Over at Vox, Sean Illing talks to Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen, who have written a new book about work. It's focused, like many others, on the American habit of working too much and failing to set work-life boundaries. It's a good interview, but here's some context before you dive in:
Here in the online world we tend to fixate on people who are college grads and have certain high-value jobs: Silicon Valley programmers, Wall Street analysts, journalists, and so forth. But those account for a fairly small share of all jobs out there. If you take a look at the overall average, full-time American workers tend to spend just a few minutes more than eight hours a day on work. On a weekly basis, it comes to about 43-44 hours per week.
This doesn't suggest that we are crushed by long hours in the office here in the US. In fact, our problem is not so much that we work too many regular hours, it's that we're missing widespread benefits like maternity leave, reliable childcare, decent amounts of vacation, plenty of holidays, and other things that workers in Europe, for example, take for granted. Those are the things to focus on, not the myth that lots of us toil away in the office until midnight.
A lot of the service industry jobs do not have regular hours. And people will need two jobs to make ends meet if companies want to keep most people part time to avoid having to pay for benefits, etc.
^^This. The only full-time, hourly-paid jobs with benefits I'm aware of these days are for first responders (fire, police, etc.) or maybe some union factory jobs like in the auto industry. In the service industry? Hah! It's all part-time, non-benefited.
Huh? Most office and clerical jobs for big companies are hourly full-time with benefits. A lot of people in those jobs are female, which may reduce their visibility.
People who work on hourly wages do not, as a general rule, work much overtime. If anything, they work less than 40 hours, because that avoids paying them benefits.
This book was not written for them. It isn't about them. I'm sure the authors know that. Which kind of makes your argument irrelevant.
What happens is that in jobs where productivity is hard to measure, AND it is an "exempt" (non-hourly wages) position, workers are being squeezed into many more hours. This isn't just Silicon Valley, though it is a great example of it.
A problem doesn't have to be a universal problem to be a problem, does it?
Over the course of the industrial revolution work hours decreased, making life a lot better for most people. Reducing hours was a major objective of the labor movement, and it was accomplished by legislation as well as union action. But the reduction of hours basically came to a halt in 1940 as the 40-hour week became standard by Act of Congress. Most people do not enjoy work and would work less if they got the same money. Also many people, mostly women, would prefer to stay home and take care of their families, including older people as well as younger. In fact as Kevin says, total yearly work hours in most European countries are considerably less. Why isn't reducing work hours a major liberal objective in this country? The free market won't do this - it will have to be legislated.
By the way, shorter work hours is one thing that automation should do, whether it's called "robots" or something else. The other thing that automation has done is increase production, resulting in more stuff for everyone. The robots-are-coming people, which include Kevin, don't seem to be aware of the things that automation has actually done for hundreds of years. That is we have gotten more stuff and shorter hours (until 1940) instead of mass unemployment. If we don't get these things as more robots are used, it is a political failing.
Emphatically agree! We should have continued shortening the work week and work year, especially as the services sector continues to expand. (We still manufacture more goods than ever before, but as you say, automation means that we don’t need as many workers to produce them). The US is really good at producing leisure-time services - movies, TV, streaming, games, amusement parks and more. Relative to other industries, these tend to have less impact on the environment; mostly consuming electrons. We could continue to grow the economy without consuming inordinate quantities of natural resources.
I suspect this chart doesn't take account of the literal 24x7 nature of too many jobs, caused by the ubiquitous cell phone and various Internet communication strategies. Even when you're "home", you're at the boss's beck and call.
This.
Also, scheduling uncertainty won't show up in any measured stats. Hard to plan and live life if you might work 4 hours or 8, or 10 during an AM or PM shift all to be determined later. But it only shows up as 4 hours of work.
As others have pointed out, hourly workers (modern blue collar) don't get to 40 hours a week because that means overtime and possibly benefits.
So for the exempt, salaried positions that this would be more applicable to: many of those don't require 8-hour days to begin with. The tyranny of the 40-hour work week is, well, tyrannical.
I'm kind of tired of explaining it/preaching about it at this point but Ed Zitron does a pretty good job pounding this drum in his free newsletter. E.g., https://ez.substack.com/p/the-four-day-workweek-perception. Among other articles/thinkers out there...
"It’s a study concerned with, and in support of, reducing the hours of workers in total, and still getting the same productivity out as a result. The key differentiator here is that this means that the extra hours people were working were inefficient, rather than the overall structure of a four or five-hour workweek. It specifically included a chart that showed how more hours actually equals less productivity."
Many white collar jobs, particular those that can be done remotely or are based mostly around discrete administrative or regulatory tasks (like mine), can be done in far fewer than 40 hours per week. It's part of why the "return to the office" narrative being pushed by executives and managers, who are mostly just trying to justify their little office of fiefdoms that so validate them, is so annoying.
In Bernie's Fruitopia, the workweek would be 30 hours.