So, I've had these arguments a lot online over the years. Whenever I bring up John Keynes' argument (even before today) citing that by 2030 we should be working 15 hour work weeks, I always get shut down when talking to mainstream capitalists. I get all the standard lectures. I get told, "oh, we could have done that, but Americans CHOSE longer work hours! We prefer higher living standards and prefer NOT to work less!" I'll get told about how "labor saving technology doesn't eliminate work, it just creates more work!", as if that's some sort of moral argument against technological employment. I always get some runaround about the nature of the human condition and how we just can't do it, and how Keynes miscalculated how much we like to work and consume. Now, to be fair, Americans in particular are a people who pride themselves on hard work to a ridiculous degree, and high consumption, but let's dismantle some arguments I've come across.
The idea Americans "choose" to work long hours
This is something insidious that exists within our culture. We love to pride ourselves on our freedoms, and we always love to act like America is a place of freedom, blah blah blah. But I don't see it as true. I mean, imagine you're someone who WANTS to work less than 40 hours. What are your options?
If you go apply for a white collar job that pays well, and say, you know what I wanna work for you, but I only want to work 20 hours a week, what are they gonna tell you? They're gonna laugh at you and tell you to get the fudge out of their office. When you apply for jobs, you accept an employment contract. You basically put yourself in service of an employer, and they dictate your life to you. Most jobs are designed to be 40 hours a week. many high paying ones can even be more. A lot of them are "salaried" positions, rather than hourly positions, in which people are given a certain pay for the year, and they work as many hours as told by employers. Maybe sometimes they WILL work 20 hour weeks. But often times, they'll work more than 40, sometimes up to 60-80 or even more. A lot of white collar jobs in say, computer related fields are like this. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, all expected to work long hours, with no option of refusal. Even managers of retail or food service type places will often work long hours, with little to show for it. And honestly, you can't really say no. The employer dictates the terms, you're either in or out.
Even hourly positions often end up pressuring people to work long hours. While hourly workers get time and a half, you're basically told, you're doing overtime, or you're fired. So people will often make good money at these positions, making anywhere between $15-30 an hour typically, but at the end of the day, the boss tells them when and how long to work, and the worker complies or finds another job.
But say a boss did give you a cold $30 an hour doing skilled work and let you choose to work, say, 20-30 hours a week. Say that was a possibility. You make $40,000 instead of $60,000, you're in relatively good shape. Okay...what about healthcare? Oh wait, you don't get healthcare. You only get healthcare if you're employed to work full time. And because you're now a "part time" worker, guess what! You can get screwed I guess! That's kind of the importance of the full time and part time distinction. 40 hours is full time. You're expected to work that many hours and your life is designed around that standard. Again, your life is designed for you. It's designed to make you work long hours. While you're free on paper to work less, you often can't, because of the sanctions that are available too. And let's not forget what happens to a lot of people who do work part time.
Since the ACA, part time work has become a norm among a low of lower wage working class workers. Employers don't want to pay insurance, and give people benefits, so they keep hours down to keep wages low. Many part time workers only work 25 hours a week, for wages around maybe $10 an hour. That's $250 a week, $1000ish a month, around $13,000 a year. You can't live on that well. That's basically what my UBI would give people for free. You could probably live on it, with at least one other person, but alone, would be tough. Most people decide to work multiple jobs because of this, working maybe 50 hours a week at two jobs, bringing in a cool $26,000 a year, because of this structure. Because the minimum wage isn't a living wage, people have to work long hours just to be able to survive. Because workers work part time, they get denied benefits.
Where's the freedom in being able to actually decide your work hours? The structure of the system basically compels people to work longer hours. And rather than be outraged and push for freedom, a lot of people brag about how hard they work and how miserable they are and how little sleep they get, seemingly one upping each other over how much their lives suck compared to each other. And a lot of pressure to stop the system from changing is from these miserable people who would rather they all have to suffer, than to actually ALLOW someone who is "lazy" to work less. No. The system is designed to force us all to work long hours and be miserable. And a lot of the population accepts it because it's all they know, they don't have the education to know how to change it, and they'd rather punish people they deem lazy than free themselves.
