead stop working and wait for more to come in. After that I just stopped finishing my work early and haven't heard a complaint since.

That was wise. When I was a cubicle drone I was similarly breaking records for productivity and never failing an audit. All that got me was higher expectations for my output and getting passed over by people who were less productive but more well-liked for promotion. Got the fuck out of there and started learning to code.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

The 40 hour work week was invented by Henry Ford to optimize car assembly lines. Now maybe 40 hours is the correct schedule for that, I really don't know. But what about literally everythng else? Is 40 hours a week right for an electrician? A construction worker? A programmer? A nurse? We have no idea. Nobody has bothered to check, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. Even if you're a ruthless capitalist who would sell your employee's organs for a nickel, you should want a schedule that's optimal for employee productivity. Nobody is even trying that. They're just blinding applying 40 hours across the board and wondering why everything sucks.

40 hours is, if not obsolete, at the very least a number that needs to be revisited.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

The 40 hour work week was invented by Henry Ford to optimize car assembly lines.

And because of his weird obsession with workers' personal lives. 5 days a week maximized the amount of time they were at the factory.

There's no justifiable reason why 4-10's isn't a standard option. It's not like anybody does shit on Fridays anyways.

 

[CoolFool]

I don't care if it makes me sound whiny or entitled, 40 hours a week is bullshit for a vast majority of people. That doesn't leave you much time to do shit. It sucks, you have errands to run, relationships to maintain, and need a day to recover/rest from a long week, but you only get 2 days to do that before starting the week over.

Like others said, most people can get their shit done sooner in most fields. I can get all of my stuff done in a few hours, yet I have to either pretend to work or slow my pace down to meet my 8 hour requirement. I'm literally being paid to sit around being bored.

Furthermore I think it's kind of scary that in certain fields people are working insane hours, like nurses and doctors. I remember going to the ER and talking to a nurse there, she said she had been pulling double shifts and was exhausted. It brings me no comfort or confidence knowing the people that are supposed to be making sure you don't die are about to pass out and are more prone to making errors due to lack of sleep. I get there is a staff shortage but part of reason for that is nurses don't like working long shifts.

We were told technology would make us work less, but I have seen zero evidence of this.

 

[Merton J. Dingle]

It probably won't change anytime soon, so the best solution is to just fuck off at work as much as you can.

 

[The Blue Morpho]

The 40 hour work week was invented by Henry Ford to optimize car assembly lines.

Fordism, Taylorism,scientific management and their consequences have been a disaster for the working man.

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

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Fordism, Taylorism,scientific management and their consequences have been a disaster for the working man.

Uhm, yikes sweaty. Scientific management has the word science in it. Do you want your management to be unscientific? Don't you trust the heckin' science?

Ths is what middle management actually believes because upper management told them to.

 

[Kel1 shi1]

It probably won't change anytime soon, so the best solution is to just fuck off at work as much as you can.

Most of the office based jobs I've had in over 20 years have never had 40 hours of actual "Work" to do. Most of the time I'm just looking busy while shitposting on forums. Keep your head down and collect that paycheck. Once you've got 2 years experience there, job hop to a similar role for a pay rise. Don't bother trying to climb the ladder internally as the roles will be given to friends or outside hires.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

The 40 hour work week was invented by Henry Ford to optimize car assembly lines. Now maybe 40 hours is the correct schedule for that, I really don't know. But what about literally everythng else? Is 40 hours a week right for an electrician? A construction worker? A programmer? A nurse? We have no idea. Nobody has bothered to check, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. Even if you're a ruthless capitalist who would sell your employee's organs for a nickel, you should want a schedule that's optimal for employee productivity. Nobody is even trying that. They're just blinding applying 40 hours across the board and wondering why everything sucks.

40 hours is, if not obsolete, at the very least a number that needs to be revisited.

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.

 

[Dyn]

I think we should kill and eat Elon Musk and then all work 10 hour weeks standard.

 

[The Blue Morpho]

Uhm, yikes sweaty. Scientific management has the word science in it. Do you want your management to be unscientific? Don't you trust the heckin' science?

Ths is what middle management actually believes because upper management told them to.

If shitlibs only knew the kind of man Taylor was. Wanted to reduce every task to its most basic, braindead motions and optimize them so that even a halfwit could maximize their productivity as they dig ditches and screw widgets 8+ hours a day. But its not like shitlibs have principles or care for the working stiff.

Middle management are the biggest cucks in business. You have no union, you have no comradery with your fellow workers, you take the brunt of the ire from above and below and all so you can pull in an extra 10 or 20 grand yearly on salary while putting in way more hours worked. Total Middle-Manager Death

 

[Mr. Manchester]

I've had a discussion about this with a friend of mine a while ago, stemmed from the age old concern of technology stealing everyone's jobs. The idea he floated was that maybe it was time to start looking at a 32 hour work week. It raises obvious concerns and sounds good on paper I guess. Needless to say I don't think it'd work without some kind of significant and destructive overhaul of the economy. Do you just change the OT threshold to 32 hours? If so won't McDonalds just hire more people and cut hours to 32 a week? The counterpoint was that they did it before when reducing the work week to 40 hours. I'm sure there were other points raised but the conversation and we both realized that neither of us actually had an answer, so we started talking about guns or something.

40 hours a week isn't bad, it's just something you get used to. For a while I was at a job where I was working 70s, which isn't great but it's something you get used to as well. If offered the same pay to take a free day off every week I wouldn't complain and could probably get as much done though.

I think the biggest change I've seen in a lot of jobs sprang from Covid, which got a good portion of the population working from home. If it was between going back in the for 4 days or working from home for 5 I'd take work from home. Saves me money on transit, I can listen to my offensive podcasts and I can take 10 minutes to run to the store or take a work shower. For a while the company was really trying to get people back into the office, they made 1 day a week mandatory which lasted about a month. This is despite getting beer on tap for weekly happy hours. Now there's just this unspoken agreement everyone seems to have that we all show up at the same time once or twice a quarter when some important client shows up and doesn't want to see an empty office.

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

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

Uhm, yikes sweaty. Scientific management has the word science in it. Do you want your management to be unscientific? Don't you trust the heckin' science?

Ths is what middle management actually believes because upper management told them to.

They also bought into those shitty Japanese managerial techniques back when they were supposedly going to take over the world.

Definitely worth emulating a country that has had a stagnant economy for a generation while people literally work themselves to death.

 

[User names must be unique]

40 hour work week can be fine but when you have an hour+ commute back and forth it's soul crushing, especially in winter when you see the sun for only a couple minutes a day during lunch break.

Certain jobs it makes people less productive anyway and having less people on staff can mean horror days if multiple people are sick or on holiday.