9/7/1926?
UG, i’m more like 11>6>7 or 11>7>6 depending on how bad work is :/
the 40 hour work week is archaic and barbaric nonsense in the modern world. Humans can and should work less.
But nobody wants to change this cause people, as usual, are afraid of the truth . So… enjoy that y’all.😏
Support your local unions
youre gonma have to do A LOOOT more together with your unions’ trademen than just support each other… 😏
Has anyone heard of the AFL-CIO?
We already give eachother tuggies and go-teams, what more can we do? And yes I know who the AFL-CIO is, we’re their biggest affiliate haha, why?
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8 hours of work is too much
2 hour of commute + 8 of work is basically 10 hours away from home
10 hours + 8 to sleep + 2/3 to do chores = 20/21 hours of your day, so you have max 4 or 3 hours to ““enjoy”” (you will just unwind from work and enjoy little or nothing) and this is without counting overtime work to meet the end of the month
FUCK EVERYONE WHO WANT THIS! We deserve way better!2 hour of commute + 8 of work is basically 10 hours away from home
Forgetting the hour lunch that isn’t paid, so to get your time you spend 2 hours commuting, 8 hours working, and 1 hour “on break”, so that’s 11 hours of your day gone just because of work. With sleep, you are already down to 5 hours to do literally everything else your life requires. Grocery shopping, home/car/lawn maintenance, budgeting/planning bills, etc. God forbid you have kids and you have to figure out how to keep another human alive in that 5 hours on top of keeping yourself alive…
8 hours of work is too much
If you feel strongly enough about that, you need to do what the organizers did to get to that 8 hour day: organize workers to form powerful unions, then go on strike, survive confrontations with the police where many people die, keep battling for several decades, and then eventually your shorter work day will maybe become a reality.
Getting to an 8 hour work day required a lot of blood to be spilled. I personally doubt that today’s workers are motivated enough to put in the work and sacrifice required.
See, the commute is meant to be counted into it… xD
Everyone should know that labor day internationally, GLOBALLY, is May 1st, in honor of the labor movement and the martyrs who were killed by the US government in the Haymarket Affair in 1886.
The reason they made it a different date in the USA is so they would distance themselves from what they did and so people would stop connecting May 1st and the labor movement, so people wouldn’t suddenly get a martyr remembrance day and all come together and think about hanging the rich every year.
The Haymarket affair was a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The rally began peacefully in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day; it was held the day after a May 3 rally at a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant on the West Side of Chicago, during which police killed two strikers by opening fire at the crowd as it surged to the gate to confront strikebreakers.[2]: 190 Many others were injured. At the Haymarket Square rally on May 4, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing retaliatory gunfire by the police caused the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.
Yes, it’s funny how a labour uprising in the US on May 1st ended up becoming the most important holiday in communist countries. Meanwhile, the Haymarket Affair is basically forgotten in the US.
It’s also ridiculous how people today think that an 8-hour work day is some natural thing that happened because everybody agreed it made sense. The reality is that the bosses thought that a 12 hour work day made sense, and it took protest and violence to convince them to change their minds.
Anybody who wants a 4 day work week or a shorter work day needs to be aware of their history, and know that the only way to get there from here is massive union organization, and probably violence (mostly violence inflicted on the workers by the powers backing the status quo).
Yes, it’s funny how a labour uprising in the US on May 1st ended up becoming the most important holiday in communist countries. Meanwhile, the Haymarket Affair is basically forgotten in the US.
A century of propaganda will do that to a populace.
Of all the people that claim they sleep for 8 hours like they should, how many do you think actually do? Like it’s not reduced to 6 hours for some reason? Trouble falling asleep? Wake up for the kids? End up fucking for 30 minutes? Wakes up 8 times from traffic noise?
The idea that people should be getting 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a bit of a myth.
Sure, a lot of people don’t sleep as much as they should, but it’s not like 8 hours is a magic number, or like interruptions haven’t been a factor in sleeping since proto-humans first climbed down from the trees.
In the past in England it was normal to have two periods of sleep in a night. In hot countries a period of sleep during the hottest part of the day is normal.
Idunno, I actually sleep more than 8h often. Today was ~9.5 (from 23:00 until 8:30) The thing that makes it possible for me is (1) WFH so no commute, (2) no kids, (3) “white-collar” job so I can just sleep in and start working a bit later.
I realize that this is incredibly privileged and not everyone can sleep like that. But it is definitely possible too.
I also have to get 9-10 hours to be fully refreshed, which was quite difficult when living and working in the US.
Average maybe 5, last few years, maybe less. Was horrible at first, now im coping by just going outwardly insane.
I’m not really complaining cos im self employed and secure as a result. Most people seem to be experiencing the same but only barely survive
Well for me it’s around 8 and i often sleep less and notice it clearly through the day.
Half of those “8 hours for what we will” are spent getting ready for, transportation between, and decompressing from the work hours. After time for cooking, cleaning, shopping, and other chores, we still get very little of the “what we will” hours.