A lot of this is kind of forced on them too. Cultural attitudes are transmissible from one person to another, and from generation to generation. Your parents might think like this, so they teach their kids to think like this. Their peers might think like this. And the whole system acts as a coercive force to control how people think and stop them from thinking they can make the world better. It's how I used to think as a conservative, and why I now find conservatism revolting. Many of those guys literally think a better world is not possible, that ruin will come upon anyone who tries to improve society somewhat, and that they work so hard and are miserable, and you should be too.
This is why I find my major political goals to be so important. We need a UBI to give people the power to say no, and to actually be able to come to the negotiating table with employers as an equal who can walk away, not as a prospective slave.
This is why we need to formally reduce the work week. If we designed our lives around fewer hours at work, through regulation, just as we designed our lives around the 40 hour standard we've always had, then that would be the standard things like wages, working hours, and employment benefits would be designed around. 20-30 hour weeks are possible. I feel like I demonstrated that in my previous article.
This is also why we need medicare for all. By removing healthcare off the table, we would not only free employers from a steep cost as Yang would say, we would free people from dependency on jobs.
These goals are important, in order to shift the window. I believe that while right libertarians will claim we're free to do this or that, that freedom only exists on paper. As I keep saying, our lifestyles are designed for us, and we're essentially coerced to live that way. I don't think people realize the coercion until you actually point out how you CAN'T actually live that way. Then they'll say something like "oh yeah, because people will just be lazy and sit around if we let them, no one actually WANTS to work". And then I get to internally screaming SO WHY DONT WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!? Obviously, we need SOME incentives. I'm not dumb enough to go full on "anti work" where I think abolishing all work is possible. But a UBI and shorter work weeks is very possible.
The idea that technology might replace some jobs, but replaces them with other jobs
Another argument I often hear is that technological automation is a myth, and that automation has never delivered on its promises to reduce how often we work, and that in the long term, we just create more jobs. Jobs jobs jobs! It's the religion of jobs!
Except jobism really is a religion or a cult. I'll explain the mechanics that keep this going. Let's go back to the 2008 recession here. We had a housing crash, tons of people got fired, and unemployment skyrocketed to 10%+. People were out of work, and this was a bad thing...because people had no money, how can they have money if they don't work?! So what did the government do? Talk about stimulating job creation. The second we lose jobs, there's intense public pressure to create more jobs. And because the standard length of time people are expected to toil for is 40 hours, people end up working that long or longer. And what jobs were created? often low paying jobs, the kinds of jobs that dont give you healthcare and are part time. So what happened? People ended up flooding the market looking for work, accepting the low pay, and horrid working conditions, and long hours at multiple jobs because no one wants to give them healthcare, and that was just how it was. That's actually what radicalized me. Graduating college into this mess of an economy in which nothing but low pay work was available and people were struggling immensely for like $8-10 an hour. And then unemployment went down, democrats patted themselves on the back, and told themselves what good of a job they did. Which led to 2016, with Bernie and Trump being populist alternatives to the establishment, and the rest is history.
The fact is, jobism is a cult, and our economy is very sick. The second we lose work, we correct for that by making more work to keep the population employed. Because that's how it always has been. We could choose to automate work, and then work less, but instead we insist on coercing people into jobs that sometimes aren't there and are often a mismatch for them. And many of them pay low, treat employees poorly, etc. I mean, I'm basically explaining how we got into the situation.
Also, technological automation doesn't always lead to jobs in the same area they are lost. I sometimes watch this guy on youtube called the geography king, and he talks about different parts of the country, sometimes explaining the worst parts of the country in terms of poverty. And I notice many of them have something in common, cross referencing them from other sources like Jeremy Rifkin's "the end of work". Many of them suffered from technological unemployment. One area is the mississippi delta. It's a largely African American area, and it has insane poverty. Why? Well, because in the day those folks picked cotton. But then we invented machines to pick cotton for us. And this put those people out of work. And now the area is poor as dirt. Many of them actually decided to leave for greener pastures, going up north to work in factories in places like Detroit, except, oh god, you probably see what is coming next, then we automated and outsourced the car factories, and now Detroit is one of the poorest cities in the US and a massive ghetto. Much of the rust belt is like this by the way. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and that;'s actually why democrats are losing control of these areas. Trump talked about making america great again and bringing the jobs back (such a juvenile, unrealistic, but sadly, understandably attractive promise for people who have no hope), but honestly, can he? Not really. And not being a jobist, I think those jobs are not to be saved.
I mean, Andrew Yang's War on Normal people and call for UBI is just about this. Automation putting tons of people out of work, and people not being able to find jobs to match. And while the democrats shift to supporting successful large urban centers and telling these people to "JuSt MoVe", they stand to lose a lot of voters in the next/currently ongoing party realignment if they don't shape up. Hence my own political desperation.
West Virginia is another very destitute area like this. It was never great in terms of prosperity, but it had its economic vitality based on coal, an increasingly outdated and dirty energy source that democrats want to regulate (rightfully) away. But, without coal, what economy does a place like West virginia have? Outside of the prospect of tourism and going full Gatlinburg/Pigeon forge, well...none, really. So, those areas have gotten very poor, very fast, with no hopes of improvement.
Meanwhile, jobs are created in increasingly dense city centers that can't sustain the influx of population in terms of housing, leading to the massive rent increases I've been discussing on this channel. That's the plight of the modern economy. Where there are jobs, rent is high, where rent is low, the job market is terrible. That's always been a thing, but I feel like this has been exacerbated in recent decades.
So...for me, jobs aren't working. We create new jobs to replace old jobs and act as if there will always be a steady supply of jobs as if it's a religious faith, even though there often aren't enough jobs for people in many areas and people languish in poverty as a result.
Another point I want to touch on is the idea of David Graeber's BS job too. There are a lot of jobs where you work for 40 hours, but you can do the work in 15. Some people on reddit even report automating their jobs and screwing off all day. They don't tell their bosses. Why? Because they would be fired if they did. If they're not working, why are they needed? So they need to keep up the appearance of working in order to keep their jobs, even though this system is stupid.
Even if they work less than 40 hours in a 40 hour week, they can't let on that they do. Again, if their jobs really dont have that much work to them, they can be let go. Or alternatively, they can be given more work. Sometimes efficiency is rewarded (punished) with more work. And even in low wage jobs this can be a thing. America very much has a "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" attitude in which looking busy trumps efficiency. it has to do with our culture.
So that's the problem to me. It's not that getting rid of work inevitably leads to more work. It's that our culture and social structure ensure that we try to employ as many people as possible for 40 hours a week, and that we don't allow people to jump ship. Efficiency is punished. People are let go, or given more work, or a pay cut. Any jobs eliminated we automatically strive to create more jobs to replace them with, because we know that they need to work to get money to survive.
We don't allow people to work less. We punish them financially in doing so. And this isn't going to change unless we actively change our social structures to ALLOW us to work less. Again, we need a UBI to deal with the poverty problem job displacement causes in the first place, and we need it to give people an option to say no to the absurdity of it all. We also need to reduce our work weeks directly, so that we can stop putting up the appearances of HAVING to work longer hours.
Our culture and system of incentives ensures that as long as nothing changes, people are forced to continue working 40 hours, and more jobs will just replace old jobs that are eliminated, often with imperfect tradeoffs in the first place. Again, our lifestyle is designed, and we are not allowed to say no.
The idea that no one wants to live like it's 1930 any more
This one has some legitimacy. First of all, you can't live like 1930 any more, because that world no longer exists and has moved on. You can't have a 1:1 comparison with the past, simply because despite accounting for inflation cost of living was so much different. Take housing. A $12k GDP per capita like in the 1930s won't even cover rent in a lot of places in the US. So you CAN'T live like that. It's also why I think large futuristic GDP numbers are useless. Sure we might have $318k GDP per capita in 100 years, but if rent is $10,000 a month, what's the point?
So let's face it, even accounting for inflation somewhat, you CAN'T live in the US like it's 1930.
But say we did change slowly over time in the way described in the last article, organically growing more slowly or having steady state economy for 100 years. Well, that's why I think the better comparison rather than time periods is COUNTRIES. I mean, we can't live like 1930 because the reason we would have shorter work weeks is because we use technology to work less. But many countries overseas have that kind of tech today, even if they're "poor."
If you lived like we did 90 years ago, we'd be living like an upper income third world country like China or something. Which isn't terrible these days, but it's not great. We do want to live better. But that's also why I ran scenarios to grow more slowly rather than a steady state economy. We DO want to live better. But still. Even if 15 isn't realistic and just a point of hypothetical contention if we wanted to live like China does. Are my 23-30 hour work week ideas unrealistic?
