In Asia it’s even worse. Standard work day in China for example is 9-9-6 which 9am to 9pm six days a week - remember that next time you see China living in 2070 propaganda. Six days a week is still de facto standard in most Asian countries.
The best part is that the actual work output is actually worse than five day 9-5 but I guess you have to keep the masses too busy for self awareness even if it costs economically. I’d remote contract with many teams in Shenzen, Tokyo and Hochiminh city and its incredibly how little actual work they get done with these crazy hours and its not due to lack of employee skill. It’s stupid.
From 2020 to 2025 I worked maybe two hours a day while remote. Made millions for my company but I didn’t have to work continuously through out the day. It was a nice existence. Went through two layoffs in that time but I finally had to take a job in an actual work environment.
#meirl
It should be illegal to call it 9-5 when employers don’t pay you for your lunch break. It’s like when Subway got caught with their not that long foot longs. It’s BS. They have the nerve to expect us to be honest when they can’t even be honest about how they’re going to shill us out of work-life balance. Capitalism is just modern slavery y’all. It’s time for this charade to end.
monkey’s paw:
you get paid for lunch break but in return, your hourly wage diminishes by 12%, sothat your total salary stays the same.
Speaking as an American, we’d totally fall for it, too
I think people are confused by seeing influencers and/or rich people and thinking what they have is normal.
In the 1500s it was sun-up to sun-down, 6 days a week for the work outdoors. Once the sun set, nothing could really be done. If you were a typical peasant you couldn’t even afford to keep a candle lit. So, people went back to their one-room huts with their livestock in the same room and slept and/or waited for morning. They didn’t have to work Sundays, but they were absolutely required to attend church on Sundays, so it wasn’t a free day. There were other days off, but many of them were days where you had to do a certain prescribed activity.
In the early 1800s it was 12 hours of work, 6 days a week. Industrial era lighting technology meant that work could continue after the sun had set, so there were no winter days where you only worked 8 hours. Also, because this was the era of the factory, people had to commute to the factory and back, so if you were lucky you had a full 10 or 11 hours when you weren’t working or commuting. If you wanted to sleep for 8 hours, you’d have 2-3 hours to do your cooking, eating, cleaning, bathing, mending, socializing, etc.
Thanks to tireless and bloody protesting by labour unions, 6 days of 12 hours each was shortened to 5 days of 8 hours each. It started in Chicago. The “Haymarket Affair” was a protest that led to a riot which led to public hangings. But, eventually, as a result of that, the work day was shortened to only 8 hours. Then, in the years that followed, a 2 day weekend became standard.
It might not feel like it, but your ancestors would be jealous about how much free time you have these days. Your distant, peasant ancestors might actually have had fewer work hours. But, they only stopped working when it was too dark to do anything, and then they basically sat or slept in a tiny, drafty, stuffy, one-room hut along with their livestock until the sun came up.
If we kill and eat the rich and use their bones as decorations, it would be possible to keep a bit more of the value of our labour. But, we’re nowhere near a situation where we can all live like the rich. Someone does still need to plant the food, harvest the food, pump the oil, cast the iron, smelt the aluminum, keep track of the shipping, etc. Life is hard, and has always been hard.
Interestingly, the one glaring exception to this is hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They had to work less hours than modern day workers. Hunter gathered groups tended to evolve cultural practices that lead to constant population. When you’re living off the land, the land only gives what it gives. When your area is already near its population carrying capacity, there isn’t a ton to gain from putting in extra work. You go and gather what you need for the day, and that’s it. Getting extra will just mean more food that is rapidly spoiling, leaving less for tomorrow. Better to just sit in camp, sit around the fire, sing some songs, and conserve some calories.
Someone does still need to plant the food, harvest the food, pump the oil, cast the iron, smelt the aluminum, keep track of the shipping, etc. Life is hard
This is only true because capitalism is limiting technology to the point where all these mundane tasks can’t be automated or improved with tech so that it can be possible for all to self-maintain. Yes, not that simple and yeah someone would need to program things and maintain things, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to believe that humanity can waste so much time and money on something as unethical as AI but somehow can’t come up with technology to let people maintain crops without having every piece of the puzzle we have now.
