11 ms·

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where

by briga 1mo ago

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

RugnirViking 1mo ago
> pretty consistently improved I can accept the premise that condiitions have improved, but not that it was consistent. It seems to me that it was anything but; more like extremely spiky. great depression, postwar economic miracle. Massive labor movements rose and fell, general strikes... Plus most countries have had several wars + revolutions in the last 200 years, including two world wars. Not all of those are to do with technology, but I also dont think technology wasnt indirectly responsible for the conditions that created some of them
- i000 1mo ago
  Such a good comment, I would also add how much our perception of technology lifting conditions is conflated with the increased ability of governments to steer the economy to smooth things over.
  - hparadiz 1mo ago
    All of those problems had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with economic mismanagement. And the commies were the worst at it. The US never had famines even at the worst of the great depression.
    - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
      How much of the last ~25 years of outsized capital returns in the US came from selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China?
      - scotty79 1mo ago
        You mean exploiting labor of Chinese poor for the benefit of American customers and investors?
        smallmancontrov 1mo ago
        American Labor: + cheap iPhones, - jobs American Capital: +++++++++ money America: ------- industry Behold the responsible economic management.
    - i000 1mo ago
      Economic mismanagement assumes there is economic management, and this is a very recent development. I would wager that we still do not know how to manage economies well in the long run - case in point US deficit and wealth inequality.
- Grombobulous 1mo ago
  The problem with these discussions is that it’s hard to control for the horrendously lower living standards of pre-industrial life where things like antibiotics and flushing toilets weren’t around. Certainly, many people still lack access to those things. But also, the median person essentially lives better than the monarchs did 400 years ago when it comes to some of the more important things in life. Sometimes, whether or not your power distance from your employer is high is less relevant than all the other important stuff in your life.
- mqus 1mo ago
  not only inconsistent over time, but also inconsistently distributed over people. rich people got richer (at least lately) and the less rich didn't get much richer (if at all)
georgemcbay 1mo ago
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years They've improved, but not consistently on human timescales. Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous. Things have, so far, trended better over time but they can be bad for whole generations and also past results do not guarantee future results. > The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
- palmotea 1mo ago
  > I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". We can and we will. If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think. > And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors". Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.
  - rafaelRiv 1mo ago
    > Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it. We will see in 5 years ! I think you highly overestimate llms
    - nubg 1mo ago
      Funnily enough, the parent made the point that people probably overestimate their position in the future pecking order, and did so sarcastically, which you seemed to have completely missed (probably due to being ESL), something even a current LLM would easily "understand", thus proving his point.
siavosh 1mo ago
I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions.
- cluckindan 1mo ago
  Everything changed with floating currency. Inflation became a tool for centralization of ownership.
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
    The Robber Barons were able to r>g their empires just fine in gold-backed currency. The Cantillon Pump is only one of several major "rich get richer" mechanisms in the economy. It is not the most important, and it does not consistently run in the same direction (wages can inflate faster than assets).
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    Inflation is caused by deficit spending. It is a tool for government to increase spending without raising taxes.
    - cluckindan 1mo ago
      I believe inflation is caused by people with too much money spending it frivolously and overpaying for everything.
    - barrkel 1mo ago
      Inflation is an increase in the cost of living. It can be caused by deficit spending. It can also be caused by supply shocks. For example, if you restrict building new housing, the price of housing will increase, both rents and house prices. If you tariff imports, a basket including those goods will rise in price to the degree those imports are not substituable. If you start a war in the Middle East, oil prices will rise, and increased energy costs can feed into lots of different things, raising prices.
janalsncm 1mo ago
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.
- VirusNewbie 1mo ago
  The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this. You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
    The data that deflate with CPI? The metric notorious for laundering forced substitution into voluntary substitution? The American Dream is to Owner's Imputed Rent a house? I love BLS, they do a lot of thankless work very well, but if you give someone else control of the inflation basket you are letting them pick any slope for these graphs that they want. Don't do that. It's the economic equivalent of handing your passport to an employer, talking about your net worth in public, or signing a blank check. Just don't. Yeah, we're all busy, you probably don't have time to construct a basket more sophisticated than "gold" or "housing" -- but even though those both have big problems, they still aren't as bad long-term as CPI. Or maybe you disagree and think the CPI basket and hedonic adjustment methodology compounds better for your purposes, but if so you should be able to roughly account for the dramatic difference and articulate why.
  - janalsncm 1mo ago
