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Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? Improved health so we can all work more is

Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.

jltsiren 1y ago
That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.
- vitus 1y ago
  > 1371 hours Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above? Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more. With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
  - simongray 1y ago
    Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.
    - AStonesThrow 1y ago
      In the United States, full-time hours are in a range. Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there. A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances. Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
      - nradov 1y ago
        "Banker's Hours" used to mean roughly 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM because most retail branches were only open on weekdays during those hours. This was long before online banking or even ATMs.
      - flembat 1y ago
        In the UK You don't get paid for lunch which is why real white collar hours worked are more like eight to six or a lot longer. And typically you get to work through your unpaid lunch, while your contract says 37.5 hours and 'any other time necessary to complete your work'. At least that's been my experience for the last forty years or so.
      - vitus 1y ago
        > Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. I have seen it go one of several ways. - Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break) - Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30. - Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.
    - vitus 1y ago
      Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not. It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public. In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job. There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?" On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers. From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).
      - vitus 1y ago
        > It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public. Okay. It seems that the cited numbers are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... which in turn is derived from OECD data, which also allows you to view employees by bands of hours worked per week: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=DisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_HW%40DF_USL_WK_HRS&df[ag]=OECD.ELS.SAE&df[vs]=1.0&dq=FRA%2BDEU%2BUSA%2BGBR%2BNOR%2BSWE%2BDNK..._T.Y15T64....ICSE93_1....&pd=2010%2C&to[TIME_PERIOD]=false&vw=tb https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=DisseminateF... In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.
  - FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
    Don’t forget the expansion of the labour pool by women entering the workforce, who work more often part time. And more men work part time too, especially without a woman at home doing all chores like cleaning and cooking.
  - p_v_doom 1y ago
    > Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Denmark has (had) very strong labour movement and left-ish governments, though that has been changing over the last decade or so...
- JPLeRouzic 1y ago
  > "By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries" In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.
  - sentimentscan 1y ago
    >, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy. That is strange, by this chart the Italy have 1694 and Germany 1340. In Poland it is still 1814 in 2024 hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
    - JPLeRouzic 1y ago
      Damn, I looked again at my source and it is https://www.eurostaf.fr https://www.eurostaf.fr, not Eurostat. Sorry for not catching this. When at look at OECD, they give other numbers: Italy: 1723 France: 1501 Germany: 1347 https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?oecdcontrol-324c268e53-var1=DEU%7CITA%7CFRA https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?oe...
- ordinary 1y ago
  Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-in-denmark-by-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-... That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
rayiner 1y ago
> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  > But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff. Hold on. That's what tech is for right? certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??
  - sdeframond 1y ago
    Obviously it depends a lot but, as white-collars tech people, we can already work less. What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no? Again, that's a different story for poor people.
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      Yeah I guess it answers the question who wins (for now). for sure it's just a problem for copywriters who will need to work as roofers until the ever increasing retirement age because a thing trained on stolen text now does the copywriting. The tech people who made it happen can just chill and tell everybody how they can work less while snowboarding in the alps.
    - sudahtigabulan 1y ago
      > What's preventing us from going on sabbatical? Companies are not thrilled to hire people with long gaps in their resume, in my experience. (I have 2, 1, 1, years each gaps in mine.) You risk making yourself unhirable. And, if not now, at some point you will need money.
adastra22 1y ago
> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. Why? When was that the deal? I’m genuinely confused.
snapplebobapple 1y ago
That's not really how I have observed progress working. It seems to broadly do two things: convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries) Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing. Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.
anonporridge 1y ago
We are working less than ever, living longer in retirement, AND spending more of early life in education and training rather than working. Denmark in particular is seeing some great decreases in annual working hours for working people. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker?country=USA~DNK~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
illiac786 1y ago
I’m not sure I understand your point. You’re disappointed by progress? Get in line.

Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.

jltsiren 1y ago

That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.

vitus 1y ago
> 1371 hours Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above? Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more. With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
- simongray 1y ago
  Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    In the United States, full-time hours are in a range. Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there. A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances. Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
    - nradov 1y ago
      "Banker's Hours" used to mean roughly 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM because most retail branches were only open on weekdays during those hours. This was long before online banking or even ATMs.
    - flembat 1y ago
      In the UK You don't get paid for lunch which is why real white collar hours worked are more like eight to six or a lot longer. And typically you get to work through your unpaid lunch, while your contract says 37.5 hours and 'any other time necessary to complete your work'. At least that's been my experience for the last forty years or so.
    - vitus 1y ago
      > Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. I have seen it go one of several ways. - Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break) - Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30. - Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.
  - vitus 1y ago
    Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not. It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public. In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job. There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?" On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers. From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).
    - vitus 1y ago
      > It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public. Okay. It seems that the cited numbers are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... which in turn is derived from OECD data, which also allows you to view employees by bands of hours worked per week: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=DisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_HW%40DF_USL_WK_HRS&df[ag]=OECD.ELS.SAE&df[vs]=1.0&dq=FRA%2BDEU%2BUSA%2BGBR%2BNOR%2BSWE%2BDNK..._T.Y15T64....ICSE93_1....&pd=2010%2C&to[TIME_PERIOD]=false&vw=tb https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=DisseminateF... In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
  Don’t forget the expansion of the labour pool by women entering the workforce, who work more often part time. And more men work part time too, especially without a woman at home doing all chores like cleaning and cooking.
- p_v_doom 1y ago
  > Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Denmark has (had) very strong labour movement and left-ish governments, though that has been changing over the last decade or so...
JPLeRouzic 1y ago
> "By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries" In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.
- sentimentscan 1y ago
  >, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy. That is strange, by this chart the Italy have 1694 and Germany 1340. In Poland it is still 1814 in 2024 hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
  - JPLeRouzic 1y ago
    Damn, I looked again at my source and it is https://www.eurostaf.fr https://www.eurostaf.fr, not Eurostat. Sorry for not catching this. When at look at OECD, they give other numbers: Italy: 1723 France: 1501 Germany: 1347 https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?oecdcontrol-324c268e53-var1=DEU%7CITA%7CFRA https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?oe...
ordinary 1y ago
Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-in-denmark-by-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-... That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.

rayiner 1y ago

> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.

throwaway290 1y ago
> But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff. Hold on. That's what tech is for right? certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??
- sdeframond 1y ago
  Obviously it depends a lot but, as white-collars tech people, we can already work less. What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no? Again, that's a different story for poor people.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    Yeah I guess it answers the question who wins (for now). for sure it's just a problem for copywriters who will need to work as roofers until the ever increasing retirement age because a thing trained on stolen text now does the copywriting. The tech people who made it happen can just chill and tell everybody how they can work less while snowboarding in the alps.
  - sudahtigabulan 1y ago
    > What's preventing us from going on sabbatical? Companies are not thrilled to hire people with long gaps in their resume, in my experience. (I have 2, 1, 1, years each gaps in mine.) You risk making yourself unhirable. And, if not now, at some point you will need money.

adastra22 1y ago

> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. Why? When was that the deal? I’m genuinely confused.

snapplebobapple 1y ago

That's not really how I have observed progress working. It seems to broadly do two things: convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries) Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing. Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.

anonporridge 1y ago

We are working less than ever, living longer in retirement, AND spending more of early life in education and training rather than working. Denmark in particular is seeing some great decreases in annual working hours for working people. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker?country=USA~DNK~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

illiac786 1y ago

I’m not sure I understand your point. You’re disappointed by progress? Get in line.