They can do it. Everybody talks about how crazy it is about how in such a short time span we’ve gone from flying planes to landing on the moon and it is ridiculous. It’s not that inconceivable to believe that we can come up with tech to better maintain society beyond what we have now. People want to keep the status quo because they limit their minds to what has been.
Capitalism dictates that profit means everything. We don’t need pot holes to be filled every other year just because people get a job. People shouldn’t be dependent on such a system to survive. Pot holes can be filled with a solution that will not dissipate over time but capitalism doesn’t want that. It wants to make sure there’s a demand to pay someone despite the penalty of the many.
This is only true because capitalism is limiting technology
Capitalism is trying as hard as possible to replace people with machines, but there are a lot of jobs that machines simply can’t do.
to landing on the moon
Hundreds of millions of people paid the equivalent of thousands of dollars each for a dozen men to be able to walk on the moon. “Walking on the moon” isn’t some activity that anybody can do now. It was effectively a stunt to show that it could be done
Capitalism dictates that profit means everything.
Only in the eyes of communists.
To your last point - do you believe that profit is not valued above all else in our current society?
I’d like to understand your view here further if you’re happy to elaborate
do you believe that profit is not valued above all else in our current society?
Of course not. Just look at a typical commercial. You’re supposed to drink coke because it’s an activity you can do with friends. You’re supposed to buy a truck because it lets you get outdoors and go fishing. You’re supposed to buy makeup so that you can look glamorous for your friends and eligible men.
If profit were the most valued thing, these commercials would be all about how drinking coke makes you more focused so you can earn more money, and how your truck allows you to take on a side hustle to make more money.
The advertisers don’t give a shit about all that stuff, you’re supposed to buy things to make the company money. If there was no money to he gained, they wouldn’t sell and advertise it. They’re just trying to convince you you need product x for activity y
Someone does still need to plant the food, harvest the food, pump the oil, cast the iron, smelt the aluminum, keep track of the shipping, etc.
and herein lies the paradoxy. how is that compatible with there being an unemployment crisis at the same time?
Because illegal immigrants were willing to work under conditions and for pay that American citizens would never put up with.
I think it’s more likely that people saw their parents or grandparents living on a single income, so between two people there was a lot more “free” time. When one adult is managing the home, and the other is making money, both get to be more off duty after work. The grocery shopping, meal prepping, social calendar finagling, and cleaning were happening simultaneously with the money making job.
Managing a household is a whole ass job and a lot of people are expected to do it on top of their day job and that’s why we feel like we have no time. I don’t think we’re comparing ourselves to celebrities, just our own family members.
I think it’s more likely that people saw their parents or grandparents living on a single income
If their parents were white and American and this was just after WWII, that’s possible.
Just after WWII the US was basically the only advanced economy in the world that hadn’t been flattened by war. While European and Asian states had had all their factories and cities bombed, the only attack on the US was an attack on strictly military targets in a far-off place that wasn’t even a state yet. In addition, during the Great Depression FDR put into place all kinds of New Deal policies that blunted the power of the ultra rich and strengthened the power of workers. So, when WWII ended a lot of workers benefited from strong unions and weak rich people. In addition, there were now modern grocery stores, running water, electrical appliances, etc. so a housewife had a much easier time of it than her great-grandmother might have in the early 1900s.
That period wasn’t typical though. It definitely wasn’t like that in the Gilded Age, the 1920s. The 1930s had the Great Depression. The 1940s of course had WWII. Before that, in the 1800s and early 1900s it was often common for a woman to stay home while her husband worked. But, she had a pretty gruelling job. She had to get groceries (or garden (which was closer to farming than the hobby people have today)) and cook, but without any modern appliances, including a refrigerator. That also meant creating a lot of preserves or canning. She had to do laundry with a washboard and soap. Cleaning meant a broom, mop and bucket. Cleaning also meant making your own cleaning supplies from scratch. Clothes were expensive, so a lot of time was spent either sewing new clothes at home, or mending old ones. So, even though it was 1 income for 2 adults, both adults were doing a really gruelling day of work, not like the nicer version of that from the 1950s.
