If not for labor unions we would still be working 12+ hour days. The 8 hour workday and the weekend is all thanks to the courageous efforts of labor advocates.
Yep, 16 hour workdays were not uncommon historically (there’s a reason non-US countries remember May Day).
If you search up 16 hour workdays now, you’ll depressingly find people framing it in a positive light. Capitalism is trying to make workaholism the norm and required to survive.
When I lived in the UK I always found it interesting how people tought “working hard” was a good thing, especially as most of my professional experience until then had been in The Netherlands, were the objective is to work SMART.
Working hard as an objective is almost literally the opposite of being efficient: it’s wanting to work more rather that work less and produce the same or work the same and produce more.
Then again it’s not surprsing that a society were the Owner class is almost 100% composed of people who were born in wealth would glorify the most shortsighted, short-termist and incompetent way of looking like employees are producing more.
Unsurprisingly the productivity per capita figures of the UK are way worse than those for The Netherlands.
Time not spent generating revenue for yourself and/or someone else is unacceptable.
And now kids in Arkansas get to experience the grind.
We have so much to be thankfull for to those that came before us. Standing on the shoulders of giants, how easily we forget.
The goverment started recognizing some of these rights after they were won by unions. Then they regulated unions to death, since we’ve got these nice laws now. Then they started rolling back the legal protections.
And people still have the nerve to say the government is protecting workers rights.
Doesn’t stop certain big tech companies from building giant campuses with cafeterias and housing so that employees can literally live, eat, and sleep at work.
Imagine if they let us work from home instead. I already live, eat, and sleep at work, and it doesn’t cost my company a dime! In fact I pay for all of it!
What if we all just didn’t go in? They gonna fire everyone?
And they can sell the office too (good luck lmao), we are doing the company a service 😌
What if we all just didn’t go in? They gonna fire everyone?
That is called a strike and why they work
This is what unions are for!
The US, at least, is far too individualistic to effectively do something like this without the people involved being far from unified, and without there immediately being scabs who are more than willing to take their place.
These people have been so indoctrinated into believing that unions, the very thing that would allow them to effectively do what you suggested, are bad. There is no sense of solidarity in this country.
Damn. Thought you were advocating for reformism or some other non-syndicalist approach until I noticed the icon. Do you have a favored approach for building that solidarity?
Edit: it’s unfair for me to ask this question. A better way of posing it would have been for me to propose a few and to discuss / develop them.
So, I’d say, I guess organizing outside of the workplace through creating non-hierarchical institutions that meet people’s needs, ie, dual power, is essentially what I’ve arrived at.
Honestly, I don’t know how we fix it.
I’m not sure I would identify myself as a socialist or syndicalist. That said, my politics have been continuously pushed to the left throughout the past 20 years, so you’re probably not too far off.
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No, company dont want you to work from home because you can have multiple full time job.
They want all of your mental attention on one job only.
and only one full time job.
And this is why you support your labour unions.
Dudes wearing Oakley’s and Fox Racing hats would be saying they’re better than you because you don’t work 22 hour days.
I don’t understand that culture. You get looked down upon if you say something and when I said we need at least 100k yearly in America, they laugh as it too much for them. We need more confidence as workers to demand more and unions.
Yeah, and these are the same dipshits that think there shouldn’t be a min. wage.
It’s almost as if decades of identity politics fed to the uneducated masses is super effective.
I’ve literally had a relative say shit like “only construction workers need unions” and other nonsense because he just does not understand that for society to function for more than 100 years, you need to be able to tell your boss to fuckoff or do fuckall and get paid for it. I think people assume that wage earners are the latter but like security cams and bullshit metrics and shit have eroded any semblance of humanity from modern workplaces.
All of this stems from a few areas that keep labor prices down artificially: Agricultural worker exemptions, prisoner exemptions and corporate personhood. You might be like “why the last one” but its the one that says you are functionally equivalent to a corporate charter in the eyes of the government.
The last one was specifically to allow corporations to (effectively) vote. We’ve been living with the political results of that since; it’s one reason why the rest of the world laughs when anyone calls Bernie Sanders a leftist extremist.
I hate that everything that is not the opinion of the Republicans is just labelt left and therefore bad. Your politics is just a very weird shit show of two old people screaming at each other that the other one stinks.
