This is John Maynard Keynes. He was a really important economist. And in 1930, he made a really bold prediction about the future of work. He said that a hundred years later by 2030 we'd be working 15 hours a week. There's still time, but it's not looking good. So, what gives? Well, he wasn't delusional. When he made that prediction, working hours were in steep decline thanks to new technologies that were making workers more productive, and union efforts that were shrinking the work week. But then, after World War 2, the shrinking work week just kind of stopped shrinking. I mean, it kept going down a little bit, but it averaged out around 40 hours a week which we still have today. So, this got me wondering: what happened? Why do we still work so much? Before we get to the answer, we should probably talk about something. CNBC: "A wave of worker strikes sweeping across America." CBS: "Thousands have hit picket lines in several states amid a nationwide labour shortage." ABC: "Strikes flair all across the United States." You may have also seen this guy talking about it. This is Anthony Klotz, and he coined a term that you've been hearing everywhere. The Great Resignation. Because he saw it coming. Anthony Klotz: "I was talking to a reporter and shared my view that I thought there might be a great resignation coming. And since I made that prediction over the past six months we have seen elevated rates of resignations here in the United States more than we've ever seen before. So, why are so many people quitting their jobs right now? Well, for one thing, a lot of people are just... burned out. But also, a lot of people have been rethinking the place of work in their lives. Anthony Klotz: "Individuals reflected on work and whether it was really giving them the meaning and the happiness that they wanted." And for a lot of people, the answer was just "no." There's a really popular subreddit that illustrates this. Doreen: "There's not a lot more at this point that has mass appeal than saying, you know, 'I hate my job', or 'I hate my boss', or 'I hate work.'" Doreen is one of the moderators of the antiwork subreddit. Doreen: "Which currently stands at 1.1m 'idlers', or subscribers." Actually, right now it's at 1.4m, so it's grown since our interview. And that number shot way up during the pandemic. Doreen: "Just a straight line, just a straight line up." And r/antiwork is now one of the most active communities on Reddit. Doreen: "It's a heavily anti-capitalist, or at least critical of capitalist philosophy where people are kind of calling into question our dedication to work, or our overdedication to work." Some of them call for a four-day work week and higher wages, just a gentler version of capitalism. But others, like Doreen, are a little more radical and want to abolish work altogether. You may be wondering: how would society even function without work? This is a frequently asked question, so I'll just read what the subreddit says: "we're against jobs as they are structured under capitalism." Doreen: "It's anti the coercive part of work where you are forced to do a job that you don't like for wages that aren't sufficient with people that don't even respect you. Especially the bosses. When I was researching this film I came across this chart. This graph basically illustrates income inequality and where it came from in the United States. And I called up economist Sylvia Allegretto to help me... well, to help me understand it. Sylvia Allegretto: "Yeah, this is a very interesting concept and long term trend that should be understood." One line on this graph is the growth in worker productivity. Sylvia Allegretto: "That's how much income is being generated economy-wide per hour of work." And it just has kept going up. The other line is compensation for the typical worker. Sylvia Allegretto: "Not the highest income workers but kind of the bottom 80%." See how they diverge here? Economists call this the "productivity-pay gap." Sylvia Allegretto: "Since 1979, productivity has increased about 3.5x that of worker pay." Before 1979, productivity and pay grew together. Sylvia Allegretto: "As workers became more productive, they gained in that benefit. They got to enjoy some fruits of their labour. And of course, this was due to purposeful policy following World War 2." Those policies were put in place to spread growth evenly across income classes. They protected unions, they raised taxes on highest incomes, and they increased wages for the working class. Sylvia Allegretto: "What happens in the '70s is those policies start to unwind." Meaning tax cuts for the wealthy, aggressive deregulation of banks and big companies, smaller and less frequent jumps in minimum wage, and fewer guardrails against union-busting. Then came Citizens United and more money in politics, and with it, intensive lobbying for policies that benefit the wealthy. Sylvia Allegretto: "So the gains of that increase in productivity since 1979 went disproportionately that are the wealthiest amongst us, the top 10%, and even moreso the top 1%. And when you look at the top 1%, and you can just Google it, ‘income share of the top 1%’ it follows that graph. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 USD an hour. It has not changed since 2009. We've gone the longest time ever in the history of the minimum wage since 1938 of not having an increase." You like charts? Here's another one. This chart shows every time the minimum wage was raised in the US over the past 70 years or so. This blue line is the value in today’s dollars. It goes down because of inflation, which erodes the buying power of the dollar. If wage increases don't keep pace with the rising cost of living, and inflation, then it effectively means a pay cut. And for many workers, wage growth has been struggling to keep up with inflation. And for a lot of people, life is just getting more expensive. But there's a glimmer of hope for the working class, here. (Just a glimmer.) All those resignations have led to a labour shortage, so there are more jobs available than people willing to fill them. So some employers are raising