Backwards. Satan was a bro and tried to tell god to take a chill pill when he was being a fuckwad but God was “like no U, go to hell” and he did and now we bow to the corporate overlords as God intended.
Plot twist: OP intended the comparison as a compliment.
The guy who made the 8hr/day 5day/week schedule was a saint
That’s was unions
Call me a devil’s advocate, but Satan was pretty based in this case. Also have you seen the advocates for God? They kinda suck
You’re not wrong. Isn’t Satan’s whole schtick questioning the authority? Asking what could be different? Sounds pretty based
Rather, “whoever invented weekends was a genius.”
The idea came from a British guy called Robert Owen in the 19th century. It was a huge step forward in workers rights seeing as it was fairly normal for factories to work from sunrise to sunset to try and maximise their output.
Typical working hours were 10-18 hrs a day 6 to 7 days a week
I’m not saying I love working 8hrs a day and modern society can definitely do better but this was a positive step forward in history and should be celebrated… celebrated isn’t quite the right word but I hope you get what I mean
150 years ago some guy made advances in workers rights, and the best way we can honor him and that accomplishment is by never making another advance in workers rights! /s
I know that isn’t your point, and I agree we shouldn’t demonize him without bothering to know the context, but I couldn’t help thinking this as a response.
Yeah, the tone of this tread is, “everyone needs to be more greatful.”
The cruelty of the 19th century does not cancel out the cruelty of the 21st century.
I absolutely agree we should show gratitude, and I think the best way of showing gratitude is saying “this is no longer enough”
Reminded me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo
It is more made to debunk the idea that capitalism has given humanity more leisure time. But relevant here too because makes the case that historically people worked even less than the ‘typical’ week we have today.
It makes me wonder if the reason we mostly feel like working 40+ hours is too much is because people really don’t seem to have worked that much until the industrial age.
I really liked that video. I’m always cautious of stuff like this, which can easily become a fallacious appeal to history, but I think this video effectively avoids that territory. Like, it’s useful to consider how things used to be different and how things became this way, without presenting the former as a solution for the latter.
100% agreed - there is a lot of garbage on youtube and it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Yeah, anyone calling the creator of the 40-hour work week “Satan” is obviously ignorant of the history of labour.
As you said, we can definitely do better, but at the time it was (quite literally) revolutionary.
Yup, we need to get 6 hour 4 days a week now, so people in 2100 can call us satanic for wasting so many hours working.
Appreciated for what it was at the time. I get you.
Greetings from Scotland, I’d gladly take a 40 minute workday 🤣
I waltz in one minute before my shift every day. Not working for free.
I had to bitch slap my ostensible boss with this when I first started my current job. He tried to tell me that he thought it would really be “best” if I showed up approximately 30 minutes before my scheduled start time. I responded him flat out that if he wanted me there half an hour earlier, he should schedule me to be there half an hour earlier. Alternatively, you could try biting my feathered ass. I know which one is bound to get you better results.
I clock in when I get here, I get paid for the time I’m here. This ain’t no charity.
I am now VP of the company. Make of that what you will.
… Feathered?
Are you really? How marvelous for you, and good for you for not putting up with it!
My CW shows up 1-2 HOURS early for NO reason at all as hers is a registration job and there is nobody there to register at 630 am. Drives me around the bend. She gets paid nothing for it and acts like a big martyr but how is that my problem? I show up, do my job and leave on time every day.
I have a coworker that always says she ‘feels bad’ when it’s slow and there’s no work to do. I straight up told her we also get paid to be available just in case there’s work to do, not just to do it. I’ve also caught her clocking out and just sitting there waiting when it was the worst of covid a couple years ago and there was nothing to do for like 3 hours. We work in an office, it’s how the job goes sometimes.
She’s older and a propagandized republican corporate shill. It’s unfortunate really.
I’ve also caught her clocking out and just sitting there waiting when it was the worst of covid a couple years ago and there was nothing to do for like 3 hours.
Should’ve reported the violation to the Department of Labor so that HR would be forced to chew her out for being too much of a corporate whore.
That’s a bit similar to mine. During COVID lockdown she had very little to do and yet she still came in 2 hours early. I think some people have no life but work, but it reflects badly on us who just want to do our shift and go home.
Keep in mind that once upon a time it was 6 days and 14 hours per day.
Keep in mind that before that, people worked much less in winter and still less than today in summer
That’s much debated, actually.
Admittedly, they were completely at the mercy of disease, herd migration, had no plumbing, buried astounding numbers of their children, were not the apex predator, didn’t have mattresses and when injuries happened they often healed poorly and painfully.
And if I worked less hours in my office job, all that would return?
Your office job is incompatible with the pre-agrarian lifestyle you described earlier.
You don’t get modern luxuries AND the minimal hours required as a hunter gatherer, just as I can’t get the speed of my car AND the cardiovascular benefits of my bike simultaneously.
With an ebike you can! 25mph (more if you jail break it) And all the pedaling your heart desires!
You can have both! Our insane productivity rises in the past century SHOULD have allowed us all modern luxuries and like half the current working hours. Corporate greed has robbed you of that while wages have stagnated
He’s not talking about “pre-agrarian;” even medieval peasants got more time off than we do today.
That’s mostly a silly meme that’s been seized upon.
When they worked, it was from dawn to dusk doing hard labour. And if the harvest wasn’t good, they died because the Lord took his tithe regardless.
And that’s not to mention the household labour, all of which we take for granted (consider chopping wood every time you wanted heat, mending clothes or the ridiculous process of cleaning them.) Or looking after farm animals etc. The only stuff that’s counted in that 150 days silliness is working the land which was only a portion of their real labour.
