When the company I work for was a tech startup I really enjoyed working long hours, that problematic tech bro “let’s burn the midnight oil and get this done” attitude, the feeling of camaraderie that comes from doing hard work with a team, I absolutely loved it and got a real kick out of it. I felt ownership over my work and felt personally fulfilled when it came together and found success.

The problem is that it wasn’t a true camaraderie. Actually it was unequal. I got a wage and only a small group got to own the thing. The hard work wasn’t for myself it was taken by a them. It wasn’t in fact myself that was being fulfilled. It wasn’t actually my success.

I don’t want to play the sob story too hard because financially they treat me well and there is genuine appreciation from them for my contribution, but really the illusion of ownership of my work has been broken and I realize I fell into some trap where I was told we were making this together but really we were making this for them. I should have taken a regular desk job and poured those midnight hours into myself instead.

I don’t grudge hard work at all. On the contrary I love it. I wouldn’t force hard work on anyone and I strongly believe the ideal we should advocate is more like a 4-day work week (or less or earlier retirement etc) that emphasizes work as a necessary part of building society but not work as the purpose of society.

Work is glorious and hard work is fulfilling but having the product of your labor taken from you is what transforms work from a fulfilling, even self-actualizing, exercise and instead turns it into a simple transaction of labor for money. It reduces you to a cash value rather than a member of a community laboring to create society.

Work should be part of community. Work should be an exercise of political and economic freedom rather than a result of my lack of it. Work should be part of who I am and what I mean to my community and to the world rather than what cash value I represent to an employer.

I’d be happy digging trenches for roads if that was a decision I made with my community that we need more roads. I enjoy physical work as well, although I’m not the best suited for it. I’d be happy writing software for a large firm if that firm was owned in part by myself, or was owned by my community, and I had a voice in the consensus to shape that.

I’d be proud to be the person who is known for giving more than I need. I really am not motivated by money, I’m motivated by autonomy and respect. I am exceedingly willing to work hard for respect and a kind of social status that comes from being known as a person who gets it done and I’m also willing to give you the shirt off my back if you need and I’m really not just circlejerking myself when I say that.

But I want to be clear that it’s a bell curve, right. I am motivated to be at the top of the curve in terms of what I contribute because that satisfies some of my needs such as ego and status and respect. The 80% in the middle, this group just want to live life and enjoy themselves without too much stress and without worrying about losing everything if one small thing goes wrong. I don’t believe we should hold as an ideal that “work is good for its own sake.” That Protestant work ethic is pure propaganda to equate giving profit to your employer as a moral good.

For the majority of humanity I think everyone needs a purpose and work is an important part of that but work is not the end of that. Their purpose is more defined by their community. Work can play an important role in defining a persons place within a community but it’s wrong to reduce a person to that because we are so much more. I would imagine reducing the number of days worked or enabling longer and freer childhoods and early adult lives for education, and working to reduce the retirement age to the extent possible, these are worthy goals.

It should be democratic. Simplistically, we should give society a dial. That dial adjusts the needle between “how much material wealth do you want vs how much free time do you want”. Let everyone dial in what they choose. In a socialist state that minimum will very likely need to be above zero of course but I see no problem at all with the amount of work we expect from each individual being adjusted to what they desire.

Like, someone is going to get the nice beachfront property for example and it makes sense to give that to the person who contributes the most so I see inequality of total income as a perfectly acceptable outcome for inequality of effort invested. Socialism is perfectly comfortable with “to each according to their effort”. So I would agree with tying material success (in the form of higher wages earned due to more hours worked, and status items like houses tied to more or less challenging fields) to effort but the critical thing is to end the capitalist practice of being entitled to the profit of the effort of others. And I’ll add of course so long as there is true equality of opportunity to pursue the higher status fields with those perk rewards, that being eg a doctor or engineer doesn’t become a hereditary class.

That’s my perception of labor. I value it. I think it gives meaning to an individual. Capitalism robs that meaning by reducing it to a cash value. When you have the autonomy to decide how much you want to work and for what goals, you will likely find you do want to work more than you realize but it’s wrong to reduce us all to mere laborers and consumers, and it’s a fact of nature that we have different appetites for work and different psychological needs to be satisfied.

I’m not currently employed at this moment, but I’m joining a union.

I work only 20 hours a week, but it’s weird. It’s two ten-hour night shifts. I have a chronic physical disability that makes it difficult to stand/walk for too long, or to do even basic tasks that involve my wrists. I used to do 40 hour/wk night shifts, but they were 8 hours each, and it felt way more doable as we got there when things were settling down and usually left before the chaos of the morning shift began. Now, I’m arriving to the chaos of evening shift, doing night shift, and leaving work only after the chaos of the morning shift. I’ve talked about it before, but unless night shift is the only shift you can reliably do as I feel it is for me, don’t do it. It may seem like the “easy shift” but it will absolutely destroy your emotional, physical and mental well-being, your schedule, your appetite, your ability to sleep, and your social life as you’re now too busy sleeping throughout the day. It’s not worth it.

