One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now.
Think of pointless meetings, smoke breaks, soda breaks, talking about sports, life, hobbies, debating/complaining, talking politics, talking about TV shows, online shopping, keeping up with twitter/FB/Linkedin, Hacker News, the average cubie dweller probably only puts in 10-20 hours a week of actual work right now.
"Everyone knows" the guy who's forced to put in 60 hours at the office who spends 50 of those hours on FB / Reddit / talking about football, etc.
There's a Russian proverb about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
If you define work as "hours spend on premises" then no one has worked as many hours as Americans do today since the early 1900s. If you define work as actually doing something productive, well, thats a whole nother ball game.
>One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now.
For actual work, maybe even less.
But not having pocession of your body for 8-12 hours every day in exchage for a pay-check, is work too. Even if you just sit there and "do nothing".
Think of pointless meetings, smoke breaks, soda breaks, talking about sports, life, hobbies, debating/complaining, talking politics, talking about TV shows, online shopping, keeping up with twitter/FB/Linkedin, Hacker News, the average cubie dweller probably only puts in 10-20 hours a week of actual work right now.
"Everyone knows" the guy who's forced to put in 60 hours at the office who spends 50 of those hours on FB / Reddit / talking about football, etc.
There's a Russian proverb about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
If you define work as "hours spend on premises" then no one has worked as many hours as Americans do today since the early 1900s. If you define work as actually doing something productive, well, thats a whole nother ball game.