Why didn't productivity shorten working hours?

[warpus]

I'm guessing they still check your VPN times to ensure you maintain "proper working hours?"

Hmm no, my boss just assumes my hours add up to what they're supposed to add up to each week. When I try talking to him about my hours, he says he doesn't care and that I'm a professional and leaves it at that. Connecting to the VPN and to my work desktop just a tool I can use to help me work more effectively.

Some tech companies have a full-on, come and go as you please, unlimited leisure/vacation time policy.

Supposedly this approach has actually been successful in a bunch of places. It can work if the office culture is right.

Hours spent in an office is almost as poor a measure of productivity, but I guess the feeling is that if you're present, you can be monitored.

That's one of the psychological benefits to the employer, yeah, but at what cost to employee productivity? Depends on the type of job we're talking about of course, but in some cases limiting your employees to certain hours can make them less productive. So it's on employer. Would he/she rather have the feeling of control? Or a better finished product?

Depends on management and their priorities and the type of industry, IMO. Some types of office culture only work with certain industries. As industries change, so will working hours, not all headed in the same direction either..

 

[civvver]

Many office jobs do have measurable productivity though and that's why they can have work when you want policies. Most have core hours so that you can schedule meetings and depend on everyone being present, it's a logistics thing, if one guy worked 12am - 8am every day he'd never interact with anyone else. Beyond that though it's often flexible. Like a software product does have measurable deliverables like delivery of features, debugging etc. It's mostly tech companies that do these kind of policies.

 

[EvaDK]

In 1929, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century people in the developed nations could maintain a high standard of living while working sixteen hours a week. And yes, productivity has risen massively- so why hasn't this happened? Why aren't we working 3 hours a day?

He was correct about the trend. He just got the time prediction wrong.

Where I live, we now work roughly 15 hours less per week than we did in the 1920s. After WWII, women entered the job market in large numbers. That influences average work week per worker as well, despite the rise in consumption and production, due to more people out there with money to spend on stuff.

 

[warpus]

Many office jobs do have measurable productivity though and that's why they can have work when you want policies. Most have core hours so that you can schedule meetings and depend on everyone being present, it's a logistics thing, if one guy worked 12am - 8am every day he'd never interact with anyone else. Beyond that though it's often flexible. Like a software product does have measurable deliverables like delivery of features, debugging etc. It's mostly tech companies that do these kind of policies.

I agree, there are many office type jobs that give a lot of benefit to 10-5 working hours. Like you say it makes a lot of sense in some cases to have everyone in the office at the same time, for various reasons. I also agree that for a lot of these jobs it's possible to gauge what their productivity is.

But in some cases those things do not make so much sense. Each type of job and situation warrants its own examination, office culture, and hours.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

He was correct about the trend. He just got the time prediction wrong.

Where I live, we now work roughly 15 hours less per week than we did in the 1920s. After WWII, women entered the job market in large numbers. That influences average work week per worker as well, despite the rise in consumption and production, due to more people out there with money to spend on stuff.

As was pointed out earlier, that actually points out an increase in hours worked per household. Couple that with decreased household sizes and it seems the trend is exactly opposite what was predicted.

 

[EvaDK]

As was pointed out earlier, that actually points out an increase in hours worked per household. Couple that with decreased household sizes and it seems the trend is exactly opposite what was predicted.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that it was the norm in the 19th/early 20th century, that the grown up boys in a household had jobs, part- or full time, to contribute to the household. A lot of kids from the poor working families, never really went to school/college back then. They worked from the age of 14-16 and onwards.

 

[civvver]

Well and women in the work force are really offsetting work at home. Pre industrial revolution and really pre atomic family, women stayed home and did all cleaning, all cooking, all child rearing etc. Now they can get a job and you can pay someone else to do that. So they were productive before it just didn't show up as gdp. But when you hire someone to watch your kids it does show up as wages somewhere.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that it was the norm in the 19th/early 20th century, that the grown up boys in a household had jobs, part- or full time, to contribute to the household. A lot of kids from the poor working families, never really went to school/college back then. They worked from the age of 14-16 and onwards.

Hmmmmm...food for thought there. Certainly some sort of bottoming out occurred though, since without question the household that was single earner (perhaps with some temporary 'helping out' from grown children) early on in the previous century was consistently dual earner by the three quarter mark.

 

[Ferocitus]

Bertrand Russell gave a lovely example in his short book: "In Praise of Idleness".

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in
the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working
(say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number
of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly
any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody
concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours
instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the
world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours,
there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men
previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in
the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are
totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured
that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being
a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

 

[Mise]

It seems insane because it's only half the truth. The other truth is that employment moves from low productivity sectors to high productivity sectors, and people earn more money.

 

[Hygro]

Or they move to lower productivity sectors and earn less money.

You mean society advances what industries it can support and the general wealth level it can sustain? Sure, but everyone working in a call center for minimum wage who used to work in a car factory for more is wondering what happened and why they aren't working "higher productivity jobs for more pay".

