
It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? - dmitriy_ko
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/why-are-we-working-so-hard
======
pg
I've often wondered about this. As some commenters have pointed out, we don't
work quite as hard as people used to have to. But we still work a lot. I
suspect the short answer is healthcare costs. I was an expert in the earn-
little-spend-little lifestyle for a while, but I knew it only worked because I
was a healthy 25 year old with no one I had to take care of.

~~~
simonbarker87
That might be the case for the US but in the UK and most other developed
countries that isn't a factor and we still work a lot.

I think the main factor is that we both do more (waste time and push
paper/design etc) than in the past thanks to computers. Also, many jobs are
simply a function of population size, more people = more emails to send, calls
to take etc.

~~~
glesica
I've thought for some time now that corporate inflexibility was part of the
cause. More of us work for large, bureaucratic companies than in the past.
These sorts of companies often won't employ someone on a flexible or part-time
schedule because it would be too complicated to manage. It's actually easier
and cheaper to let you site at your desk and waste time for 10-20 hours a week
than it would be to figure out and manage an alternative. Do you think this
rings true in the UK? It certainly does (in my experience and observation) in
the US, though I think in the US healthcare is at least as important a factor.

~~~
simonbarker87
Part time and "work when needed" contracts for the 20 - 30 year old bracket is
growing in the UK and has been cited as one of the ways the unemployment
figure has fallen. It is concerning some workers groups according to some of
the papers and the BBC.

I think if you want part time work in the UK it is easy enough to come by
(engineers at many companies I know can go part time until management level if
they wish) but there is a growing trend of only part time positions becoming
available in some sectors and you either have to like it or lump it sadly.

~~~
makomk
Yeah, see for example [http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/economics-
blog/2013/aug/0...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/economics-
blog/2013/aug/04/zero-hours-contract-workers-reserve-army-labour)

~~~
simonbarker87
Thanks for finding that - I'd forgotten they were called zero hour contracts

------
rndmize
When a machine replaces the work of a man, the value that work generates goes
to the owner of the machine instead. I don't see why this would lead to less
work for anyone, as the man the machine replaced still has to work to make
money - until you have a universal income, or a high minimum wage, increasing
automation does nothing to create less toil for the average worker.

In fact, you could argue that it's the opposite - by devaluing/automating the
work that man did, you make it harder for him to make money, as whatever
expertise he might have had is now worth less, leaving him to continue doing
the same work for less money (as long as that might be possible) or moving to
a new field and likely starting from the bottom.

~~~
legolandbridge
When a machine replaces the work of a man, that man (who had the ingenuity to
create a machine, say a fishnet, and take a risk) can make his products to you
a lot cheaper than it otherwise would be if he had to hire tons of laborers.
That is where you benefit. When the price of a car becomes reachable all of a
sudden, or a tv, or plumbing, or common items like socks are $5 and not $100.
The standard of living should rise through automation and increase
productivity. Instead everyone is fighting for higher wages, higher
protection, weaker currencies... and ever-rising prices across the board.

~~~
aspensmonster
And what happens when enough work becomes mechanized or automated and enough
people are out of jobs that it doesn't matter how low the resulting price of
the product is? I call this the Wal-Mart effect. The idea is that you don't
have to pay higher wages, or provide better benefits, or otherwise ensure that
the increases in productivity track with increasing real wages. Because
everyone can just shop at Wal-Mart!

Ever-decreasing prices are not a panacea.

------
Aqueous
It is leading to less work. Why do you think we still haven't recovered full
employment from the 2008 financial crisis?

Fewer people are working more hours. Fewer and fewer and fewer people will
continue to work more and more hours. As the machines pick up the slack full
employment will begin to seem almost laughable.

The problem is, that in order for the wealth to accrue to everyone - to allow
everyone to survive with fewer total available jobs - we need to be
redistributing the wealth that the machines create. Or else we're going to
have a future with third world inequality in first world nations.

------
aspensmonster
>We have the machines to make that a reality today – but none of the will.

Correction: "we" don't have the machines. Society on the whole does not
collectively own the means of production, and the workers who utilize the
machines are not compensated for the entirety of the value they produce.
Productivity has steadily risen thanks to mechanization, and real wages did at
one point tend to track more or less equally with that rise, even if the wages
did not entail the entirety of the value produced. That is until the late 70s.
I think the more important question is: given how well we've been doing for
the past ~35 years, why is our compensation still stuck in the 70s?

------
stefantalpalaru
I blame it on the culture. It's considered unethical to survive without
working so now we need to work in order to survive. The constant push for more
jobs is the biggest enemy of automation. Until we get something like a no-
strings-attached minimum income we won't make the transition.

------
Zoepfli
The tools that allow me to be more efficient are not only available to me, but
to everybody including my competitors. This results in an efficiency jump of
the whole industry.

Workers don't benefit that much, because my competitors suddenly have a lot of
free time to sell, which drives down prices. Me and my competitors end up
working more, until our previous work/life balance and wage level is restored.

End result: Workers are more efficient, but work the same amount, and earn the
same amount. Buyers benefit because they get more for less money.