And the “lunch in your own time” means I’ll be at work for 9 hours anyway
Wake up 1 hour before you leave, 1 hour commute there, 1 hour home eats another 3 hours that for some reason come out of your personal time slot.
Lunch time is a farce too.
Yeah, life was a lot simpler when your wife/servant prepped all your food and work was a fifteen minute walk away.
That’s the world executives still live in, contributing significantly to the disconnect between their realities and those of their workers.
listen, do not overlook: they are bad
I hate that when women took their right to work, instead of reducing the workload of everyone they just made everyone work more.
If I ever marry a woman, I imagine a future where we both come home tired and she cooks as I rush to clean/tidy the house do chores vica versa. and we both get a whopping 4 hours of slack out of our total of 8 hours. That’s a goddamn dark vision of the future tbh.
Yeah, that’s not far from it. But we used to find a couple hours a night to spend time together, and that was nice.
I’m not sure how you’d make enough mess in 4h to need 4h of cleaning. Unless you have kids, and then yeah, that tracks.
plenty of those idiots drive hr+ a day to work
You didn’t mention unpaid lunch time, making sure you get there before clock in, any phone calls or emails that happen after hours, taking kids to daycare, and all the little things that you wouldn’t be doing if it wasn’t for your job. I guess that comes out of the “8 hours of sleep” time.
I was going for the gist, not an exhaustive detailing of what most of us already know and/or doesn’t apply to everyone’s particular jobs. Nonetheless, you are absolutely correct in that there’s a LOT unaccounted for in OP’s generalization.
OP created their post 100 years ago when this sentiment was much more radical. The fact that we failed to move our positions further in one hundred years is kinda on us.
I think we need an international strike to reduce working hours (with retained compensation) from 8→6 hours. Could be a good test run for more radical change.
It’s actually gotten worse in the last 100 years. See, back then, most women would do unpaid household labour, and men would work. So your typical married household does 40 hours of work a week.
Nowadays, we have (some) gender equality, which means everyone works 40 hours a week. So your typical married household does 80 hours of paid work a week, PLUS the unpaid work that still needs to be done!
If we want to get back to doing the same work as a society as in 1926, we need to legally mandate a 4 hour workday. Anything less is a regression in workers’ rights.
This is a very important point. We doubled the amount of labor, but the wealth of households stayed flat.
It’s actually gotten worse in the last 100 years. See, back then, most women would do unpaid household labour, and men would work
This might have been true for someone in a relatively well off class position, but for the majority of working class people 100 years ago, the women also worked. Especially in things like service and textiles.
It wasn’t until the post-war economic boom with soldiers coming home and taking advantage of the GI Bill, did the “traditional” setup of women being stay-at-home mothers while the man worked, become normative. At least among white families.
People also often lived much closer to their work so commuting was just walking down the street a short ways. It wasn’t until cars became common that the sprawl and long commutes started.
Somewhat, yes - reliable public transit was also still incredibly common into WWII (and beyond in some major metros). Even if your job was downtown and you were living outside the core, you could reliably expect bus or train service within a block or two of your house, and a reliable enough network with enough stops to let you walk to your office or whatever with fair ease.
Don’t worry you have the weekend for those, which you spend 8 hours in bed, 8 hours for chores, 4 hours feeling tired, and 4 hours doing whatever you want while feeling tired.
The weekend which, by the way, is another concept that labor unions had to fight and died for.
so I work retail which means labor day is just an excuse to have some kind of sale. And of course I didn’t get labor day off. Anyway someone unironically said to me ‘you must be pretty busy because everyone is off today’
‘except for me! (:’
she didn’t say anything else for the rest of the transaction lol. it’s like they forget we too are humans who are WORKING on LABOR day
Did you get holiday pay at least? I dont think I got holiday pay even when I worked retail. My husband got 8 extra straight hours, and was paid time and a half for the shift he worked yesterday (unionized labor).
I dont think retail does anything like this. Fuck retail. I know exactly what you went through, and it is why youll never see me shop on a holiday.
yeah thankfully I do get time and a half, and I thibk my store also gives an extra 4 hours of pay for anyone who works on the day. It’s definitely better than nothing and I don’t mind the extra money :3c
its just the insensitive folk who remain ignorant to the fact that everyone else around them is living a life as varied as theirs that gets to me.
but same! honestly if I could I would even like shut down my entire home and spend the day out in the wild so I don’t have to give work to the people making sure utilities are still functional too. those Homies also deserve a break, and a hell of a lot more than time and a half
In Finland you get 2x pay for working Sundays and Holidays. 1.5x for Saturdays.
The problem is that transportation and transitional period always encroaches into sleep or atwill times, never with times. Have is why we’re always push for 30h work weeks. It’s still a lot imo but it’s still manageable.
That’s why I sleep on the train 🧠 🧠 🧠
Same, but we shouldn’t have to imo lol
When the 40 hour work week was brought in, working men were expected to have a wife at home to do all the household labour.
“8 hours for what we will” gets eroded pretty quickly now that both of you are expected to work.
It’s also non-consecutive. 8hrs split over morning & eve feels much shorter
gotta take away commuting time as well
And lunch used to be included in the 8 hours of work. And paid. Now it’s an unpaid hour you can’t really use.
