I literally work for a global company and our EU teams definitely put in more than 40 hrs per week, exempt.
we’re practically reliant on worker exploitation in asia, africa and south america to maintain said standard where I’m assuming a lot of people work more
It’s not exploitation for comparative advantage to benefit both parties
Chinese sweatshops are known for how they’re not exploitative you’re so right.
And yes obviously some people work overtime or in some cases have contracts with longer work hours but that’s literally only because of the same problem of unwillingness to hire someone else to take over the needed workload. There’s always some org overhead with having more people but the point is that it’s not inherently necessary.
You can’t just hire multiple people to do a job all the time. That’s not how high-skill jobs work. I have a huge workload, and if they hired someone to “help” with that workload, the amount of work to be done would actually go up.
And certainly you understand that the Chinese government is a hellish dystopia, but also that people choose sweatshop labor over subsistence farming even in that hellscape.
If more people make the workload per person go up that very much sounds like a lack of or insufficiently developed processes to allow those people to actually effectively work together.
And it should be obvious that something being less bad than any available alternative doesn’t make it not exploitative.
If more people make the workload per person go up that very much sounds like a lack of or insufficiently developed processes to allow those people to actually effectively work together.
My job is building internal infrastructure at companies, and yes this is often absolutely true. However, it’s also the case when any specialist is doing a complex task - I work with a lot of instructional designers, project managers, etc and “too many cooks in the kitchen” is absolutely a thing.
That’s not even getting into highly specialized manual labor. My buddy is a Lineman, and the backlog for new Lineman is years long, because the job is extremely dangerous and skilled. You can’t just swap people in.
Even something like press operators - I’m currently working in sustainable packaging and all of our manufacturing employees do 4 12-hr shifts (with unlimited OT opportunities) - this is because the practical realities of changing shifts cuts production severely. It’s better to just pay people (a lot) more to work the 12s and only have one (two?) shift change(s)/day.
I have a feeling we’ll never meet on the “exploitation” thing because I’m not a socialist, but hopefully these examples help demonstrate the other points.
I think we’re also talking a bit past each other on the first point, in that “less than 2080 hours a year” is also achieved by, say, working 75 hour weeks for 6 months then not working at all for another 6 (sounds shit personally but some might like it) which would reduce a lot of the overhead.
If we include lack of trained personnel, then yes, I agree currently some people need to work that much because there’s just no one to replace them.
My whole point was a bit more theoretical than an immediate “we will not notice any negative effects if suddenly everyone that works a lot works less” which I also would say is plain false, more a generalized “if people are properly trained and workload is efficiently divided, no one would necessarily have to work that much”. Perfect efficiency in this regard is of course impossible to combine with people’s freedom of choice (and fuck planned economies) but given that the vast majority of for example europe works less than
2080 hours a year already, it doesn’t seem like too lofty of a goal. Still would take a while to actually reach though.
So, as a quick explanation, I take everything extremely literally. If I missed your more generalized points by not seeing the forest for the trees, my apologies. Internet posting is not often my tonal friend.
I do agree that hours can come down on lots of sectors. Personally, I’d love to see a generalized trend toward a 4-day week, with additional hires for overlap. Whether that’s 4 10s or 4 8s (or even 4 12s like in manufacturing) I still think it’s a better option for the vast majority of workers.
I literally work for a global company and our EU teams definitely put in more than 40 hrs per week, exempt.
It’s not exploitation for comparative advantage to benefit both parties
Chinese sweatshops are known for how they’re not exploitative you’re so right.
And yes obviously some people work overtime or in some cases have contracts with longer work hours but that’s literally only because of the same problem of unwillingness to hire someone else to take over the needed workload. There’s always some org overhead with having more people but the point is that it’s not inherently necessary.
You can’t just hire multiple people to do a job all the time. That’s not how high-skill jobs work. I have a huge workload, and if they hired someone to “help” with that workload, the amount of work to be done would actually go up.
And certainly you understand that the Chinese government is a hellish dystopia, but also that people choose sweatshop labor over subsistence farming even in that hellscape.
If more people make the workload per person go up that very much sounds like a lack of or insufficiently developed processes to allow those people to actually effectively work together.
And it should be obvious that something being less bad than any available alternative doesn’t make it not exploitative.
My job is building internal infrastructure at companies, and yes this is often absolutely true. However, it’s also the case when any specialist is doing a complex task - I work with a lot of instructional designers, project managers, etc and “too many cooks in the kitchen” is absolutely a thing.
That’s not even getting into highly specialized manual labor. My buddy is a Lineman, and the backlog for new Lineman is years long, because the job is extremely dangerous and skilled. You can’t just swap people in.
Even something like press operators - I’m currently working in sustainable packaging and all of our manufacturing employees do 4 12-hr shifts (with unlimited OT opportunities) - this is because the practical realities of changing shifts cuts production severely. It’s better to just pay people (a lot) more to work the 12s and only have one (two?) shift change(s)/day.
I have a feeling we’ll never meet on the “exploitation” thing because I’m not a socialist, but hopefully these examples help demonstrate the other points.
I think we’re also talking a bit past each other on the first point, in that “less than 2080 hours a year” is also achieved by, say, working 75 hour weeks for 6 months then not working at all for another 6 (sounds shit personally but some might like it) which would reduce a lot of the overhead.
If we include lack of trained personnel, then yes, I agree currently some people need to work that much because there’s just no one to replace them.
My whole point was a bit more theoretical than an immediate “we will not notice any negative effects if suddenly everyone that works a lot works less” which I also would say is plain false, more a generalized “if people are properly trained and workload is efficiently divided, no one would necessarily have to work that much”. Perfect efficiency in this regard is of course impossible to combine with people’s freedom of choice (and fuck planned economies) but given that the vast majority of for example europe works less than 2080 hours a year already, it doesn’t seem like too lofty of a goal. Still would take a while to actually reach though.
So, as a quick explanation, I take everything extremely literally. If I missed your more generalized points by not seeing the forest for the trees, my apologies. Internet posting is not often my tonal friend.
I do agree that hours can come down on lots of sectors. Personally, I’d love to see a generalized trend toward a 4-day week, with additional hires for overlap. Whether that’s 4 10s or 4 8s (or even 4 12s like in manufacturing) I still think it’s a better option for the vast majority of workers.