UCHIDA Masayasu（内田正泰 Japanese, b.1922）
🖤 African/North African women’s fashion
Ok, but yeah. I want to work more than 15 hours a week. I genuinely love the challenge with what I do. 15 seems, oddly tiny? Where did this number come from?
This is a good response to that question, in case anyone wanted the q&a paired together. 15 would be the social average — some people might work more, some less, but that would be up to them. This is also presupposing a change in the way the economy effectively functions, in the sense that 15 hours would be the social average for necessary labor, and after that point you’d probably see tons of people participating in “unnecessary” labor out of interest. There’s an idea in socialist theory that basically says once you reach a point far enough along after capitalism you’d just start seeing a blurring of the lines between what’s defined as “work” (or as “a job”) and what’s defined as “a collective activity”, especially with regard to the arts, science, etc.
At the very least, a transition towards (eco)socialism will require a vast shortening of the workweek and a reduction in overall advertising/consumption, whether that mean a 15-hour week or a 20-hour week. The main point is that people are overworked, we can meet everyone’s needs feasibly with less hours anyway, and the over-emphasis on extraction and accumulation (which is in part fueled by a tediously long workweek) is having disastrous effects on the planet. We can both accomodate the needs of the planet AND expand the political horizons for the great majority of the population, but it will require the fundamental defeat of capitalism and the establishment of a new ecological workers’ democracy. It’s a big project, but so worth it in the long run.
The 15-hour week presupposes a change in the economy first. Obviously capitalism requires long hours for people to survive, but in terms of pure stats it’s not necessary for society to be working that much. There’s enough resources for everyone, and so much work is pointless bullshit that only exists to line the pockets of the rich. The ecosocialist project demands a new way of looking at and distributing work. Get rid of the bullshit jobs, divvy up the necessary jobs, and we’d free up people’s time immensely to engage in pursuits they actually want to do to contribute to society.
Also, food and housing and such would be guaranteed in an ecosocialist society anyway, so it goes beyond simply reorganizing work. People have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and those will never be achieved for the great majority in a capitalist society.
These were really good additions so I wanted t add them onto the cumulative post
the 40 hour workweek is not as productive as corporate/management wants us to think, and it also leave most people exhausted. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is an absurd amount of time to be working. And judging from statistics, there’s about 50% of Americans who work more than 40 hours a week…
This does not even include time spent commuting or getting ready for work.
Even though our productivity is leagues better than it has ever been, we now have less leisure time than feudal peasants! There is absolutely no reason for people to need to work 40+ hours a week just to support themselves or family.
There’s a lot of “But how will X industry function on so few hours?” And the answer that comes to my mind is that if the price we pay for no one living on the street, going hungry, or suffering from curable illnesses is that movies/video games take longer to make because no one can be coerced into working obscene hours on threat of starvation, then damn, that’s fucking cheap, and I would pay it without hesitation.
Also, on that last point: if we’re talking about projects that *actually* take that long? Yeah, most of the people who work those jobs are likely to volunteer more time at them; again, see “blurring the line between ‘a job’ and ‘a collective activity’” above.
I mean we already see people making movies, video games, music, fashion, and all the other things we love essentially for free out of the love of the medium with no expectation of profit right now. Why would we expect that art would suddenly disappear? If anything it would flourish.
It WOULD flourish because people who have more free time on their hands and aren’t living in constant fear of losing their house, healthcare, etc. have greater energies that they can devote to creative pursuits. Think of all the art and innovations we are likely missing out on, because everyone’s too busy scraping like hell to survive. Countless studies have proven that stress has very real deleterious effects on logic and reasoning along with pretty much all forms of thinking associated with creativity.
I haven’t really seen a ton of math here yet, so let’s do some simple math to prove that a 15 hour work week, if anything, is an estimate in the high range of what is necessary, and not absurd in the slightest:
What we see here is that technology has increased human productivity while median compensation for that productivity has been lagging behind.
In other words, somebody (a small minority) is making a bunch of money they weren’t making before.
Since 1978 human productivity has, thanks to technology, multiplied by 2.5x.
Standard of living has (calculated from spending and accounting for inflation) NOT CHANGED.
This means that we are not living more expensively, and in some areas, particularly housing, healthcare and education, we are now actually having it WORSE than they did 50 years ago.
So let’s do the math I was missing:
If we got rid of this paradoxical group that is making so much more money, we could have the same standard of living as in 1978 while working 2.5x less!
As the typical work week in 1978 was 40 hours, that corresponds to 16 hours (16 × 2.5 = 40).
And human productivity didn’t start increasing through technology in 1978! If we accounted for farther back than that we could cut it WAY more!
On top of that we have all of the previously mentioned factors, which get a lot more complicated to calculate, but it’s not even necessary!
The IWW was campaigning for a 16 hour work week in the 1910’s for crying out loud!
You really think we can’t do any less than 15 in 2018?
Also, let’s talk about how exactly capitalism makes this not work:
In capitalism, you have an employer who needs to profit from what you do.
This means that you create a certain amount of value for them. They pay you a wage in turn.
This wage is ALWAYS lower than what your work is worth.
If it was equal or higher, your employer would lose money from hiring you!
And this surplus value that your employer takes isn’t a little. It’s a lot.
So much that cutting the work week by half – presupposing this wage-exploitation stopped existing – would be absurd; a 15 hour work week would probably be too long, not too short!