I’ve been thinking about going up to 40, but I don’t know if I could handle it. The money would be so much better, though.

44 hours a week averaged out. Sometime 46.

At some point, I basically work between 7 to 8 straight days every pay cycle.

Im not really MAD about it. Thankfully for me, this is more of a decision to have some spending money after bills

7 hours a day, 6 days a week. So not too many hours, but having to go everyday kinda sucks. I’m really lucky that it’s a job I can dick around for most of the day though so I really can’t complain.

50-60, i like it, i wish i had more free time, but i enjoy my work, changing jobs soon and i am going to be working less for more money cuz i got a contract job this time around, so im excited. Having a full two day weekend is going to be crazy awesome, first time in ten years 😅

I’ve been officially working 32 hour weeks for the last year and it’s too much. There’s a bit of overtime involved too, which I don’t mind in itself when it’s necessary, but it’s piled up so much that I’m starting to lose the collected overtime without being able to use it. It just still feels really shitty knowing that a significant portion of my time on earth is being spent for the sole benefit of some out of touch rich assholes.

32 hours (6h 24m per day, 5 days) is way better than the somehow-still-standard 40. It’s a big win for my mental health and relationships and personal projects that I get that hour and a half back every day.

It’s like @Soselin wrote at length about here. I don’t mind labour, in fact I want to and know I need to. But it’s got to be democratic, help my community, and not add to the hoard of some arbitrary idiots born to privilege.

I’d reduce my hours further, but money will be tight enough soon anyway. Of course I already had to take a 20% reduction in pre-tax pay with the 20% reduction in hours, while being expected to achieve the same amount as before, but I knew that going in and on the whole it’s been the right thing for me.

I think 30 hours a week should be the new normal. In fact it almost became reality in the US.

40ish most of the time, sometimes near 50.

I was getting about 45-50 a week with 5hr or from just not taking a break, starting early, and working a bit over. I’m remote work from home so at least no commute. Then they cracked down on all of and I am only allowed to work 40 a week. Which sounds loke not a huge deal but all it really did was effectively cut my paycheck by several hundred dollars while not really giving me much more free time at the end of the day. So I somehow feel more overworked with less pay and it’s because I have to now cram more work into the day because I still have the same load but not able to pace it more manageably. So I have started to slow down and burn out which makes the work backlog.

I think anything over 32 though is too much, if we consider adequate pay and manageable work load. I didn’t mind the longer hours cause I also had less of a load and could take small breaks and take care of some personal stuff like take 5 mins every 20-30 minutes and do a set of lifting. I don’t get that now so instead of both work, and working out, spaced throughout the day I have a huge lump of work and then a big chunk of working out do try and fit in afterwards and in the end I actually spend more time doing both. Which actually turns into me cutting out the working out part because most days I feel to mental worn out after work to do it.

Anything more than 30 hours definitely makes my life feel a little less human than I would like.

Currently I work about 30 hours DoorDashing, but for me this is infinitely better than when I worked 30-40 hours at a restaurant because I can smoke weed, listen to music, listen to political longform content (mostly Breakthrough News), talk to people on the phone, look at nice clouds, wear whatever clothes I want, etc., so this makes the equal work hours much more tolerable.

I also work probably an additional 2 hours a week helping my girlfriend with her new job. And then, another 10+ hours a week working on my personal projects, which I would argue is absolutely work and only doesn’t seem like it right now because I’m not making money yet (namely music and videogame development). I definitely see it as a job, albeit ones that I love, I force myself to put in the work even if I don’t “feel” like it. I see no reason people shouldn’t be counting all their side hustles and long shots, this society after all is pressuring us to put every ounce of our free time into productivity either for today or for a year from now, no?

So I work roughly 30-55 hours most weeks, but I honestly aren’t terribly stressed because it’s all either tolerable or really nice. It leaves me with very little time for anything else though; I have very little friend interactions (I’ll talk to my best friend a text or two a day and a phone call once a month), I’ve been neglecting the gym and my other hobbies, I’m go-go-go and then I crash. Sometimes I feel like I’m falling sideways, but I finally am “dancing on tempo” as I might call it, and it makes it pretty okay.

I can’t imagine though…some people I know are pulling 40, 50, 60+ hours in terrible, terrible, terrible jobs…shit is absolutely not right. THAT is why I’m a communist, not my relatively easygoing albeit shmushed setup.

Currently 32 hours. It’s a bit much combining it with studying and internship sometimes, but I can manage. Combined with partywork I am busy for at least 60 hours a week I think.

1. 40 hours
2. Yes

Ah I see I got hit w downvote bot