You work too much

We think we don’t work enough, but actually we work more than most people in history.

A medieval/modern peasant worked an average of 6 hours a day for half the year. Those in charge of food took breaks in castles and communities to prevent exhaustion and to take part in religious festivities.

Later, with the Industrial Revolution, we went through one of the most destructive periods in human history (I recommend reading ‘The People of the Abyss’ by Jack London), which killed a significant part of England’s labor force in the 1900s. We went through confrontations between anarcho-syndicalists who called for a reduction in daily working hours (from 14 hours to 12, then from 12 to 10, and finally from 10 to 8 hours). Moreover, and with much bloodshed and struggle, they established rules so that pregnant women do not have to work until giving birth, and children can actually be children. In all these revolts and revolutions, the employers did their utmost to destroy the leadership (including deaths, kidnappings, threats, and state blackmail; everything you can imagine from a modern-day militia member in Rio de Janeiro was present in England in the 1900s).

With a lot of bloodshed, we arrived at a challenging scenario of an 8-hour daily workday in companies with 30 days of vacation. Less developed countries, like the USA, still do not have this legislated, but it tends to be a general rule.

Today, we work at least 8 hours a day for more than 90% of the year (with luck, you get 15 days of vacation). Emails, overtime, pressure for personal growth, productivity, and unrealistic growth goals (which often only make sense in the CEO’s mind as they read spreadsheets) overwhelm us.

Furthermore, we are bombarded with a liberal propaganda that claims “we have a lot of holidays” or “we have many breaks during the day.” This type of argument always arises from time to time, especially when capitalism goes through one of its cyclical crises (1900/1920/1940/1970/2008/2022) and needs to cut costs for the poorest class to maintain the profits of the billionaires, as mentioned earlier.

We will see more of this in the next 2 or 3 years. Figures like Milei, Bolsonaro, Paulo Guedes, and many other liberals from Faria Lima, Wall Street, and 9 de Julho will emerge. The idea is, indeed, for the bourgeoisie to unite around this power project, which is based on intensifying the workforce through fear. This happens as we face phenomena that challenge the logic of capitalism at its core (companies from the USA and the EU) that are expanding into emerging countries and new economies. First, we had remote work as a trend (and companies that forced hybrid and in-person work as the rule after the COVID-19 pandemic cooled down ended up losing qualified labor). Then, individuals who did nothing beyond their contractual work and left at the scheduled hours (9/5 in the USA, 9/18 in Brazil, and most of the world) with the concept of ‘quiet quitting’ (doing only what they are paid for) posed a bigger problem for companies. To combat this ‘problem,’ many companies created hierarchies of positions, giving everyone some degree of management, even if there were no subordinates to manage. This resulted in the new trend of avoiding or declining promotions to management positions to avoid working without defined hours, on weekends and holidays, and without the prospect of vacations. In short, Generation Z, in particular, has decided that it is better to live to enjoy their salary than to live to work.

Of course, capitalists create work policies for capitalists, often with the complicity of the State, which is bourgeois, and this has caused turbulence in companies.

So, it is important to reflect on how necessary it is to respond to demands when your boss or a more insensitive colleague asks you to stay late, start the day earlier, or perform urgent tasks on Friday at 6 pm.

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“From 1400 to the early 1650, mean height reached 173–174 cm. The early years of the 1600s were ‘unusually healthy’, and the paper notes that the introduction of poor laws may have contributed to better health for poorer sections of society. Heights then fell after 1650, falling to around 169 cm in the late 1600s, a decline that continued until the early 1800s, says the study. It notes that previous research suggests mortality rates had declined with life expectancy for those born between 1650–1750 being 35 years as compared with 40 years in the late 1500s. The nature of work after 1650 had changed with manual labour putting more of a toll on the body. The authors note that during the Industrial Revolution, the demands on workers were much greater than in medieval times. The increasing number of working days coupled with poorer working conditions could be why average height went down even though wages grew after 1650. The decline in heights could also be associated with increasing inequalities in society, suggests the paper.” (2017, “Highs and lows of an Englishman’s average height over 2000 years”)