~~~
aidenn0
Except workers are also buyers; why can't the workers take advantage of
reduced prices to work fewer hours?

------
claudius
We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at
least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many
children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who
put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of
which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago.

Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of
the sweat and pain of our forefathers? :\

~~~
Torkild
I average 100 hours per week. I think you sound sickly sheltered.

~~~
Noughmad
I don't know where you live, but I'll assume US. In other countries, the wages
are different (usually lower), but the salary/cost of living ratio tends to be
similar.

The minimum wage over there is $7.25. Are you really telling me that you need
$3K per month to survive?

~~~
croisillon
Norway apparently

~~~
icebraining
Probably not, considering Torkild got a cellphone under an US federal benefit
program.

------
azakai
> Nonetheless, the workers' movement was once dedicated to the eventual
> abolition of all menial, tedious, grinding work. We have the machines to
> make that a reality today – but none of the will.

No, we do not have such machines. While we have made big strides in getting
machines to do menial labor, the fact is that

1\. There are huge amounts of menial labor that we simply cannot make
sophisticated-enough machines to do. Humans are still necessary for many
menial jobs. (If they weren't, they would have been replaced long ago with
cheaper machines.) While we can land robots on mars, we still do not have the
technology to, for example, clean our entire house using robotic labor.
Achieving that would require solving some very hard problems in robotics, but
humans can just do those types of work with hardly any training.

2\. The amount of labor required keeps increasing, as the standard of living
goes up. People expect more and more. We do everything we can with machine
labor, but then we can get humans to do work machines cannot that further
improves our quality of living, so we do that. For that reason it seems
unlikely that human labor will vanish until robots can literally do everything
humans can, which we are nowhere close to.

------
stdbrouw
One amusing thing about corporations is that they tend to keep hiring people
as long as there is at least some marginal benefit (profits minus costs for
that employee higher than zero) to it. Most companies I can think of could
probably operate quite well at half their current head count, or with 20 or 30
hour work weeks for their existing work force. It would work. They would still
make money. It just wouldn't be financially optimal.

------
Gustomaximus
It's because of where most people assign value - consumer goods ownership.
People are always going into debt for unneeded goods like that giant TV or
upgraded car. These things make them feel good because society says you're a
success if you have them. Very few people can look past this and get that $3k
car by choice when they can afford much more. And until society puts greater
social value on things like time with family this won't change and people will
seek the dollar for as many hours as they reasonably can. And surely not fight
for the opposite.

What I find sad is that almost every politician would say they are 'family
orientated' but I never see any fighting to make sure people can spend more
time with their family - the most important thing IMO. In my life I have only
seen one country reduce official working hours. This was France about 10-ish
years ago. This to me is the sign of an advancing society far above the TV
screen size I own.

~~~
StandardFuture
I completely agree with you. However, let's not forget the inevitability of
game theory: people will always take advantage of the system for their good.
France made their rules and it really did not solve the problems they were
trying to solve e.g. unemployment. And a jobless family may end up worse off
(family-wise) than a family whose parents work 5-10 more hours a week.

~~~
Gustomaximus
With the French example they said it didn't improve employment as they just
increase output. So in a way it was a win as no-one lost and workers gained
time. Personally I have seen this result in myself when I go from extended
long hours back to a more normal routine, I'm just more efficient. I've seen
studies saying the most efficient work hours are about 6 hours a day (I think
I found on HN).

I'm not sure how you get to the jobless family being worse off... what is the
logic there?

------
rdouble
In this particular story the answers are easy.

