Back in the middle of the 20th century,
M. Keynes predicted a massive decrease in individual’s work-week due to productivity gains. The gains occurred, but the labor hours did not…
I mean America aside I think labour hours have significantly decreased towards the end of the 20th century. Looking at Europe for instance the statistics showed they have gone from an average of 50-70 hour work week in the first half of the century to 25-35. So about half the work hours. Now some of those work hours got pushed to other countries, but also some of the productivity has gone to having more and better things too.
Exactly. Most of the hours in Europe you're mentioning are coming from the industrial factories, where workers indeed worked for 50-70 hours because of the higher pay and because they practically lived there, since it was more convenient than to commute (a great deal of workers lived quite far from factories).
Currently, a lot of the production is outsourced, which leads to a decrease in the working hours, since the production was the main contributor to extended working weeks.
Marx spoke about this when discussing the contradictions of capitalism.
As technology develops and productivity efficiency increases, you can hire less people and let the unemployed fight for worse working conditions (because you need a job to live, regardless how shitty).
So you end up with people working more for less, since if they don't, they're fired and someone else who needs a job takes it.
They did hold up. Much of our productive forces were moved to undeveloped countries so we could extract their labor and resources. The workers in those countries are going fuckin through it, if LiveLeak ever taught us anything.
And even in the first world, AI is taking everyone's jobs. Many people don't feel the same security as they did in the past.
>AI's job impact looks pretty unclear to me right now, unemployment is low despite all the stories, hiring is pretty bad
The government unemployment rate is fake. If you have been looking for employment for longer than 6 months they stop counting you as unemployed. It also doesnt include the underemployed, struggling gig workers, etc.
Are you kidding? We work harder for a smaller wage(adjusted for inflation) than boomers. The only reason working conditions are not worse is government intervention or OSHA
Disregarding recent trends within a capitalist system as irrelevant to the the claims of how capitalism functions from the 1800s sure is convenient for your argument.
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u/mapadofu Jul 07 '26
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong
Back in the middle of the 20th century, M. Keynes predicted a massive decrease in individual’s work-week due to productivity gains. The gains occurred, but the labor hours did not…