    “Upper middle class” has nothing to do with it. In 1950, the median household could buy a house with 2 years of income. That is, 50% of households could do this. Today, the median house costs $400k. Only the top 12-14% of households make 200k per year. So proportionally, the % of households that have the same buying power as a median 1950s household has shrunk roughly 4x.
Fricken 1mo ago
Labour conditions in the capitalist west 200 years ago were some of the worst in history, so it's easy to make yourself look good in comparison.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  Now compare that against: 1. working conditions before 200 years ago 2. working conditions under feudalism and communism 3. explain why ships laden with scores of millions of people came to the US, and went back empty
  - Fricken 1mo ago
    Before 200 years ago we lived as hunter gatherers, and we did it sustainably for millions of years, longer than we've been human. 200 years is nothing. It's nothing, unless that is, we try to think about what the mess we're currently making will look like 200 years from now. Then 200 years from now is a terrifying prospect. It has to be sustainable. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      > Before 200 years ago we lived as hunter gatherers Agriculture ended that thousands of years ago. Even the Indians practiced farming. So did the Pilgrims, and the first settlement, Jamestown. Hunter gathering can only sustain a small population.
      - Fricken 1mo ago
        The important part is that it's sustainable.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        Never mind the extinction of the large fauna after the Ice Age. We don't know for sure, but a leading suspect is predation by humans.
heylook 1mo ago
You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they only sorta sometimes were able to retrain for the new jobs, and the working conditions in those new jobs were atrocious, exactly because they were new enough that we didn't yet have safety regulations for them. It was only their children who eventually saw any improvement in working/living conditions, and it was only because of all the absolutely awful things that happened to their parents. Safety regulations are written in blood. It only looks like consistent improvement if you zoom out to a level that obscures intra-generation experiences. At the level of the actual human beings subjected to the turbulence, it was awful.
- bunderbunder 1mo ago
  I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up. Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs. And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless.
- mplewis 1mo ago
  Exactly. Workplaces became safer and more equitable to the laborers despite technological advances, not because of them.
- briga 1mo ago
  Awful compared to what though? To our modern perspectives yes, but for subsistence farmers working in the fields 16 hours a day and rarely far away from starvation, life in a factory might not seem so bad. After all, wages were far worse before the factories and wage growth was almost non-existent.
noosphr 1mo ago
2026 - 200 = 1826 Yeah no. It's only since 1950 that conditions improved for everyone. Before then everything from sewage, to coal smoke, to chronically low wages made life worse for everyone involved. The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century.
- nubg 1mo ago
  > The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century. I find this topic very interesting, do you have any reading you could recomment on this?
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
    Oliver Twist. If you want a high level economic perspective, try A Brief History of Equality by Piketty.
  - eli_gottlieb 1mo ago
    _The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844_ would be a classic on the subject: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306
- prewett 1mo ago
  Early in the Industrial Revolution people voluntarily moved from the countryside to the cities despite all that, so apparently a lot of them thought it was an improvement. Some of the cities were proud of the soot, since it showed that they were participating in Progress. You can see some of this repeating in China. Migrant workers move to the cities because, while what they can earn is low, it is a lot higher than subsistence farming in the countryside. "The Last Train Home" (documentary) follows such a family, although to understand the tragedy in the documentary you need to understand that Mao created the hukou system to prevent exactly this, which means that their children can only receive state education in the countryside.
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
regularization 1mo ago
The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse. Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  This corresponds with the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government. > the hourly wage This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc. The TEC is often worth up to 150% of the wages.
  - anonymars 1mo ago
    FRED shows Federal outlays as a percent of GDP broadly leveling off and declining. 2008 GFC and COVID being transient exceptions https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S Meanwhile here's employee compensation* over GDP (both seasonally adjusted) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h Any chance you can share the sources for your assertions? * includes benefits as per https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook/pdf/chapter-10.pdf https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook/pd...
    - s1artibartfast 1mo ago
      Comp over GDP is slightly down, but is still increasing overall, even when adjusted for inflation. See my sibling post.
      - anonymars 1mo ago
        Not since the seventies which was the assertion in question
orcasushi 1mo ago
Although that's true, is 200 years ago really the baseline we want to use for judging working conditions? Two hundred years ago meant widespread child labor, harsh factory conditions, little worker protection, and slavery or serfdom. Add to it the onset of Industrial Revolution. Modern studies indicate people in the dark ages worked 6 hours a day: Ironically a better baseline!
- fugaziboutit 1mo ago
  I don't believe that "6 hours a day" is an answer any historian would give when asked how much workers in any period in history worked. There have been indications that there were approximately 150 days per year which were most active for medieval farmers, but if I had a time machine I wouldn't stay there very long if my desire was to experience good working conditions.

