Why do we still work 40/hrs a week?

Why have reductions in labor hours not kept track with increases in efficiency?

Congress made the 40 hour work week a law in 1940. That's almost a hundred years ago. Compare that to the period 1840-1940 where you started out at 6 days a week 14/hrs day potentially.

Why has progress stagnated?

>people keep working to buy more stuff user

And? Standard of living from 1815-1940 rose along with reduction in labor times. What gives now?

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Because now you must compete with people from fucking China.

>like just don't trade with China man like nigga just close them borders lol

The left lost the class struggle in the qest after Lenin fucked up with his special Russian way that contradicts all marxists theory and degenerated into literal retards who think that identity politics is a good idea and have no idea about economics beyond lol sharing is caring. Without any pressure, the bourgeois have no reason to reduce working hours.

Globalization and "equality". Now that emerging markets in Africa and Asia have been opened up, you now have to compete with people who are willing to work longer hours for a lower wage, as well as having to compete with your wife even though her competing is suicide for family life.

But that's the thing.........we don't even have a choice anymore. Because if we don't trade with China, other nations still will, and we'll end up getting left behind. Globalism isn't some dark conspiracy, it's the inevitable outcome of market pressures.

And Africans still shit out 6 kids while you're lucky to get one, maybe two.

We should have never taken our foot off their necks.

The economy should serve the people

The legal workweek is mostly a meme, what actually matters is the annual hours really worked per person.
For example Germans on average work 1363 hours which comes to a little under 4 hours per day. They're the lowest in the OECD but petty much the entire Western world is below 1800 hours/year or 5 hours/day, meaning below the legal workweek in the respective countries because of holidays and paid leave and other breaks.
Even American cucks only work just a bit less than 1800 hours, so they effectively have 35h weeks.

The normaltons need structure society would literally break down if people didn't have to put in their daily eight hours.

>Breakdown
You mean revolt or uprise. As I said here

Can you explain why employers insist on 8 hour days even though the work might necessitate far less hours? Especially in employment shitholes like Japan where even if you have literally nothing to do you have to stay until your boss leaves first or you're "lazy"

How go you arrive at those statistics

Your foot was never on anybody's neck pussy.

The birth rate in Africa is at 4.7 and declining along with improving living conditions. If you look at this map you'll see the correlation between wealth and birth rate, even in Africa. Give it 20 years, user

t. Mobutu mdembe

We'll literally be minority white countries by then

Thanks modernism

950 usd after taxes is plenty to survive and live a good life. in the materialistic west you won't live a "good" life. atleast not the "right" life. you can have all you need for this amount though.

demand for infinite growth doesn't care about laborer well-being go figure

Better petition your politicians to bump up the foreign aid then.

Well Japan is an especially stupid case and entire books have been written about salaryman culture and workplace discipline, but in general it's just standardization efficiency, you're supposed to cut costs and delays by having employee at the workplace at the same time. It's pretty annoying, yeah, and I'm not sure there are efficiency gains from this in the modern office now, but that's how it started.
Jobs that are outside the office/factory tend to have way more flexible hours.

No one represents the worker in congress or outside of it. No one with power is fighting for worker's rights, so the worker has no place at the negotiating table. As far as I can tell it is forbidden to even talk about "the worker" in the US; you'll get called a commie and ignored, or worse. Labor movements are growing though, slowly.

Which is pointless because that just helps them get rich enough to migrate here. This was well discussed ca 2012. We thought they'd stay here but all the middle class comes here instead of staying in their shit countries. We need to just go back to them dying in droves. By the time they're 1st world it will be 2300.

Gee, maybe it's because every company has to report the number of hours worked for taxation, administration and welfare purposes and states collect this data to analyze economic performance etc?

Sounds like a great economic system

In my company we all clock 40 hrs but actually work many variations- some 50, some ~35

There is no significant period in human history or prehistory where the global population has overall gone down due to people "dying in droves". This is pure fantasy.

I'm reminded of Graeber's article too:

libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber

In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. An objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits.

Report the fraud to the authorities and sue your employer for a bazillion dollars.

Shit premise to argue from 2bh

Gotta work to pay for the immigrants

The point is it's much more feasible to make them again so poor that they have to stay in their countries, rather than "in 200 years they'll be rich enough to stay home"

Ok, yeah, sure thing. Thanks for the advice.

That's not even close to feasible with modern transportation.

Whites are fucked.

Possibly, but the silly thing is that if you actually care about whites maintaining majorities about in their "own" countries there are only two realistic policies.

1. Massive amounts of foreign aid and generous trade policies.
2. Mitigating global warming as far as possible.

Amusing how the people that claim to care most about that goal outright reject the obvious empirical policy conclusions.

What an absurdly ignorant piece of text

Again, at this stage in the game more aid just helps more people come here. We're a long way from people wanting to stay in Africa.

That's just a made up claim, all the empirical evidence is that it lowers the birth rate.

How exactly do you plan to make them poorer than Eritreans who are the most desperate and eager migrants?

Eritreans are not even the poorest actually, a better example might be Somalians.

You dense motherfucker

>Africa 100 years ago: too poor/isolated for mass migration
>Africa today: wealthy enough to have money to come to Europe but not developed enough to want to stay home
>ca 2200: Africa is first world

To be fair half of that problem are white guilt leftists

It's you being dense, suggesting you have the magical powers to make Africa "undevelop" 100 years is beyond ridiculous.

What are you going to do? Magically do away with the invention of cars and buses and planes and modern ships but "just for Africa" through your powers of talking nonsensical shit on the Internet?

>>too poor/isolated for mass migration
This applied to the entire world including Western countries before the late 19th century (subsidized colonization efforts don't really count but even those were a minuscule fraction of the modern migratory rates) and basically stopped applying to any countries by the mid-20th century. Literally any third-worlder can afford an airplane ticket or a boat ride if they put their mind to it now, all those who bought a rusty old car could have bought a ticket instead.

if only we'd listened to macarthur and nuked the chinks...

divine retribution. People no longer worship the gods, they no longer praise them in hymm and rhyme for all that they are, so the gods forsaked man in turn.

Because the job market is the victim of a generations-spanning price fixing scheme. If the price of labor were properly valued, 25-30 hour work weeks would be standard because businesses would want to maximize the efficiency of their spending on labor. Instead, the value of labor is comically low, so the de facto standard work week is 40 hours, which is the peak productivity level rather than the peak efficiency level. Above 40 hours a week, net productivity actually goes down due to fatigue, overtime is only effective for periods of

>Give it 20 years
120 years would be a closer estimate

do you have a more indepth refutation

Work weeks would be far shorter if the world had somehow agreed to produce only what was made 50 years ago, using new technology to do so more efficiently, but nothing like that would ever happen. The reality is that capitalism encourages everyone to produce ever more, so with improved technology we make more with the same amount of work, rather than the same with less work

the gods can be fuckups too ya know, and everything has feelings and its own perspective. who is better suited to judge the gods than those who take council and suffer their
misdeeds?

>other nations still will, and we'll end up getting left behind
Feels goodman. Kys stupid amerishits and remove your fucking NATO bases

I think his point is that protectionism wouldn't actually help, it would just change the problem from fucking us over one way to fucking us over a different way.

WE

>who is better suited to judge the gods
only God can judge the gods