So, while it’s true that some women today “manage a household” on top of a 9-5 job, modern appliances and stores mean that they do a fraction of the work that their great-great-great-grandmothers did.
Oddly, though the work type has changed, there’s only about 5 hours less a week of housework than there was in 1900. Heck that’s less then 45 minutes a day difference, even with everything you mentioned.
I agree the work is far less physically demanding, but modern standards dictate about the same amount of time burden, the difference lies mainly in that men have picked up 13 more of those hours a week, and that it’s more rare for only one adult to work outside the home.
That seems extremely hard to believe to me.
Looking at the actual study, something suspicious is this, from Table 3:
1920s farmwives reported spending only 3.9 hours per week taking care of children and adults. That’s less than an hour a day. Does that really sound reasonable? A child can be ignored except for a brief, less than 1 hour period each day? My guess is that in the 1920s tthere was a lot of X+childcare. Like, making a meal while also keeping tabs on the children, maybe holding one on the hip if it was too young, or having them help out if they were old enough. Or, something similar while cleaning or mending clothing. This wouldn’t show up in extra hours of work done. But, it would make the work more challenging and less fun. It’s often fun to cook for people. It’s much less fun to cook for people while also wrangling multiple kids at the same time.
Another big difference between 1920 and 1965 is that time spent “Purchasing, management, travel, other” went way up. Purchasing, i.e. shopping, is clearly something that has to be done. But, it is also sometimes a leisure activity. If you just purely count it as housework, then mindlessly scrolling for things on amazon.com is a household chore.
The paper is really short on details. I’d like to see what the breakdown of tasks actually was. If “housework” includes things like reading a kid a bedtime story, scrolling for deals on amazon, and going to a kid’s soccer game, then sure I can imagine that “housework” hasn’t really gone down. But, I think the reality is that the true “work” part of housework really has gone down.
In Table 3, the only one that actually breaks down activity by time and compares different time periods, the latest date mentioned is 1965, 60 years ago. I think even by 1965 the amount of drudge work was down by a lot. But, I imagine that it has also gone down much, much more in 2025.
Back in the 50s they thought people in the year 2000 would only work 20 hours a week and the biggest problem would be too much free time.
If we don’t make permanent retirement for all of humanity a goal we won’t get there. But the unifying factor for every political party is MOAR JOBZ. Hell, even the ancoms think people should work.
And we basically did that with agriculture already. In industrialized nations less than 10% when just a couple hundred years ago it was over 90%.
Back in the 50s they thought people in the year 2000 would only work 20 hours a week and the biggest problem would be too much free time.
Back in the 50s they had strong unions and great New Deal laws that helped workers out. But, they didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t understand why things were great. They didn’t realize that by the 70s politicians would already be rolling back all those protections, and that people wouldn’t object. In addition, the people in the 50s just assumed that black people would continue to be an underclass who could be exploited. So, a white person could do less while a black person picked up the slack.
Do we actually archaeologically/anthropologically know that this is the amount of time that people spent working in those different periods?? Would love to see sources because I always think this is one of the most valuable things those fields can bring to us, but I’ve had trouble finding clear answers.
There’s a lot of evidence of what life was like for peasants back in the Medieval period. But, it’s hard to be exact because there were a lot of things that were taken for granted so nobody bothered to write them down and clarify.