by briga 1mo ago

RugnirViking 1mo ago

> pretty consistently improved I can accept the premise that condiitions have improved, but not that it was consistent. It seems to me that it was anything but; more like extremely spiky. great depression, postwar economic miracle. Massive labor movements rose and fell, general strikes... Plus most countries have had several wars + revolutions in the last 200 years, including two world wars. Not all of those are to do with technology, but I also dont think technology wasnt indirectly responsible for the conditions that created some of them

i000 1mo ago
Such a good comment, I would also add how much our perception of technology lifting conditions is conflated with the increased ability of governments to steer the economy to smooth things over.
- hparadiz 1mo ago
  All of those problems had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with economic mismanagement. And the commies were the worst at it. The US never had famines even at the worst of the great depression.
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
    How much of the last ~25 years of outsized capital returns in the US came from selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China?
    - scotty79 1mo ago
      You mean exploiting labor of Chinese poor for the benefit of American customers and investors?
      - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
        American Labor: + cheap iPhones, - jobs American Capital: +++++++++ money America: ------- industry Behold the responsible economic management.
  - i000 1mo ago
    Economic mismanagement assumes there is economic management, and this is a very recent development. I would wager that we still do not know how to manage economies well in the long run - case in point US deficit and wealth inequality.
Grombobulous 1mo ago
The problem with these discussions is that it’s hard to control for the horrendously lower living standards of pre-industrial life where things like antibiotics and flushing toilets weren’t around. Certainly, many people still lack access to those things. But also, the median person essentially lives better than the monarchs did 400 years ago when it comes to some of the more important things in life. Sometimes, whether or not your power distance from your employer is high is less relevant than all the other important stuff in your life.
mqus 1mo ago
not only inconsistent over time, but also inconsistently distributed over people. rich people got richer (at least lately) and the less rich didn't get much richer (if at all)

georgemcbay 1mo ago

> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years They've improved, but not consistently on human timescales. Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous. Things have, so far, trended better over time but they can be bad for whole generations and also past results do not guarantee future results. > The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".

palmotea 1mo ago
> I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". We can and we will. If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think. > And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors". Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.
- rafaelRiv 1mo ago
  > Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it. We will see in 5 years ! I think you highly overestimate llms
  - nubg 1mo ago
    Funnily enough, the parent made the point that people probably overestimate their position in the future pecking order, and did so sarcastically, which you seemed to have completely missed (probably due to being ESL), something even a current LLM would easily "understand", thus proving his point.

siavosh 1mo ago

I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions.

cluckindan 1mo ago
Everything changed with floating currency. Inflation became a tool for centralization of ownership.
- smallmancontrov 1mo ago
  The Robber Barons were able to r>g their empires just fine in gold-backed currency. The Cantillon Pump is only one of several major "rich get richer" mechanisms in the economy. It is not the most important, and it does not consistently run in the same direction (wages can inflate faster than assets).
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  Inflation is caused by deficit spending. It is a tool for government to increase spending without raising taxes.
  - cluckindan 1mo ago
    I believe inflation is caused by people with too much money spending it frivolously and overpaying for everything.
  - barrkel 1mo ago
    Inflation is an increase in the cost of living. It can be caused by deficit spending. It can also be caused by supply shocks. For example, if you restrict building new housing, the price of housing will increase, both rents and house prices. If you tariff imports, a basket including those goods will rise in price to the degree those imports are not substituable. If you start a war in the Middle East, oil prices will rise, and increased energy costs can feed into lots of different things, raising prices.

janalsncm 1mo ago

> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.

VirusNewbie 1mo ago
The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this. You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.
- smallmancontrov 1mo ago
  The data that deflate with CPI? The metric notorious for laundering forced substitution into voluntary substitution? The American Dream is to Owner's Imputed Rent a house? I love BLS, they do a lot of thankless work very well, but if you give someone else control of the inflation basket you are letting them pick any slope for these graphs that they want. Don't do that. It's the economic equivalent of handing your passport to an employer, talking about your net worth in public, or signing a blank check. Just don't. Yeah, we're all busy, you probably don't have time to construct a basket more sophisticated than "gold" or "housing" -- but even though those both have big problems, they still aren't as bad long-term as CPI. Or maybe you disagree and think the CPI basket and hedonic adjustment methodology compounds better for your purposes, but if so you should be able to roughly account for the dramatic difference and articulate why.
- janalsncm 1mo ago
  “Upper middle class” has nothing to do with it. In 1950, the median household could buy a house with 2 years of income. That is, 50% of households could do this. Today, the median house costs $400k. Only the top 12-14% of households make 200k per year. So proportionally, the % of households that have the same buying power as a median 1950s household has shrunk roughly 4x.

