97 years (since Ford implemented the 5 day week for his workers) is not substantially less than 100, and it’s been 115 years since the first textile mills in NJ instated a 5 day week so their Jewish employees didn’t have to work on their sabbath, either.
In VA in 1607 the work week was 36 hours.
That’s because there were no slaves here at that time. The Virginia Company required the colonizers to work 6 hours a day, 6 days a week *for the company*. That didn’t include growing food, building houses, standing guard, etc. Only labour that produced value for shareholders like looking for gold.
Fair point -- it was later in the 17th century than I was remembering. Still, pre-industrial labour laws don't map to post-industrial conditions all that cleanly.
There has been so much tech made in the past that would make it possible for people to work half the hours and produce the same amount but it's only used to work the same hours and produce more than needed, AI won't be any different
This is a conversation I wish we'd see a lot more of. The only thing wrong with technology eliminating jobs is that we've structured our economy to require almost everyone to *have* a job on pain of starvation and homelessness.
But there's nothing necessary or noble about that-- trust fund kids are exempt and nobody weeps for them. As technology improves, at some point we could make everyone exempt from the need to work to live. Or we could make a few people extra-superrich and continue to punish everyone else.
The idea that any C-suite member would look at a 20% increase in productivity and say "take that day off" instead of "we can get rid of 20% of our workforce" is ludicrous.
The workers will be paid less, as the oligarchs will deem justifiably so, for their four day workweek as now the powers that be will demand that money as needed to hire a crew to maintain the AI they feel beholden to, for inoculating them against the working class.
Shocking we have the same “40 hour work week” as someone in the 80s who was conducting business over a fax machine. Productivity increases alone weren’t enough, we need collective action.
In the long run it's more likely that AI improves to a point where most white collar knowledge based jobs are destroyed, while corresponding improvements in robotics and automation destroy blue collar jobs, leaving most people without jobs.
One of my teachers told me (C.1984) that our future would mean more leisure time thanks to computers. It never occurred to anyone that we’d have to work harder for longer to keep up with IT.
AI is just a management tool. Like anything management wants, you don’t unionize it, you negotiate its use with an implicit threat of sabotage and violence.
But not vacations. I found it really interesting that the U.S. unions deliberately didn’t push for mandatory vacations for all like Europe and kept it for their own negotiations with individual companies.
Rich people always love to present this song and dance of “if this is successful then working people will benefit immensely” when their plan is always using it to hurt working people one way or another.
There's nothing a capitalist hates more than seeing someone else relax. They want to force that person to do more work the capitalist can exploit for profit.
As I recall, computers were supposed to increase efficiency and shorten work hours and here I am now with the ability and expectation to be accessible 24/7 by my office.
Man if only there were studies that told us that a 4 day work week was a productivity boost with out AI, maybe ones that have been happening fairly regularly every couple of years for decades.
Or at least that a 4 day work week didn't hurt productivity while improving nearly everything else.
There has been enough trials of four day working weeks to show that it increases productivity and happiness for everyone involved. That most businesses in the world won’t do it tells you more about how they feel about their employees than anything else.
Yep! It comes back (like many things) to poor management. I have known managers who couldn't imagine ever managing remotely -- until they had to do it and found they liked it, and it works, and they could actually *trust* their team.
AI is 10000% not going to replace humans. Not with our current limitations. And news outlets should definitely stop using AI as a buzzword for their articles. It's cancerous. I hate it.
My experience with AI: I told Github Copilot to create a list in Python, and it created a dictionary. Useless.
Comments
In VA in 1607 the work week was 36 hours.
1607 labour practices don't really map well to more recent centuries -- for one thing, I suspect the 36 hour measure does not include slave work.
Not sure what happens after that.
- the typical capitalist
(That's all I got for an AI union joke)
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/17/1194467863/europe-vacation-holiday-paid-time-off
https://apnews.com/article/starbucks-workers-united-union-lawsuit-israel-palestinian-f212a994fef67f122854a4df7e5d13f5
Or at least that a 4 day work week didn't hurt productivity while improving nearly everything else.
My experience with AI: I told Github Copilot to create a list in Python, and it created a dictionary. Useless.