Am I going crazy or is the 40hour workweek completely inane and morally reprehensible. I have two jobs one very part time (9ish hours) and one of which only requires 20 hours but I can work more if i want to. I get paid for travel time and gas stipend as well. Overall between these two jobs I work about 35hrs per week making OK money. Obviously I'd be making more if I chose to work more hours but it does not seem mentally feasiable. As a note, I am nearing 30 and live with my parents and pay a little rent as well as my other general expenses (phone car insurance etc) It is an incredibly lucky life that I get this opportunity to save money that I know I would not get to have if I had to fend for myself. Personally I would never leave lol. Rent prices are insane there's no way I wouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck even if I did my job fulltime.
Anyway, i am the only one in my social circle who seems to think 40 hours is nuts. I mean I get it, in the current system 40 hours with good pay is the bare minimum to get by. But anybody I talk to thinks its an immutable fact of the universe. Like the world would implode if not for the sacred 40 hour full time work week. People think i'm crazy for suggesting that it is possible and practical to have 20hour work weeks with the same standard of living. People get offended when I suggest that this is the same argument people were making 100 years ago when the owner class was trying to keep people working 80+ hour weeks. Everyone I know has drunk the coolaid. A better world is possible. But its like nobody seems to care.
Kropotkin did an analysis on how much actual labour was needed to run the early 20th century economy. He figured working until your 50 only about 5 hours a day (they counted only Sunday off) was enough to produce all that people needed to survive for their entire lives.
Today, that number has just dropped and dropped between technology and automation. I would not be surprised if we only had to put in 4 hours a day 4 days a week to maintain our lives in a de-growth scenario (which we need in the west in my opinion) but even if we wanted to expand luxury and treats I bet you only need to tack on one more working day and just be back to 5 day weeks - and retire at 40 or 45 on top of that. We are massively overexploited, so much of the western economy is just pointless busywork.
I very much agree. At this point the west could stop production of just about everything non-essential and we'd still have more than enough. Our overproduction has lead to the point where we just need to properly distribute stuff rather than making more. We have enough for everyone everywhere today, we just have to make sure everyone gets and gets it equitably.
Goddamn I hate how much Bullshit Jobs was right. It's all made up busywork in a make-believe system. I hate that I have to opt-in and buy-in to this fantasy.