The work of a steveadore, one of the examples given, has been vastly automated
and unionized. The work is much physically easier than before: operating a
crane vs. manually moving cargo. Dockworker's unions have negotiated strong
agreements related to overtime pay which guarantee time and a half. There are
a far smaller number of employees needed, and those employees want to pack in
as many hours as they legally can, to reap the overtime benefits. Automation
of an industry can actually lead to longer hours for the fewer employees still
working in the industry.

Since there are far fewer well paying positions like being a longshoreman,
people who may have once gotten a job on the docks have to compete with
everyone else for service jobs. The service jobs don't pay enough, so many
need 2 or even 3 jobs to keep their families afloat. The need for multiple
jobs explains why this class of people is working longer.

------
stephenbez
I'd say sexual selection is a cause. There is pretty much a fixed pool of
potential mates. Women highly value mates who are good providers. Some of my
female friends say they wouldn't date a guy who made less than them.

Thus if you are a guy and are considering cutting back on your work, you will
become significantly less attractive to many females.

~~~
dmitriy_ko
What about women who work 60 hours a week?

~~~
stephenbez
I don't have a great answer, but maybe:

Due to the reasons listed above men work long hours. Women, which in many
professions are the minority, must then match those hours in order to not look
bad.

------
norswap
If you find the idea we should work less interesing, or in the contrary,
revolting, you should read "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell:

[http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

It's a piece written in 1932, but that finds a surprising echo in these modern
times.

------
RivieraKid
\- Income inequality is higher than before. The rich are getting richer much
faster than others.

\- I don't know if people are working less on average, but I suppose so. I
think I could live quite comfortable life if I worked just two or three days a
week as a freelance developer.

------
legolandbridge
We have to support a ravenous State that gives little in return but barriers
to industry and inflation (in education and healthcare most visibly). The
point is that everything should be cheaper than it is. Yet we're told
deflation is such a great evil. We work but we're not productive. All these
visions of the leisurely future in the article were during in the boom of
capitalism, when the State really was small and unobtrusive, and the standard
of living absolutely surged. It's a pity that the US has not embraced these
core values in time of recession but have gone the opposite way in directing
the economy. Creating jobs is not the goal. You could hire one guy to dig a
hole and one to fill it and you wouldn't be any better for it. All slaves had
jobs. The goal is to create efficiency, productivity, and encourage
entrepreneurship and profit, for they are incentives to best serve customers.
You could name too many ways that government make everyday product more
expensive to 'protect' and cater to smaller segments of society.

------
wavefunction
Maybe Karl had some valid criticisms, just sayin'...

~~~
e12e
Indeed. When a small elite control the means of production, high efficiency
(less need for waged labour), means more will starve -- or have to live off
welfare.

That is, unless we do something to change the system.

------
StandardFuture
Price of automation > Price of Chinese/Indian Labor Wages ... I think the
reason we don't have things automated is because of how little companies like
Walmart can get away with paying its employees.

A lot of people will look at automation as taking away jobs and thus a sort of
'immoral' pursuit. But I am not sure the average person these days has that
much of a 'job' to begin with. :/ (And I mean in both terms of pay AND
responsibility)

Is the morality of how humans should be treated (home, food, healthcare, etc.)
distinct from how job-dense an economy is?

~~~
wavefunction
How can we bring "foreign" labor into line with domestic labor? Barring
FWD.US's attempts to maintain the status quo by labor dumping?

------
general_failure
Speaking about computer science - As technology progresses so fast, it takes a
lot of time to master them. By the time you master something, another
technology comes along obsoleting the old one. So, this is really a long long
job race - you have to keep moving learning new stuff. Otherwise, you will be
branded into a specific technology (like 'ios developer', 'php coder') and
there's no way getting out of it.

------
mark-r
The question is, to whom do the benefits of automation accrue? The utopians
assumed it would be distributed equally, but we all know how it really turned
out - the rich get richer.

There are some areas of the economy where work hours have been reduced, as a
side effect of companies restricting the work week to avoid paying full-time
benefits such as healthcare.

------
mmphosis
I think we need to think about work as energy.

At the moment, we don't take responsibility for underpaid workers and we don't
own the many machines that actually do a lot of work that we depend on. And
also, we don't own the means of energy collection and generation. And, we
don't account for non-renewable and detrimental energy use.

------
subsystem
Spending money is giving away time. Look at what you spend money on and you
will know why you work so much.