Can you provide a citation for that, please?
Yeah I don’t think so …
We can both acknowledge progress and an extreme lack of what that progress should/could have been.
All you have to do is look to countries like China and even Japan where people literally work themselves to death.
Should we be working 40 hours a week? No but let’s not pretend that the situation has only gotten worse…
You’re a crab in a bucket and so wrong.
If you need to work to afford to live, you’re being lied to about what’s possible for a healthy and functioning modern society to thrive.
Don’t forget that in order for capitalism to stay alive, it requires poverty, manufactured scarcity and obsolescence.
You should question why billionaires even exist in what you consider to be a just and modern society. You should also look up a visual representation of just how much larger 1 billion is from whatever your gross annual income is if you still think it’s reasonable that they do exist.
The person you’re responding to gave no reason to think this mountain of accusations
You okay? I wrote about pre agrarian societies and you went with a semi hinged rant about capitalism and billionaires?
If you meant to respond to my point though, I’m super curious how you think a society where almost everyone spends their work time getting food ALSO develops the luxuries of modern life, like a washing machine. Everyone work 2 jobs? That seems pretty against the whole free time thing. So, uhhh, help from Aliens or Jesus?
Your post was a view point that we couldn’t work less while maintaining modern conveniences and luxuries, at least that’s how it’s coming across.
If your point was simply that in pre-modern times they didn’t have what we have today and that it was due to working too much for sustaining life to develop, then ok I guess. Maybe I misread the thread. The main post was about the fact we’re working too many hours in our current society though so… yeah.
I live above the arctic circle, please don’t make me work 24/7 during the summer since the sun is always out.
I’d love the part where I wouldn’t have to work November through January though.
I don’t do it anymore, but I used to LOVE working overnight. No one around, I could get everything done, and I still had time for errands.
I wouldn’t want to work straight from Nov to Jan though
I remember working from 6 am to 6 pm. Who actually needs to see the sunlight? 😭
It used to be dawn till dusk 6 days a week, bro.
No wonder more people went to church back then
Op, you don’t seem aware that getting the work week down to this took a very concerted effort
While I agree, the amount of productivity that’s increased since the 5 day work week was established has made it reasonable to once again change the norm. That, or pay workers equivalent to the increase in productivity that has happened. It’s all going somewhere.
Source for productivity gains?
Any economic study from the last 80 years.
Stop being lazy, lol.
We can keep applying yet more effort. This is better than 6 day work week, but we can do even better
Sure, but it seems ignorant of said progress when op referred to it as created by Satan.
Not if you think of Satan as a questioner of authority and bringer of change. We could use another Satan
Lol yes but I don’t think that’s what they meant.
I don’t want my work day tied to length of sunlight in either direction. But I do want a four day work week!
And in 50-70 years someone can make an internet post about how people wanting a 4 day work week were satan
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Don’t live so far north / south.
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Work something besides 8am - 5 p.m.
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We shouldn’t have to work so many hours but until labor right improve and companies hire 20% more people to cover the lost 8 hours for everyone that isn’t white collar, then we’re going to need another baby boom in most societies where population is declining instead.
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World understanding that the stock market is basically a magic money generation machine for the rich while only funding a measly retirement for the working class since they don’t pay us enough to save for our own retirement without magically quadrupling what we put in via compound interest. Have fun trying to reconcile static based GDP with retirement via stocks until we figure out Fusion and make a Dyson sphere.
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thx Henry Ford!
Our Ford, hallowed be thy name.
Make sure to thank him for the unhinged antisemitic conspiracies too.
Why? The Ford Motor Company literally tried crushing unions. And unions made the 40 hour/5 day work week.
Whoever invented the eight hour five day work week is Satan.
Unions. Unions won the five day eight hour workweek after heavy, sometimes bloody conflicts with employers. Before that it was common for workweek to be 10 or 12 hours.
Before that it was common for workweek to be 10 or 12 hours.
10-12 hours per day*, dangerous typo
Fixed
Too many people are ignorant of the role Unions played in American history. I assume they were brought up in places where the GOP controls the schools.
I was actively taught in high school that “unions were nice, but not necessary any more, they get in the way of all our very cool free trade!”
Obviously, my thinking on that has changed a whole lot, but both my partner and I got fed that kind of rhetoric straight out of text books.
I’m guessing teacher unions weren’t a thing where you were raised.
God bless unions. Now can they negotiate a four day work week?
The bad news is their power has been systematically eroded for a long time. The good news is they’ve made a bit of a comeback in the last couple of years. Hopefully this trend continues.
Grieved something recently and won a 3K payout and a workload change. It was great.
Technically, if your shift is long enough and timed properly, you can have daytime going in and coming out.
And no weekend. Basically almost your entire life would be working
What? Here in India it’s 12 hrs a day 7 days a week. One paid holiday per year, For the new year
Is it really? By God.
In factories at least
2 shifts of 12 hours each.
People working 12 hours earn about 24k INR per month
Working 8hr /day earn about 12k INR per month but the work is unskilled. ( Cleaning and stuff )
That’s unreal.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/india-debate-on-70-hour-workweek-illegal-or-road-to-greatness.html
Indians currently work an average of 47.7 hours a week — higher than the U.S. (36.4), the UK (35.9), and Germany (34.4), according to the International Labour Organization.
Infosys founder Narayana Murthy recently sparked a controversy on social media when he said young people should be working 70 hours a week to boost India’s economy.
Perhaps it’s common for the workweek to be that long in the informal economy, but the official data at least doesn’t reflect that.