Minimum wage might not be needed if we instead used universal basic income. Low paying jobs wouldn’t be automatically exploitative since they would still have a minimum income. Perhaps some of those low paying jobs may even bd desireable for certain people over the current minimum wage jobs (e.g. lower or very infrequent hours).
Yeah but then the working class might threaten the rich by being able to live a basic life!
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This doesn’t really make sense. Try it the other way: “It’s a shame we don’t sleep 23 hours a day, then we’d only have to work for a few minutes.”
If we slept 23 hours a day I don’t think we would have developed to the level of technology that we’re now at.
We simply wouldn’t have had enough time awake yet to achieve anything very much.
Eventually an asteroid would hit or Yellowstone would erupt and we would have probably only got to the medieval age, and then we go extinct.
https://www.powernapcomic.com/ deals with a fictional world where a drug makes this corporate dystopia possible but a small percentage of people cannot take the drug making them effectively disabled from a normal worker perspective.
This is great, thanks for sharing it
Wow this is great thanks for the link! Just spent the last hour reading and it flew by
Haha, as if there was not a push for people to work more around the clock than ever.
Omg I actually had this same thought the other day and wrote it down.
I just thought about how cool it would be to not need to sleep. You could have a whole 8-or-so hours to do whatever you want. But then I realized that if we didn’t need to sleep we would likely be required to work longer hours or be otherwise productive during those 8-or-so hours. It’s crazy how arbitrary productivity really is.
our cultures
*Capitalism
Capitalism can also work with government mandate which is not corrupt. If government rule for a 3 days work week and 5 hours a day then it should work
Very rich man proceed to buy a lot of medias, make them share propaganda to vote for the politician that will make you work more.
Every time the working class gains wins under capitalism they are short term at best. The new deal in the US is a great example. As long as capital controls the levers of power, it will always find ways to claw back the gains of the working class for for the name of profit.
Ever heard of 9-9-6?
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9-9, 6 days a week
That sounds like hell
Sounds like construction.
thats pretty common in Japan right?
China, not that Japan’s work culture is much better though
Investment bankers would like a word (but they probably don’t have time).
Congratulations on having the world’s most depressing shower thought.
Healthcare workers and mental health workers already are doing 12 and 16 hour days.
Follow-up Shower thought: Sentient Robots will not require rest or sleep, and thus, will automatically suffer through this.
Why would you specifically use the sentient robots for your grunt work and why would an artificial intelligence have problems with the same things humans do? Especially if an AI was made for the specific purpose of doing work. The reason humans don’t like doing work is because evolution naturally selected for us to be good at things like
-hunting gazelles
-gathering berries
-making finger paintings on cave walls
-sitting around a campfire making ape noises
and not working at a corporation. For an AI, it’d presumably be the opposite, meaning that AIs would be about as content with their lives as humans are in their natural environment.
Actually. If since we have evolved since we were doing all those things we have evolved more towards what we have now. Evolution doesn’t just stop
Ackshyually, we’ve had millions of years to get used to fire, about 200,000 to get used to being sentient, 20,000 to get used to agriculture, about 150 to get used to industrial society, and about 30 to get used to computers. We have just barely figured out how to cope with knowledge of our own deaths by making up supernatural stuff about it and we have not gotten used to any of that other stuff at all.
Achshyualllly, organisms evolve on a much greater speed than you are giving them credit for some species being drastically different 1-5 generations after changing environment. You can really see it in domestic dogs and cats.
Achsjulllyally, dogs and cats changed quickly on account of selective breeding. Natural selection, especially in cases where flaws in biology won’t immediately lead to someone losing reproductive fitness, operates on much longer timespans.
Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it’s why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.
All I’m saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.
Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it’s why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.
This is not really what I’m talking about, making more people so you can make them work on the fields is kinda different from breeding dogs with inhumanely short snouts for aesthetic purposes, or making gargantuan dogs capable of 1v1ing a tiger so they’ll protect your livestock
All I’m saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.
Culturally, yes, physically, a little bit, psychologically, no. Our minds are still optimized for the savannah, and not the office, factory, or farm. Cultural adaptations, in the form of religion and etiquette, which we patch in after birth are what fill the gaps and make us actually capable of thriving in such a foreign environment to what our biology is made for.
that happens already sometimes lol