Here’s an article about it:
https://www.yeoldetymenews.com/p/do-you-work-more-than-a-medieval
What’s well known, for example, is how many sundays and feast days there were. What’s less known is what actually happened on those days. For example, the Monday and Tuesday after easter were ale-drinking feasts. What was a feast though? In some cases it was a “party” where attendance was mandatory and you had to pay a fee. Yes, there was drinking, but was it a party, or was it one of those “work parties” where you had to go, had to be on your best behaviour, etc.?
Because it varied a lot century-to-century and also varied location-to-location, it’s hard to pin down what it was like unless you’re looking at a specific location at a specific time, and it’s a location and time where there’s good data. What is pretty well known is that nights were really dark. Even candles were expensive for a peasant. So, when the sun set, work more or less stopped
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-price-of-lighting-has-dropped-over-999-since-1700
Beautiful, thank you so much! Will read momentarily.
Update: Good and pretty compelling source. May not be primary, but I appreciate the easier reading and I enjoy that they basically put confidence intervals on their answers.
But also, wow the rest of this site is hilarious. Bookmarked!
Solid review of the source, now I need to make a note to check it out later…
Yeah, that particular article is a serious more historical one and then most of the others on the site are satire written in a cheesy old English style and medieval setting and it’s killing me
Yay! A chance for me to link to my favorite blog: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivc-rent-and-extraction/ (may require reading part IV.a and IV.b first).
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is right now doing a series on how peasants lived. Arable land is limited, people really don’t want to watch their family members starve, and the entire economic system is maybe kind of reliant on squeezing peasants to do the things necessary for society to function, so there’s strong incentives of all kinds to work a lot
In the 1500s
(I assume amerikkka)
AND with no supplemental information offered… Off to the races!
love me some internet.
*sources plz don’t apply
And they wonder why no one wants to have children anymore. Between not having enough money and not having enough free time, how the fuck do they expect all that? The rich really are a parasite and capitalism is a cancer.
I guess anon is too tired to do maths correctly. That sums to 21 hours, so only 3 left instead of 4.
Thanks for making it worse.
My version:
24 hours in a day
12 hour shift
1 hour commute each way, so 2 hours
1 hour cooking/eating/cleaning
1 hour showering, getting dressed, getting ready for the next day.
Uh oh, bedtime if I want to have a chance at 8 hours of sleep.
1 hour walking the dog and playing with her. 7 hours of sleep possible.
Fuck it, I’ll get groceries next week I guess.
Trouble sleeping due to the anxiety of not getting enough sleep.
Cry.
Sleep 5 hours.um uh buy less avocado toast
Yeah and I’ll skip the lattes too. That’ll reclaim an hour every day.
Have you tried not eating and drinking yourself to sleep yet?
I save that for when I have 24 hours off to flip from day shift to night shift or vice versa. Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that the 12 hour shifts frequently rotate. Fuck me, right?
Rotating shifts are lovely. I used to work in a factory for 3 years that did weekly day/night/afternoon shifts. Living in perpetual jet lag did fucking wonders to my circadian rhythm and blood pressure. The pay was amazing, but not BP over 200 and falling asleep at the wheel amazing.
How many days do you work a week?
It varies. Usually 3-4 unless somebody takes PTO, but a few times per year there’s like a month of 6-7.
1h unpaid overtime?? Explain? So much wrong here, and 1h is just 1h, but why would you ever work unpaid??
Working through the lunch hour, as someone else said, but I want to add that this is why you leave the freakin building for that hour.
not OP
I’ve had numerous jobs that had ‘unwritten rules’, such as being in, dressed, and ready to clock in 15 minutes before the shift starts. Being 1 minute late 3 times in a month was grounds for dismissal. It’s the old way that everything wanted to work.
If the job market is bad and managers are tyrants, you end up being soft-forced to put in more time.
If you don’t do it, you prob won’t get fired, but you prob also won’t get raises in hopes for attrition.
Lose your job otherwise
“Work 1 hour extra or get fired” goes a very very long way to people that work minimum wage and can barely read, let alone fight a court case, my man…
I think they are referring to a lunch break they are forced to work.
9-5 is 9h, so they probably work the whole time and don’t get OT for the 9th hour.