Fricken 1mo ago

Labour conditions in the capitalist west 200 years ago were some of the worst in history, so it's easy to make yourself look good in comparison.

WalterBright 1mo ago
Now compare that against: 1. working conditions before 200 years ago 2. working conditions under feudalism and communism 3. explain why ships laden with scores of millions of people came to the US, and went back empty
- Fricken 1mo ago
  Before 200 years ago we lived as hunter gatherers, and we did it sustainably for millions of years, longer than we've been human. 200 years is nothing. It's nothing, unless that is, we try to think about what the mess we're currently making will look like 200 years from now. Then 200 years from now is a terrifying prospect. It has to be sustainable. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    > Before 200 years ago we lived as hunter gatherers Agriculture ended that thousands of years ago. Even the Indians practiced farming. So did the Pilgrims, and the first settlement, Jamestown. Hunter gathering can only sustain a small population.
    - Fricken 1mo ago
      The important part is that it's sustainable.
      - WalterBright 1mo ago
        Never mind the extinction of the large fauna after the Ice Age. We don't know for sure, but a leading suspect is predation by humans.

heylook 1mo ago

You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they only sorta sometimes were able to retrain for the new jobs, and the working conditions in those new jobs were atrocious, exactly because they were new enough that we didn't yet have safety regulations for them. It was only their children who eventually saw any improvement in working/living conditions, and it was only because of all the absolutely awful things that happened to their parents. Safety regulations are written in blood. It only looks like consistent improvement if you zoom out to a level that obscures intra-generation experiences. At the level of the actual human beings subjected to the turbulence, it was awful.

bunderbunder 1mo ago
I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up. Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs. And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless.
mplewis 1mo ago
Exactly. Workplaces became safer and more equitable to the laborers despite technological advances, not because of them.
briga 1mo ago
Awful compared to what though? To our modern perspectives yes, but for subsistence farmers working in the fields 16 hours a day and rarely far away from starvation, life in a factory might not seem so bad. After all, wages were far worse before the factories and wage growth was almost non-existent.

noosphr 1mo ago

2026 - 200 = 1826 Yeah no. It's only since 1950 that conditions improved for everyone. Before then everything from sewage, to coal smoke, to chronically low wages made life worse for everyone involved. The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century.

nubg 1mo ago
> The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century. I find this topic very interesting, do you have any reading you could recomment on this?
- smallmancontrov 1mo ago
  Oliver Twist. If you want a high level economic perspective, try A Brief History of Equality by Piketty.
- eli_gottlieb 1mo ago
  _The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844_ would be a classic on the subject: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306
prewett 1mo ago
Early in the Industrial Revolution people voluntarily moved from the countryside to the cities despite all that, so apparently a lot of them thought it was an improvement. Some of the cities were proud of the soot, since it showed that they were participating in Progress. You can see some of this repeating in China. Migrant workers move to the cities because, while what they can earn is low, it is a lot higher than subsistence farming in the countryside. "The Last Train Home" (documentary) follows such a family, although to understand the tragedy in the documentary you need to understand that Mao created the hukou system to prevent exactly this, which means that their children can only receive state education in the countryside.
- smallmancontrov 1mo ago

regularization 1mo ago

The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse. Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.

WalterBright 1mo ago
This corresponds with the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government. > the hourly wage This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc. The TEC is often worth up to 150% of the wages.
- anonymars 1mo ago
  FRED shows Federal outlays as a percent of GDP broadly leveling off and declining. 2008 GFC and COVID being transient exceptions https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S Meanwhile here's employee compensation* over GDP (both seasonally adjusted) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h Any chance you can share the sources for your assertions? * includes benefits as per https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook/pdf/chapter-10.pdf https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook/pd...
  - s1artibartfast 1mo ago
    Comp over GDP is slightly down, but is still increasing overall, even when adjusted for inflation. See my sibling post.
    - anonymars 1mo ago
      Not since the seventies which was the assertion in question

orcasushi 1mo ago

Although that's true, is 200 years ago really the baseline we want to use for judging working conditions? Two hundred years ago meant widespread child labor, harsh factory conditions, little worker protection, and slavery or serfdom. Add to it the onset of Industrial Revolution. Modern studies indicate people in the dark ages worked 6 hours a day: Ironically a better baseline!

fugaziboutit 1mo ago
I don't believe that "6 hours a day" is an answer any historian would give when asked how much workers in any period in history worked. There have been indications that there were approximately 150 days per year which were most active for medieval farmers, but if I had a time machine I wouldn't stay there very long if my desire was to experience good working conditions.