cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/4071058
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Not even, peasants were provided free food several times per shift, and worked for only half of the year. The church only started defending Sundays as a holiday when capitalism blew into town. For us to match medieval peasants, we would need all weekends, all public holidays, and 3.5 months of PTO
And also be literally unable to leave where we're born, have no rights to self-governance, be poor as fuck and eat mostly vegetable soup, and, oh I'd be dead, because there's no medicine
We lived in a vastly better world than peasants did, and that world requires a lot of people working in concert to maintain.
While modernity brought many good things, people weren't all serfs in the middle ages.
I also must remind you that many people in your country are living a miserable life, barely managing to buy food, and most people don't own their house. Self governance is a thing only the bourgeois talk about because they were wealthy enough to be jealous of the privileges of the nobility. They merely changed the system so that money provides privileges rather than blood, but it's not much more just than it was before.
It's absurd to compare even the poorest Americans (or any non-developing nation) with Middle ages peasants.
The standard of living by comparison is immeasurable. The poorest person in a developed nation today enjoys a standard of living higher than most royalty throughout the ME.
The ostentatious palaces and shit were largely a product of the Renaissance era. Most ME lords lived in what is effectively a single room stone building and drank water contaminated with their own feces.
I understand that things can, and should, improve further but this is well beyond a reach.
You're mistakening were the progress were made. The end of famines started with the industrial revolution. The increase in life expectancy went from taking care of child deaths and antibiotics for the biggest part. Vaccines come right after those. And war is probably next. All of these are why the population was multiplied by 10 between 1940 and now.
But that doesn't make the life of everyone a paradise. There are homeless people in your country, and those are no better now than before. Depending on where you live, you don't necessarily get to be cured in a hospital because liberalism thought good to forbid free healthcare. When you're poor, you only have access to bad food, if you're not too poor.
I don't idealize the past. But I don't demonize it either only to be able to idealize our present.
It's not idealizing anything to recognize that standard of living for poor people in developed countries (and, by this standard of measurement, developing nations as well) is massively improved over even 40 years ago, much less 400. That's just accepting reality.
Not even touching the "liberalism means health care is expensive" argument, because that's just fucking silly. Healthcare is unduly expensive in exactly 1 developed nation. That's on those people, not liberalism.
It does not, however, require us to work for 40 hours per week. We work way too much.
That very much depends on your job.
There is not a single person that has to work for 2080 hours in a year.
That's just incorrect
Seems to work fine for practically all of europe where we have mandatory paid time off. And some countries like france with standard work weeks less than 40 hours.
In a perfectly equal system with perfect division of labor efforts, we could most likely keep our standards of living and all work less than 2000 hours per year. As it is that's not the case and we're practically reliant on worker exploitation in asia, africa and south america to maintain said standard where I'm assuming a lot of people work more. But that's not inherently because of their job, it's because their employer isn't willing to pay them more and hire more people to lessen individual workload.
I literally work for a global company and our EU teams definitely put in more than 40 hrs per week, exempt.
It's not exploitation for comparative advantage to benefit both parties
Chinese sweatshops are known for how they're not exploitative you're so right.
And yes obviously some people work overtime or in some cases have contracts with longer work hours but that's literally only because of the same problem of unwillingness to hire someone else to take over the needed workload. There's always some org overhead with having more people but the point is that it's not inherently necessary.
You can't just hire multiple people to do a job all the time. That's not how high-skill jobs work. I have a huge workload, and if they hired someone to "help" with that workload, the amount of work to be done would actually go up.
And certainly you understand that the Chinese government is a hellish dystopia, but also that people choose sweatshop labor over subsistence farming even in that hellscape.
If more people make the workload per person go up that very much sounds like a lack of or insufficiently developed processes to allow those people to actually effectively work together.
And it should be obvious that something being less bad than any available alternative doesn't make it not exploitative.
My job is building internal infrastructure at companies, and yes this is often absolutely true. However, it's also the case when any specialist is doing a complex task - I work with a lot of instructional designers, project managers, etc and "too many cooks in the kitchen" is absolutely a thing.
That's not even getting into highly specialized manual labor. My buddy is a Lineman, and the backlog for new Lineman is years long, because the job is extremely dangerous and skilled. You can't just swap people in.
Even something like press operators - I'm currently working in sustainable packaging and all of our manufacturing employees do 4 12-hr shifts (with unlimited OT opportunities) - this is because the practical realities of changing shifts cuts production severely. It's better to just pay people (a lot) more to work the 12s and only have one (two?) shift change(s)/day.
I have a feeling we'll never meet on the "exploitation" thing because I'm not a socialist, but hopefully these examples help demonstrate the other points.
I think we're also talking a bit past each other on the first point, in that "less than 2080 hours a year" is also achieved by, say, working 75 hour weeks for 6 months then not working at all for another 6 (sounds shit personally but some might like it) which would reduce a lot of the overhead.
If we include lack of trained personnel, then yes, I agree currently some people need to work that much because there's just no one to replace them.
My whole point was a bit more theoretical than an immediate "we will not notice any negative effects if suddenly everyone that works a lot works less" which I also would say is plain false, more a generalized "if people are properly trained and workload is efficiently divided, no one would necessarily have to work that much". Perfect efficiency in this regard is of course impossible to combine with people's freedom of choice (and fuck planned economies) but given that the vast majority of for example europe works less than 2080 hours a year already, it doesn't seem like too lofty of a goal. Still would take a while to actually reach though.
So, as a quick explanation, I take everything extremely literally. If I missed your more generalized points by not seeing the forest for the trees, my apologies. Internet posting is not often my tonal friend.
I do agree that hours can come down on lots of sectors. Personally, I'd love to see a generalized trend toward a 4-day week, with additional hires for overlap. Whether that's 4 10s or 4 8s (or even 4 12s like in manufacturing) I still think it's a better option for the vast majority of workers.