Wholesale theft.
How early do you get up? I only get up in time to grab a coffee and a snack before work.
No small kids, I take it? Take away about 5–7h every day from the “what you will” pool. And/or rest pool.
Ah, well, I’ve been self-employed working from home since 2005, so I get up anywhere between 7:00am-9:30am depending on how bright it is outside
Yeah how the fuck am I supposed to get 8 full hours of Rimworld without someone here to cook me chicken tenders?
We probably need closer to 10hrs of sleep (e.g.).
I think a 24 hr workweek is pretty ideal, distributed as one prefers (3x8 up to 6x4), so 4hrs work per day not counting Sundays.
4/10/10 is what we should strive for in the current age I think.
We can do what we want to. We decide. If we want that, that’s what we get. The only ones who don’t want that are the land/production system owners and the system of capitalism.
There is nothing inherently “normal” or “natural” or “good” about the system under which we toil and slave, except you would be hard pressed to believe it when you speak to people because they are so deeply indoctrinated in that mode of thinking that they will fight to keep it. For some fucking reason.
We’d have to double to triple the workforce in logistics and construction and other necessary sectors. A reduction in work hours necessarily means a reduction in standard of living - even with CEO wages factored in - because the overhead of necessities grows compared to societal achievements. We need the same amount of food delivered and the same amount of houses built, but now it takes two to three times as many people to do it. The same applies to doctors or teachers, so the additional workforce would come from other segments - which finally means reduction in standard of living for the average citizen.
This assumes steady productive output. In some sectors, this assumption is wrong, but I think it’s a fair assumption for logistics and construction.
Putting all essential jobs together (health, education, construction, logistics, agriculture, food retail, utilities, public administration, plus the required manufacturing and IT infrastructure) is already 50-55% of the workforce. In order for everyone to halve their workday, we’d all have to exclusively work only for the status quo. Which means no watches, no smartphones, no TV, no cinema, no museums, no parks.
A reduction of work hours would be nice, no question. But we also have to remember that the work goes somewhere and time/energy/resource efficiency matters on a fundamental biological level. We have to be a productive part of society for it to function, and while this is usually co-opted by capitalists to extract money, it remains a fact of life.
E: We’re already having healthcare only because we’re exploiting healthcare workers to the maximum. Even at the current status quo, treating them fairly would just not work. We’re already in a state of broken equilibrium between what we need and what we want. The healthcare workforce would have to double only for them to have a 40h work week.
And then there’s people with three jobs who still can’t make ends meet. I propose we make the 40h week work for everyone first before we reduce further.
the additional workforce would come from other segments - which finally means reduction in standard of living for the average citizen.
This is a great point, one also addressed by Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread. However, you’re assuming all labor meaningfully contributes to our standard of living and produces “societal achievements”. I’m not so sure about that, I have yet to see any benefit from e.g. the advertising industry.
As Kropotkin and Graeber both argue, capitalism breeds many bullshit jobs that help capital accumulation but don’t actually contribute to a better society. Transferring those workers to necessary jobs alone would allow us to work less without a meaningful loss in standard of living.
Will that get us to 4/10/10? Probably not, but I like to be a little aspirational. If you only demand a workable 40h workweek that’s all you’re getting, if that. Any further demand will simply be met with “but we already gave you what you wanted you ungrateful peasant!” :)
‘…while this is usually co-opted by capitalists to extract money’. You just solved your own problem. Fairer taxes means more money for healthcare, social services, logistical services and essential services.
Under your proposal, we continue with ever-increasing productivity with ever-decreasing living standards until all the wealth is concentrated in one cunt’s wallet.
Also, you’re going to quickly find we’ll soon beg for the ability to maintain the status quo once climate change really gets going. Which capitalism has caused, by the way. Both the problem and final solution, fittingly enough.
My proposal is based on fair prices to begin with. I’m saying we as humanity don’t have enough work capacity to sustain ourselves if we don’t contribute a certain minimum because of necessities. I’m not simping for capitalism, I’m saying there’s a lower limit of work hours a day we need to contribute to even exist.
Labor Day was created in the US to distance us laborers from the global labor movement’s chosen day, May 1st. A day that was largely established upon events that occurred into the US
8 hours to pay the landlord, 8 hours to pay the other bills, 8 hours for everything else
Tell St. Peter I can’t go,
I own my soul to the company store.
I reaalllyyyy like the 4 4 4 movement as a modern successor to this:
Someone should do an actual artwork for that. I really like the idea, but the ai slop gives me mixed feelings here
Aww, I didn’t realize! It came from people I trusted, and it’s a few years old, so I guess I didn’t look too closely… 😭
Yeah if this is ai I shouldn’t have posted it. We definitely need some real graphics for this idea.
What would 4 months for democracy entail?
Presumably an active duty to participate beyond just voting. Serving on local councils, school boards, etc.
Arguing with idiots
Meeting with your various neighborhood planning committees, sending/being a representative at the larger region’s committee of neighborhood committees, etc etc.
0 hours for corporate busywork.
