

The 40-Hour Work Week Is a Thing of the Past - pmcpinto
http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/05/05/the-40-hour-work-week-is-a-thing-of-the-past/

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Frondo
From the article, I saw this line: "That finding suggests corporate leaders
need to think more about employees’ well-being, Ms. Twaronite said."

I can think of one way to force them to be more responsive to their workers'
well-being: a union.

This is an organizational method that's had a lot of success in the past, and
works well in other countries. It's a way for workers to band together and
demand changes to the business that benefits them, and can be structured
however the workers decide it.

It doesn't have to be a "your pay is tied to seniority and it's impossible to
fire louts" kind of thing; everyone involved gets a chance to have their say
in how it works. (though, of course, not everyone uses it, just like how not
everyone votes when they have the chance to.)

I only bring this up because Ms. Twaronite seems to have a lot of faith in
corporate leaders to be good to their workers. It's those corporate leaders
who put their workers in this "your hours are going up, your salary stays the
same" hard spot in the first place.

What would make them change their minds now?

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sktrdie
Sometimes I think about how even the number 40 is totally arbitrary. If we
made the norm 30, would things be that different? It's such a sad thought that
~half (if not more) of the time we are alive, we spend at work, mostly doing
something we don't like. Then I look at this from a cosmic prospective, where
we live in this tiny little planet inside a huge universe we barely know
anything about, and yet we were able to create a system of living with one
another that requires us to do something we don't want to most of the time!

~~~
Frondo
Oh it's heartbreaking to think about. This, now, in the 2010s, is the world
we've allowed to happen (or been complicit in building).

I saw this in an article someone sent me recently: ".. a 1965 Senate
subcommittee predicted we would be working 14 hours a week by the year 2000,
with at least seven weeks of vacation time."

Well, that didn't happen, though our businesses are far more productive than
they've ever been in history.

Can anyone offer a defense of the continued 40-hour work week, the lack of
paid vacation (or people's general unwillingness to use it?), and the way all
those productivity gains have all benefited a very, very tiny amount of
people?

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themoonbus
Not a defense, but I feel part of it is due to the value we place in our
society in on being busy, see:
[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-
tra...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/)

It's not just in the workplace that we equate being busy with being important.

~~~
norea-armozel
That reminds me of a lecture by Murray Rothbard regarding the matter of
productivity and religious beliefs. He noted that Catholicism although sees
idleness as a sin, it doesn't confuse leisure time with it. Whereas
Protestants of the time of the Reformation (and there after to some extent)
saw leisure as idleness (thus a sin).

It makes me wonder how much religion has affected our social norms even today
beyond the obvious question of prohibitions on certain sexualities, drinks,
and the like.

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acd
I think this is a side effect of globalization, work your 40 hours plus with
full work load. There are difficulties being sick and still keep up with your
tasks and being with family or you will be outsourced to some cheaper labour
who will be happy to work the crappy hours for less pay than you. Further
global corporations evade paying tax by shifting profits to cheap tax
countries and putting losses where the tax is higher. So by globalization we
have gotten more stressful work places and created tax loop wholes which the
big corps use and avoid contributing back to society to pay their fair share
of taxes.

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kristianp
This is what happens when the government represents corporations rather than
the individual. Voters have a small effect compared to lobbyists for large
corps. Is there also an effect in the US that individual states compete
against each other in providing better environments to employers. The other
extreme from this is a state that is anti business and has no jobs, but there
has to be some middle ground. The Occupy Wall Street movement was useless,
they should have created a political party and got some power.

Employees compete against each other, the two guys/gals in your office who
work 80 hours a week will be put ahead of those who only work 40. If you don't
want to lose your job in the next round of redundancies, you'd better be
running faster on your treadmill than the next guy! Unions are dead everywhere
except some specialised industries.