Do note, in Russell's example, the most forward and productive pin makers are still in the game and the less productive, behind pin makers are out of the game. How are they the ones to make more money doing the more productive work?

 

[Mise]

I used the word "employment" rather than "employees" because I was talking about aggregates, not individual people. This is precisely the "half truth" I was referring to: only looking at the people who lose out from increased productivity, ignoring than the "bigger half" that benefit.

 

[Hygro]

Russell's critique is that structurally, mutually reducing work hours is not even an option. We could produce the same with half, and then everyone could either have more time off or do more other work, or even trade their half time to someone else working the pins so they can each full time one thing. Instead, our system produces a violent disruption where the conclusion is forgone: everyone has to work the same and until you can make that happen, you're SOL.

 

[Mise]

I understand Russell's critique; I respond that it only seems compelling because it ignores the fact that, on aggregate, we benefit from this state of affairs.

Russell's critique is identical to critiques of, say, comparative advantage. Indeed, comparative advantage is simply this exact process as applied to national production and international trade. And the consequences are the same: individual industries/people lose out, but on aggregate, free trade benefits both nations. Managing the disruption is both easier and more beneficial than not having the disruption and suffering never-increasing standards of living.

 

[Hygro]

It's compelling because it doesn't ignore the fact that, on aggregate, we could benefit even more from a modified state of affairs.

 

[Mise]

It doesn't make that case at all. In fact, nobody has. People are merely asserting that more leisure time would be great. Then, when the response comes, "actually people choose to buy more stuff instead of taking more time off", you respond by asserting that it is structurally impossible to do otherwise. I don't know how to respond to that... There seems to be numerous options to not buy stuff and work fewer hours, if people so choose. Instead of buying things, people could choose not to buy things. Instead of working longer hours, people could work shorter hours. Instead of living in a place with a high cost of living, people could live in places with a low cost of living. People don't do this, not because it is a structural impossibility, but because people want stuff and choose to buy stuff.

 

[Hygro]

LMK when you find an industry where 15 work hrs a week keeps you competitive.

 

[Mise]

First of all, I have literally done that.

Secondly, working 15 hours a week in a part-time job on minimum wage is entirely possible. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who do this already. Their lifestyles, homes, and creature comforts are commensurate with their earnings, of course.

Thirdly, where did this "competitive" come from? What do you mean by that, and why is this a requirement? You can clearly choose to earn less, work less, and have a lower standard of living -- perhaps a standard of living comparable to a pin maker's at the time of Russell's writing 80 years ago -- but of course this will leave you competitive with a factory worker from the 1930s, rather than an office worker from the 2010s.

EDIT: For the avoidance of doubt, I positively assert that if you want to live like a factory worker from the 1930s, with such life expectancy, education, access to food, heating, toilets, living space, electricity, transport and so on as a factory worker from the 1930s, then you can do this by working 15 hours a week on minimum wage.

 

[Samson]

First of all, I have literally done that.

Secondly, working 15 hours a week in a part-time job on minimum wage is entirely possible. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who do this already. Their lifestyles, homes, and creature comforts are commensurate with their earnings, of course.

Thirdly, where did this "competitive" come from? What do you mean by that, and why is this a requirement? You can clearly choose to earn less, work less, and have a lower standard of living -- perhaps a standard of living comparable to a pin maker's at the time of Russell's writing 80 years ago -- but of course this will leave you competitive with a factory worker from the 1930s, rather than an office worker from the 2010s.

If you can live in London and only work 15 hours a week you are pretty special. I do not know if you are in a very high value professional, own your flat/house or have some other special circumstances. However you must realize that this is just not an option for most people. I can pretty confidently say I cannot do that within an hour of London (sort of Cambridge / Oxford type range) and I have a fairly skilled job. Perhaps you could further north / west but in this area I do not see you affording rent on 15 min wage hours, and that is without eating let alone having "a standard of living comparable to a pin maker's at the time of Russell's writing 80 years ago", which probably includes a family.

 

[Hygro]

First of all, I have literally done that.

Secondly, working 15 hours a week in a part-time job on minimum wage is entirely possible. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who do this already. Their lifestyles, homes, and creature comforts are commensurate with their earnings, of course.

Thirdly, where did this "competitive" come from? What do you mean by that, and why is this a requirement? You can clearly choose to earn less, work less, and have a lower standard of living

Competitive comes from Russell:

The men still work eight hours,
there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men
previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.

In this example, none of the pin workers can choose to work less. Employees don't have that negotiating power. Can you start your own business and work 15 hours a week and make a 15 hour a week wage? Not likely unless you have a particularly lucky advantage to leverage. That leaves you with less choice of work. And it leaves you and everyone else trying to buy time with fewer work hours competing for the same limited set of part-time wage jobs (quite a specific institution) bidding down those wages.