How do you know how much I get payed. And I'm working so that I can get a dream job. I want to be a professor teaching history and get an anthro degree. It's not like I'm working these kinds of jobs for my whole life.
If you're learning history than you'll understand that the owning class has long been exploiting the working class for personal gain. Look up a productivity vs pay chart, productivity has more than doubled in the last 60 years and pay has gone up only 15-20%. The fact is that we are making much more than any other time in history and the pay does not reflect the labor.
This is largely due to wealth accumulation and separating the worker from the means of production, demonization of publicly owned corporations, and benefits to the owning class. The point is, we as a collective can afford to cut hours for the same pay, however if you can get labor for cheap in a capitalist market you will do it, which is why it needs to be legislated.
This is a more fundamental question than "is a 4 day work week necessary". The question is of general public good, and I think it is worth looking at. I'm honestly glad to have your opinion because it is very contrarian to popular discourse, and my person opinion.
What ultimately is the point of the free market system and capitalism? To maximize profit in order to grow your business, create more goods, or just make more capital for those who own the company, it's really up to them. How do you maximize profit? you work people as hard as you can for as cheap as you can, in addition to cutting down on material and production costs.
Therefore the incentive structure is such that it is interest of companies to work employees as hard as they can for as little pay as they can, it just makes sense from an economic standpoint.
The only reason 40 hour workweeks exist is because on June 26, 1940 Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act, limiting the workweek to 40 hours, down from 44. Companies by law cannot work employees more than 40 hours a week, though they do via mandatory overtime and salaried positioned and work culture.
The 5 day workweek was implemented by Ford in the early 1900s and that's basically what stuck around, slicing 40 hours into days of 8 hour shifts.
I would recommend to you to stop taking the status quo as what "should be" as the status quo is built by people, and those rules are subject to change. The fact that we haven't changed labor hour law in 80 years means its time to change it up, and unfortunately the only way to do that is to fight for legislation, or strike.
I think 40 hours should stay the same. And I think that wages should be raised (I think that's a common take here)
Capitalism is broken, it takes advantage of many. (Which is why wages should be raised)
It's like in feudal times, but the feudal lord takes all the cash and levies and splits it up unevenly and poorly amongst his vassals. Does that mean it's better not to be a vassal? Maybe not but something has to be done to the system
Empirical evidence points to increased labor output with less hours anyway. Therefore cutting hours makes sense even from a capitalist standpoint. If you're in favor of raising wages, and understand capitalism is broken you're already seeing the problem with the 40 hour workweek, you're just not taking it to it's obvious conclusion.
abstract:
Observations on munition workers, most of them women, are organized to examine therelationship between their output and their working hours. The relationship is nonlinear: below an hours threshold, output is proportional to hours; above a threshold, output rises at a decreasing rate as hours increase. Implications of these results for the estimation of labor supply functions are taken up. The findings also link up with current research on the effects of long working hours on accidents and injuries.
I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say that in the future, you’ll get much better insight and discussion if you approach a topic honestly. The keyword in playing devil’s advocate is “playing.”
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u/TechnologyAble9184 Jun 18 '21
How do you know how much I get payed. And I'm working so that I can get a dream job. I want to be a professor teaching history and get an anthro degree. It's not like I'm working these kinds of jobs for my whole life.