I was taught in University Communication classes (a couple decades ago) about the 40hr line drawn by management when negotiating with unions. Forty hours was the minimum per week to leave most workers without enough energy to take night classes or get caught up in union organizing, etc. - so, even if the research wasn’t top notch, there was some philosophy behind the number. Of course, like so many other ‘facts’ I was taught way back then, I can’t remember the actual source to back up my statement.
7 Likes
True or not, I could see management pushing for a 40 hour workweek because they thought it was true. There’s a lot of ignorance and stupidity in management, so I’d not be surprised if it was joined by some (ignorant) malevolence as well.
I worked in an industry with a lot of periods of “crunch,” where people might be working 80 hour weeks for many months at a time, with management honestly believing that they were getting more work out of people, even as projects suffered horribly and got more and more behind schedule the more hours people worked. In recent years, the practice is being pushed back against, but not because it’s (so clearly) counter-productive - management remain clueless - but because it’s causing workers to literally get sick and have their lives destroyed.
3 Likes
Or… just fucking employee refugees!!! Not sure why that’s difficult. Look, a group of people willing to work! Give them fucking jobs!!!
6 Likes
The proper response is “Malaka.”
4 Likes
Apropos of ‘livable’; you’d think Korea would be one place where anyone who isn’t specifically planning on that being someone else’s problem would be more worried about the limits of get-more-hours-out-of-the-peons strategies.
You aren’t going to workday your way out of a fertility rate of .8 unless you’ve got access to some sort of atemporal salaryman class from which considerably more than 7 per week can be exacted.
5 Likes
No, the rich won’t have that.
2 Likes
Japan has been on the same road for the last 50 years, now China seems to be as well (compounded by a job market that only hires recent grads and actively discriminates against anyone even of the age where they might want to have a family). They’re situations where sets of traditional expectations (e.g. that women will leave the workforce when they get married to have children and support their husbands that they never see) meets irrational management practices (where workforces managed to be productive despite overwork) clashing with reality.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
