• In the past people worked around 10 or even 12 hours a day (or more, but it is hard to believe that a human could work more than 12 hours for some time), so many coutries, especially the socialist ones, determined that a worker could work at the most 8 hours a day. However it was already a long time ago when the technology was much inferior and there was very few or no automation in the producition, at that time there is no computers and advanced technologies (robots, artificial intelligence etc.) of the, so known, “4th industrial revolution”.

  • Nowadays we could automatize almost all. On the other hand, in capitalism it finds contradictions, because if the capitalist automatize the whole production, it will be benificial to him and most workers will lose their jobs. Structurally, if the most capitalists automatize their production, great part of population will have no job, no lose their buying power and then the capitalists wouldn’t sell their products much it could conduce to a crisis due to “overproduction”.

  • Only in socialism could be benificial to automatize everything what would be possible and nowadays with this kind of technologies the socialism could easier be applied and hold high productions without using much human working.

Consider it in a capitalist context. What do you guys think about the 8-hours working a day?

I think the working day of 8 hours is overhidden. It should be at most 6 hour a day and 35 a week, especially in physical labour.

  • @mylifeforaiur
    link
    22 years ago

    I believe the idea is to shorten work weeks to force the capitalists to hire more laborers in the US. If the capitalist could move their production to Asia, they would have done it already.

    Most USian workers don’t work in factories producing tangible commodities. They work in restaurants, accounting firms, and other types of service work that can’t be easily exported. Again, if the capitalists could export this labor easily, they would do it with or without a shortened week.

    • There are still many industries in the United States, and mainly high-end industries, so China must buy from the United States and cannot produce it by itself. Assuming nothing else matters, I’m assuming that Americans only work four hours a day, and a factory that produces as much product as the original eight-hour work will have to pay twice as much salary. If the product of a total of eight hours of labor is still exchanged for the original quantity of Chinese products, it is clear that the purchasing power of Americans will be greatly reduced. But Americans absolutely want to reduce their working hours without reducing their quality of life. In order to ensure this, the United States must exchange the same amount of American products for 2 times of Chinese products, and it is far easier for the United States to succeed in doing so than for China to successfully refuse. And for most Americans to sit in an office for two hours in exchange for a product that a Chinese, Vietnamese, or other country’s worker labors for eight hours in a sweltering factory, that’s absolutely exploitative. To eliminate this exploitation, the standard of living of Americans and people in other Western countries would absolutely drop significantly. I don’t think the economic makeup of the US means that US productivity is high, otherwise if every country in the world had such “high” productivity, the world would have a shortage of daily necessities