Welcome to the Working Week
Work has been eating up my bloggin’ time, and no, I don’t mean sneak-in blog time during regular work hours; I mean at 10 PM when I’m usually winding down and spilling some thoughts and refilling my sanity on this virtual page, but have recently been catching up on work overflow instead.
And, so I sit here wondering, did people really used to work a lot more? Or a lot less? How does the work time of different cultures compare today? And what other interesting things about working time might I find on, where else, Wikipedia?
Medieval Working Time Versus Today
First off, Wikipedia has these working hours statistics: in the 13th century, an adult male English peasant worked an average of 1620 hours a year. Today, an average U.S. worker works about 1949 hours a year.
Now, don’t feel bad if you’re working more hours than a 13th century peasant. If you’re average, you’re spending 24 minutes commuting to work in a futuristic machine blasting recorded music and rocketing an incredible 80 miles an hour on an Interstate highway! Don’t kid yourself; any 13th century peasant would work an extra 6 paltry hours a week if they could spend dang near an hour a day emmersed in the heretic miracle of canned rock ‘n’ roll at bullet speed.
And things could be worse…you could live in South Korea and work 2,390 hours per year.
And things could also be better: Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks.
Birth of the 40 Hour Work Week
Until the end of World War I, most workers worked six days a week. Finally, during the Great Depression, in 1938, the unions got the Fair Labor Standards Act passed. It capped the workweek at 44 hours (it didn’t get shortened to 40 hours until 1940). Part of the reason for a shorter work week was to spread scarce depression-era work across as many employees as possible.
But then came WWII, and corporations wanted workers to work as much as possible to nurture the burgeoning Military Industrial Complex.
Today’s Work Week Confusion
Today, it’s just darn hard to guess what’s going on. Some studies show that average work hours have declined, but the addition of spouses to the workforce has increased work hours per family, and declining work hours per job don’t reflect the increase in people working multiple jobs. And then there’s the big move away from hourly jobs to salaried job, and all the tricks corporations are playing to get fewer people to work longer hours (that means you) because, despite what it does to your health, fewer workers mean less health insurance payments for the employer. And, by definition, corporations are all about making bucks.
Read More: 40 hour work week, work time
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