9-5 is 8hrs, you might be thinking 8-5 with unpaid lunch
Yeah that haha
WFH has been a blessing.
You easily eliminate almost 2h from there, no commute, and some workdays no showerp/getting ready to go out. Even when I shower I try my damnest to do it between meetings in company time.
I also do zero overtime, you’d be surprised that there are actually decent consultancy companies in that regard.
As soon as I got a taste of working from home back in 2020, I knew I was never going back to the office. I bought a nice chair and built a good computer, and now I just hang out every day while working when I feel like it. I’ve come up with enough shortcuts and workarounds that I can do my job over twice as fast as my coworkers, though I’ll never tell my boss that. I do have OT sometimes, but I get paid well for it, and still rarely have to put in a full 8 hours of actual work in a day, even when getting an extra several hours of time and a half. People look down on hourly pay, but it’s way better than salary for times like those.
You two have hit the jackpot apparently.
Lol are you me?
This is why I demand work from home.
I hate commuting.
Sometimes you can sit and cut vegetables and peel potatoes in a meeting… Which drastically cuts down meal prep time, I find.
Just don’t be like the guy at my job loading your dishwasher with your mic unmuted.
When you’re crying about the 10th Teams Meeting that week you can blame the onions.
6 hour work days with higher pay would be pretty dope ngl.
And then people are like… Parents need to parent their kids… for every kid related problem or issue, but look at how hard it is to find any time to do anything! It’s so hard… Keeping up with all the kids admin, school homework, developing bodies, relationships, future planning… And then having to learn about every new platform and emoji and movie so you know if it’s appropriate and how to handle it… It’s impossible! Parents need to parent their kids is such a cop out for a society.
I feel like you’re mad at the wrong side. Parents do need to parent their kids but obviously they need to be given time to do so. I don’t feel it’s a cop out I think it’s a muti-step solution.
I think they mean it’s a cop out for people to say “parents need to parent” as a solution. The solution is “society needs to provide more support to parents.” Parenting your kids was a lot more possible when one income covered the fiscal needs of the household.
This is it. Parent your kids is a cop out statement.
Don’t have kids if you can’t raise them well. Also, less slaves to feed into the machine.
That’s a cop out.
A lot harder to agree with this statement when the abortion laws have regressed so much so recently.
Time & resources would be good but I also think we as a society shouldn’t leave it all up to 2 random individuals who happened to have a child to ensure the healthy survival of humanity. You know what I mean? We all live together here, noone is an island, noone can do it all.
Yes! If society wants any firefighters, teachers, doctors, artists, whatever 30-50 years from now, parents and children of today need better community support, mental health resources, and better free education
My south American garbage wasteland city needs one hour and a half of commute to reach work and another to go home
I don’t know if I would go home at that point…
But food, shelter and games :')
I have strictly limited overtime with high bonuses and mandatory rest days, afternoon/night shift bonuses, 20 days minimum fully paid vacation, fully paid maternity leave, fully paid sick leave, healthcare paid through taxes, all written into law. Feels nice to live in a place where workers have rights. Sometimes I don’t even know what to do with all this legally mandated freedom. Anyway, how’s that deregulation going, America?
Shitty
Real and straight. This is all of us.
We should rise up, and unionize.
Ok but I don’t want to have to eat any rich people. Frankly that sounds disgusting.
Okay you can feed them to your pet, but cook them thoroughly first, you
don’t knowsuspect where they’ve been.Not Elon Musk though, I know where he’s been.
I would feed him to the crows instead, but I suspect they’d rather leave him to the maggots.
I wouldn’t want my local crows to OD on ketamine
Oh he’s definitely spoilt rotten and inedible
I don’t really even care how gross it is at this point, I want my bite.
I dont have the time for that, I keep scrolling trough the news and attending work meetings.
I can recommend being self-employed if you like super long hours for the peanuts. But hey, at least I don’t want to kill myself every work day.