I mean, if we lived by "1950s" standards, that's like living in Portugal or various former Eastern Bloc countries today. That's what "15" or so hours actually looks like. If we worked 23 hours, we could theoretically live like Japan, or New Zealand, or the UK. If we worked 26, we could live like Germany. 30? Sweden.
I mean, these are all countries that exist, are considered wealthy, and have very high living standards. Many of them might be better off than us in some ways, even if not in raw GDP. Why? because they do seek things like greater work life balance, or more income equality, or better working conditions. Raw GDP isn't everything.
And because people love to act like people like to work for higher living standards, well, let me put it this way. If you're gonna have to work 40+ hour weeks regardless, isn't it good to get paid while doing it? if you work as much stocking shelves at walmart for 25 hours a week and then getting a second job at the kroger down the street for a similar amount and make a grand total of $26,000 a year, but you could instead work a job that pays $75,000 for roughly the same amount of hours, with you getting healthcare and other benefits with it, what are you going to strive to do?
Our society rewards higher status and living standards. But it never rewards less work. That's the myth of meritocracy in this country. We love to act like those who make more work so much harder, but they don't. They often get there as a matter of their education, upbringing, geography, and luck. Can work ethic play a role? Perhaps in some cases, to some degree. But let's not act like the people at the bottom are LAZY. They're not.
So...can we really say that people CHOOSE higher living standards freely? It's more like, they're incentivized to pursue careers that at least allow them to be comfortable in life, and perhaps pursue higher skilled more brain intensive work, than breaking one's back doing "grunt work" that's physically demanding. While there clearly is an element of "skill" to "skilled labor", again, much of it has more to do with opportunities than work ethic. Our system ensures we all have to toil for 40 hours. It just ensures some are more rewarded than others for the same amount of time. So why not pursue the work that's easier and more lucrative while patting your back while doing so?
Conclusion
The point of this article is to basically throw back the work worshippers' arguments back in their face, as they mock the idea of Johgn keynes' 15 hour work weeks. Mainstream capitalists like conservatives, neoliberals, right libertarians, and even work happy social democrats love to act like we Americans CHOSE longer working hours, or that longer working hours are inevitable because jobs will always exist, but let's not act like that choice actually exists on an individual level. Our system is designed to force people to work 40 hours a week or more. People are actively sanctioned financially with a loss of opportunities ans catastrophic loss of income or other basic necessities if they choose a lifestyle that does not involve putting the socially approved amount of work in. There are very real sanctions in place for choosing another kind of life. And honestly, while the individual choice is nonexistent, the collective societal choice always exists. And honestly, we choose, collectively, to work as long as we do.
Any time we take the idea of reducing work hours off the table, or implementing a UBI, we remove that choice from the overton window. When we pursue more jobs whenever efficiencies allow us to do more with less, then we get exactly what we get. More jobs. When we reward efficiency with more work, we encourage inefficiency. When we have an autocratic worker-employer relationship workers can't say no to, and then incentivize labor laws to exist around a 40 hour work week, don't be surprised when we get exactly that.
The first step to solving this problem, is admitting the problem exists. And I feel like people don't like to admit it exists. We CAN have a better world, we CAN have a better future. But it would involve changing our system to make such possibilities actually possible. You can't just choose, on an individual level, to work less and accept a lower, but still acceptable standard of living. You either work 40 hours a week or more, or you're poor. Period. It's not a matter of choice, there is no tradeoff, because employment relationships and the legal system exist as they do, as long as 40 hours is the societally approved norm, that's what we will get.
This is why we needed the 40 hour work week in the first place. People seem to forget without labor laws we still would probably be working the same 100 hour weeks of the 19th century. let's remind people employers would have child labor if they could. Heck many are trying to loosen those restrictions to force teens to work during the "labor shortage" (which is also artificial and societally constructed via our institutions going haywire post covid). No. We CAN do better. I have shown it to be possible. But, we need to actually update our standards for the 21st century to make it happen. So let's not buy into any more BS excuses for why we can't. As the leftists would say, it's all "pure ideology" anyway. Let's actually CHOOSE this, collectively. There's no reason 30 hours a week, or even 25 or so, can't be the norm if we actually willed it into existence. But, it must be done collectively.
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