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Originally Posted by Tobias Zimpel  That'd be great! | This is from "Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Dominiguez and Vicki Robin (pg 221-223). It was the first time I had come across statements like this which really got me thinking. Quote:
WORK THROUGH THE AGES
Let's begin by taking a brief look at the history of "work," for it is through looking at history that we find new opportunities to shape our own personal stories. Where do our concepts about work come from? Why do we work? And what is the place of work in our lives?
Minimum Daily Requirement of Work
As human beings we all must do some work for basic survival--but how much? Is there a "minimum daily requirement" of work? A number of diverse sources, ranging from primitive cultures to modern history, would place this figure at about three hours a day during the adult lifetime.
Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics, discovered that before Western influence changed daily life, Kung men hunted from two to two and a half days a week, with an average work week of fifteen hours. Women gathered for about the same period of time each week. In fact, one day's work supplied a woman's family with vegetables for the next three days. Throughout the year both men and women worked for a couple of days, then took a couple off to rest and play games, gossip, plan rituals and visit....It would appear that the work week in the old days beats today's banker's hours by quite a bit.
Dr. Frithjof Bergmann states:
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For most of human history people only worked for two or three hours per day. As we moved from agriculture to industrialization, work hours increased, creating standards that label a person lazy if he or she doesn't work a forty-hour week....The very notion that everyone should have a job only began with the Industrial Revolution.
| In his study of numerous utopion communities of the nineteenth century, John Humphery Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, noted that:
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All these communities have demonstrated what the practical Dr. Franklin (of the 18th century) said, that if every one worked bodily three hours daily, there would be no necessity of any one's working more than three hours.
| Moving on to the twentieth century, in 1934 Paramahansa Yogananda, Indian sage and visionary, spoke of self-sufficient, spiritually oriented worldwide communities in which:
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Everybody, rich or poor, must work three hours a day in order to produce only the extreme necessities of life...work three hours a day and live in the luxury of literary wealth and have time to [do what is meaningful to us.]
| These quotations all suggest that three hours a day is all that we must spend working for survival. One can imagine, in preindustrial times, that this pattern would make sense. Life was more of a piece back then when "work" blended into family time, religious celebrations and play. Then came the "labor-saving" Industrial Revolution and the compartmentalization of life into "work" and "nonwork"--with "work" taking an ever-bigger bite out of the average person's day.
In the nineteenth century the "common man," with justified aversion to such long hours on the job, began to fight for a shorter work week. Champions for the workers claimed that fewer hours on the job would decrease fatigue and increase productivity. Indeed, they said, fewer hours were the natural expression of the maturing Industrial Revolution. Fewer hours would free the workers to exercise their higher faculties, and democracy would enjoy the benefit of an educated and engaged citizenry.
But all that came to a halt during the Depression. The work week, having fallen dramatically from sixty hours at the turn of the century to thirty-five hours during the Depression, became locked in at forty hours for many and has crept up to fifty or even sixty hours a week in the last two decades. Why?
| The original sources of the material are: Quote:
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicage: Aldine-Atherton, Inc., 1972), p. 23
"From Joblessness to Liberation" (an article on Frithjof Bergmann), Green Light News, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1984, p. 19
John Humphrey Noyes, The History of American Socialism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870)
Paramahansa Yogananda, unpublished papers, 1934.
Hunnicutt, op. cit., p. 311
| Also after reading this I came across a few articles on the web that stated similar claims: Our Technological Future: Shorter, 4-6 Hour Workdays Would Benefit Us All Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past
And the Wikipedia article on working hours which has more in depth comments: Working time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Quote: |
I thought people worked longer hours farming before the industrial revolution?
| Unfortunately I didn't note the article where I read that. I recall the point being that yes, at certain periods of the year farmers would put in a large amount of daily work but this was for a short period of time. After all, there is only so much one can do with a farm.
A section of the wikipedia article seems to argue this as well: Quote: |
Popular belief depicts pre-industrial life as grim and full of toil. While the standard of living then certainly does not match that of today, several labor historians have pointed out that "full of toil" fails to describe pre-industrial life accurately. In those times, non-enslaved people generally worked fewer hours per year than they do today, though on a less regular cycle: their workweeks exceeded the modern standard during seasons when the extra work would be useful, but fell short of it during others. This depended on the productive system of the land. Intensive agriculture and pastoralism demand a variable amount of effort over the course of the year.
| Hope you find this interesting. It sure is interesting to me.  |