wages to entice workers back; especially in certain sectors, like leisure and hospitality, which have seen the highest turnover during the pandemic. Anthony Klotz: "The power balance has shifted to some extent from organisations to employees. Compared to the last few decades, this is really a moment of worker empowerment." Okay, so wage hikes, worker empowerment, that sounds promising. But, meaningful and lasting change might require a deeper shift in how we think about work. I'm talking about hustle culture. Hustle culture pushes workers to go above and beyond the 9-5. And overworking to the point of exhaustion is often encouraged, and even rewarded. Hustle culture is something Keynes didn't foresee and it might be one reason that his prediction hasn't come true. So let's turn back to that question we started with: why are we still working so much? There's, like, so much that I want to dig into but, runtime and so on. I called up a work historian, Benjamin Hunnicutt, to see if he could help me find the answer. Benjamin Hunnicutt: "I think one of the answers is certainly consumerism." Consumerism. As productivity grew through the 20th century, we had a choice: reduce working hours, or buy and produce more stuff and keep working just as much. It's pretty clear what we chose. Benjamin Hunnicutt: "The second reason that I argue is government policy designed to create jobs, to create work." Yeah, this has given rise to what's been called "Bullsh*t Jobs" Essentially, frivolous jobs that exist for their own sake you know, like in Office Space. Peter Gibbons: "I'd say in a given week I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work." But on top of that, a bigger cultural shift took place. Benjamin Hunnicutt: "Our ideas about work have changed. Work, certainly in the 19th century, and well into the 20th century was a means to an end." And in the past hundred years or so, work has become an end in itself. So instead of working to live, more people are living to work. Western society's obsession with work for work's own sake has its origin in the Protestant work ethic. For Protestants, hard work was seen as "God's will". This is when jobs became "vocations", or "God's calling". Benjamin Hunnicutt: "Gradually through the 20th century however, that God talk sort of withered away, but that religious charge on work for work's sake remains." With the new work ethic, idleness was condemned as a waste of precious time. And it still often is— but, not by everybody. Tom Hodgkinson: "I really wanted to take this quite beautiful word, I think, actually, "Idler", and in a way slightly change its meaning. I spoke to Tom Hodgkinson, the editor and co-founder of this magazine, "The Idler". Tom Hodgkinson: "But I saw in idling something very good: which is reflection, contemplation, calm, the time to think, the time to sleep, read and dream. To be creative." He also played me some songs on his ukulele, so it was a fun interview. Didn't really feel like work. ♪ One evening as the sun went down ♪ ♪ The jungle fire was burning ♪ Tom Hodgkinson: "The problem is that that attitude of hard work has been sort of privileged over everything else. If I want to kill myself working 12 hours a day that's up to me, really. But what I think we can do is to make it more culturally acceptable not to be like that." ♪ the big rock candy mountain ♪ Work is a malleable concept and it means different things to different people. Some people love their work others feel hostage to it, and that idling is just a privilege they can't afford. But I think Tom's point is that idleness has been unfairly vilified, and on top of better wages and better working conditions, dismantling our culture of overwork would be a boon for collective wellbeing. Tom Hodgkinson: "The major problem I hear from people, they say, 'Well I'd like to be more idle, but I feel guilty.' It should be the other way around. You know, you should feel guilty for overworking, because you're tired, cranky, you don't work well. It's an area of dialogue. It's bringing out a very important discussion, because it's about how we live our lives, you know. What are our priorities? How do you actually want to live?" It's yet to be seen what kind of changes will happen next in the world of work, and whether they'll be permanent. Anthony Klotz: "You see lots of great business experimentation going on right now in terms of, like, Kickstarter trialling a four-day work week." And they're not the only ones. Other companies and even some countries have been trialling four-day work weeks. Keynes' prediction may never come true. We may never get a 15 hour work week. But as more and more people are questioning the role of work in their lives, and we have this moment of worker empowerment, change just... feels possible. And that work week might start shrinking yet again. Thanks so much for watching, I really appreciate it. Hit like and subscribe if you enjoyed it, we release films every week. and in the spirit of idling, I'm gonna play a song on this ukulele. ♪ [bad cover of Bare Necessities] ♪
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So... here in Canada, I've got a 20 hour work week. I'd prefer a higher amount of hours, since 20 nets me only 80hrs a month, which gives me $1200 a month roughly...
But here's the thing. That's mostly due to the pandemic and economic downturn right now. Or so 'they' say. If/when things pick up, I could be getting 40 hours or more a week. Then again, they might just hire more people on 4 day work weeks at up to 5 hours a day as well. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that part.
It's technically 'up to' 20 hours a week for me. Dead days in the kitchen = early home time.
If im going to waste my life working for nothing, might aswell not work for nothing.
When someone asks if this is the right time to strike, show them this!
It's clearly the best moment in my working lifetime to demand change as the balance of power is with the worker.
And we need to remind people that we keep electing people from both sides and both sides fail to deliver, so it's time we take action ourselves!