We’re seeing the race to the bottom that is inevitable under capitalism, unless there’s some form of outside intervention.
When it was the norm for a single person in a household to work, wages had to be sufficient to support a household with a single source of income. Men almost always earned significantly more than women; it was assumed that a working woman was either supplementing income, or not taking care of a household, and it was assumed that a working man needed to care for a household. As women started to enter the workforce in greater numbers in the 50s and 60s, you see household incomes start inching higher; as incomes increase, prices increase to meet the available income. Rising prices leads to more women entering the workforce, because a single income is no longer sufficient to meet the requirements for a household. By the time you get to the late 80s, it’s nearly impossible to have a family on a single income. Now a two income household can barely afford to even have an apartment, much less have a family.
Now you have people working a day job, and working gig jobs for secondary income, to ‘get ahead’. Eventually that will be the new normal, just what is necessary to keep up with prices.
Without putting capitalism on a very short leash, this is only going to get worse.
They also expected a lot less. One of the hardest parts of being a nurse in the modern day is having to be mentally “on” for 2x6h for 2-3 days straight (or just 12h straight if I don’t make it to lunch). I’m constantly having to evaluate and reevaluate every action I take and decide whether multiple different types of clinical alarms are actionable or not moment-to-moment. I actually LOVE getting a nursing assistant assignment for the night because it means I get to just clean things and people all night and not have to think (as much) about every possible medication and health condition and how all of them will interact. I would 100% just make beds and wipe butts all shift and give meds 1-2x if they’d let me. That honestly sounds so mentally zen to me.
But at least I can watch YouTube at work.
At this point you should be watching YouTube at work. Reclaim the time lost at work by any means necessary!
Preach it!
Even worse, the entire concept of clocking in and out for ~8-hour shifts comes from factory jobs during the Industrial Revolution. Missing time meant that your station on the line wasn’t being manned and was holding up production. While obviously some fields still operate like that, many modern professions are task-oriented and being forced to be physically present for an entire shift is entirely unnecessary.
I always wondered what would happen if we had a family wage, instead of a minimum wage. The social and economic implications are an interesting thought experiment.
I’ve had thoughts along those lines. Like how everything I buy is just something my employer technically spent money on with the indirect expectation I am making purchases to keep myself relatively fit for work. But atomization is capitalism’s greatest strength, this economy runs on scapegoats and finger wagging.
Weirdly progressive for someone bougie
We have to be in the office 5 days a week. My boss who is a boomer/late gen X gets annoyed when people aren’t “butts in their seats 9-5”. I’m a Xellenial and really don’t care when my guys are in as long as they get things done. I keep telling him the more rigid he is with time, the more likely we are to lose good people. We’re already on thin ice with 5 days in office and have been losing people. It’s a constant fight that I have to shield them as much as possible from.
Are you me? This fits almost 100% my curent “setup”… Insane.
In a team meeting I had a while back my lead was talking about making sure we don’t get burnout. I asked if our department could trial run a 4 day work week. Their answer was “company won’t allow that but if you get all your work done by Friday I won’t ask questions if you’re not online”. Productivity and morale immediately went up. Good leads shield their team from the bullshit thank you
My current mid-manager has the same attitude that gets them our respect back, but as long as it’s not codified, it’s one single useful piece of corruption that’d be taken away if that gets noticed or they’d get replaced. Better to have legit short hours than cuts entirely dependent on someone’s will, but we are frustratingly happy eating what occasionly falls from the table. It causes a lot of mixed feelings to say the least.
As a software deceloper I struggle to understand that phrase “if you get all work done”. That will never be the case for me, because (1) there is always more work and (2) we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster. That means we are always moving work from one into the next sprint. You are never done early enough to quit even a quarter of a day early.
we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster.
That means you have a project manager who doesn’t understand how sprints are supposed to work, and he’s hurting the entire team because of it. You guys will get burnt out, productivity will be shit, and the good people will leave. I’d encourage you to talk to them, or their boss if they don’t listen.
I mean, that’s true, but the point still stands - every first Friday of a sprint there is ALWAYS going to be work to be done.
And what if they’re doing Kanban?
The point is, Fridays off shouldn’t ever be dependent on “all work being done”.
You should be able to tell by the first Friday if you’re on-track to finish your sprint without working Fridays. You can’t tell now because you’re overloaded.
Xellenial - I like that. I’m also an in-betweener - Boomer and X. It’s also called Generation Jones.
Do you feel part of either, part of both, or completely not fitting in with either?
Part of both. My work ethic is closer to that of X, but I very much understand the millennial approach to things. They way I’ve heard that sub-generation defined is “analog childhood, digital adulthood”
What if I have been having an hard time for years
It didn’t just happen with COVID… Or are you taking about the last few decades?
But the 40 hours work week is already a progressive measure to reduce the weekly amount of work?
If anything, it’s the consistent nature of 40 hours for almost the entire year that’s the problem. We need actual vacations and periods of rest and time off for other responsibilities.
Our company forced us to take 8 hours off every week for the past couple of months. It has been fantastic 😊. Why not make it permanent? C’mon!
Friendly reminder you work more now than your ancestors did before all the innovations we have now, and you get a much smaller slice of the pie for it.
This is why working from home needs to be more normalized. The corporations have made the market impossible to bear unless you have more than one income. Without the ability to work from home (ideally flex hours), then basically your house goes to shit. You don’t have any free time if it doesn’t.
Your “choice” after putting in a full day of work for enough money to buy a portion of your groceries, is to come home and do everything that your stay at home partner (now, working a full time job), would have otherwise done (basically speed running burnout, any%), or actually relax and accept that your house will always be somewhat messy.
One thing I like about WFH is that I can do the chores and stuff during the day. Take a break every hour or two is healthy, and using that time to do laundry or dishes or a quick errand means I have a lot more time in the evening and on weekends
So true. People seem to have convinced themselves that 35/40 hour weeks was some kind of ideal or agreed amount of hours we all found to be the best balance of all things.
Nope, it used to be 60, until people fought back and made them reduce the hours they’re forced to work for other people’s profit.
The problem is, we stopped fighting back.
It was a measure enacted during wartimes to increase productivity, or at least that’s what they said, because it was never rolled back to pre-war even after the US was no longer engaged.
Always beware what they try to slip through under the guise of patriotism and “unity.”
