A few generations ago kids worked at 10, there were no weekly limit, no weekends, no vacations, no security, no form of compensation if you get injured/die while working, no pension, no sick leave &c.
In first world countries we never worked so little for so much comfort.
> By the act of 1892 one day in the week, not necessarily Sunday, had to be given for entire absence from work, in addition to eight recognized annual holidays
> Children may not be employed in industrial work before 12 years, and then only 8 hours a day at work
> The first attempt to secure legislation regulating factory employment related to the hours of labour, which were very long - from twelve to thirteen hours a day.
> Boys of 13 may be employed in certain work underground, but under 16 may not be employed more than 8 hours in the 24 from bank to bank. A law of 1905 provided for miners a 9 hours' day and in 1907 an 8 hours' day from the foot of the entrance gallery back to the same point.
With women's entry into the workforce plus the 1964 Hart-Cellar Act's lifting of immigration quotas the workforce more than doubled in the 70s. At that rate how was work compensation ever supposed to keep up? I'm not saying the trade-off wasn't worth it, but you can't 2-3x the labor pool and then pretend we don't know why wages decreased while competition for scare resources increased.
Knowing a reason for wages to drop is not the same as it being acceptable.
Over the 20th century here, work hours have slashed in half. Henry Ford introduced the 5 day work week in 1926, prior to that it was 6.
You think the average farmer in the late 1800's worked 40-50 hours? What about the average coal miner, or factory worker?
How much time was spent in meetings, how much time preparing food, fixing clothes, patrolling territory, scouting things out, making home improvements etc.
If the modern person only worked for food, then I think a few hours a week would suffice.
I don't get what is with these snarky replies all over Hacker News these days. His point was that people work a lot. Quarreling over whether some people some time during history has worked even more is missing it.
Doing a load of laundry on a hand washer and scrubbing board takes forever and is pretty brutal. So is getting up super early to put coal in the furnace (and then keeping it going all day every day). Running a stove you have to load with wood means starting really early. Churning butter by hand. Possibly grinding flour by hand. Making everyone's clothes by hand - when the sewing machine came out it made Singer incredibly rich because it saved so many women so many hours sewing their family's clothes by hand.
Nearest extant comparison would probably be Amish women.
Average hours worked has gone down steadily over the last two centuries:
> 1830 69.1 hours per week
> 1880 60.7
> 1929 50.6
> 1988 42.4
> As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time.
Do you have anything supporting this claim? The facts say otherwise: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
It's easy and fun to be pessimistic, but to claim that people today work more than ever is ludicrous.
Not to mention most of our time. People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever.