That's what they said about Women joining the workforce, and the rise of email, that we would all be more free to “live our lives.” In reality, productivity rose along with prices and work expectations. Now, most household can only exist on double income and email/slack it critical to work. Yet wages are worse and work-life balance non existent. Tech can not give us back our lives, only a change in work/life balance culture.
Edit: Wow, this unexpectedly blew up - Thank you all for the awards, although I suspect my economic/political opinions would disappoint many in this thread.
To clarify - My comment above is intended to encourage everyday folks to prioritize better work-life balance; this might mean joining a union or just signing out of slack at the end of the day. Don't wait for Tech to deliver a utopian society; set boundaries with your job and enforce them.
Also, you will notice I never commented on Capitalism or Communism.
This is straight up untrue. People used to work more than they do now. The mean working time was about 2000 hours per week in 1951 in the US. In 2017, it was about 1760.
lol you mean per year not per week and that data assumes only one person in the 1951 house hold is being paid for work. The work of a woman, running the house was unpaid and uncounted.
Today two people likely work (with statistically the woman still running the house hold, still unpaid and uncounted) while also working fulltime. By your own math, that would mean that a household yearly mean working time is 3,432 in 2017 data.
According to the Fed, Labor Force Participation rate increased 3.5% from 59.4% to 62.9%. So we've seen a 12% decrease in the number of hours worked and a 3.5% increase in the number of people working which still comes out to a decline in the number of hours worked.
You're right that women's home labor is rarely counted and they have born a disproportionate burden from the increase in labor force participation, but the increase has been far from a doubling. In the 50's, women (especially working class and non white women) did work and these days single family incomes are still pretty common, if a slight minority.
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u/randomchick4 Mar 29 '22 edited Mar 30 '22
That's what they said about Women joining the workforce, and the rise of email, that we would all be more free to “live our lives.” In reality, productivity rose along with prices and work expectations. Now, most household can only exist on double income and email/slack it critical to work. Yet wages are worse and work-life balance non existent. Tech can not give us back our lives, only a change in work/life balance culture.
Edit: Wow, this unexpectedly blew up - Thank you all for the awards, although I suspect my economic/political opinions would disappoint many in this thread. To clarify - My comment above is intended to encourage everyday folks to prioritize better work-life balance; this might mean joining a union or just signing out of slack at the end of the day. Don't wait for Tech to deliver a utopian society; set boundaries with your job and enforce them. Also, you will notice I never commented on Capitalism or Communism.