Why aren't we all working 3-4 hour days?

[MiM]

"..., despite our technology", asks David Graeber in this article about nonsense jobs.

"Huge swathes of people in the Western world spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/public-s ... z2dzwlL5Yb

Do you agree? What about your job?

[Trinity]

I am baffled by the pace of life in general actually, with all the tech we have now, one would think our lives would be less frenetic but it seems that the opposite is true.
Bring back horse drawn carts and pen and paper!!

[PsychoSerenity]

Yeah very much. The economy has become almost entirely disconnected from anything of real value and substance. It's now mostly trade of abstract concepts, primarily for the purpose of keeping people in servitude to the wealthy, with the side effect of keeping nearly everyone locked in pointless endless drudgery.

[Svartalf]

I used to spend 8 hr days doing stuff that was basically useless, but hey, I was paid to do it, and if the State wanted me to harass people, I harassed them, though the recovery rate was apallingly low.

[Pappa]

It's probably just down to competition. A business can't risk falling behind its competitors and for any employee that only wants to work 3-4 hours a day, there'll be another who's happy to do double that.

Plus, we're all greedy and want bigger houses and XBOXes and shiny new shoes.

[Tyrannical]

Ironic that a college professor wrote it, since I don't think there is anything as bloated as a university.

[pErvinalia]

I'm interested to see what the capitalist cheerleaders think about this issue. I posted something relating to this subject in another thread and no one touched it.

[Svartalf]

Ironic that a college professor wrote it, since I don't think there is anything as bloated as a university.

except the upper echelons of a multinational corporation or a state administration, of course.

[Tero]

I have a job that could be done with 4 hours of labwork, but I typically do 4 hour slots of labwork, so I would actually have to go there 4 times. In grad school, we would work weekends too, but since the prof was not there, there was beer drinking at times and watching sports for some of the guys. The popular professor had a fun group, when he went out of town, they pulled the grill out of the broom closet and roasted hot dogs and brats in the lab hood.

[Bella Fortuna]

Hey, but if I didn't have duplicitous union leaders filing onerous information requests that take months to collect (only to be never looked at), and out there stirring up bullshit non-existent "problems" and prematurely filing complaints with every regulatory agency know to man to grind us all to a halt in the ossified bureaucracy and nonsensical over-formality...what would I do all day?

[Clinton Huxley]

Creation of powerpoint slides and subtly different excel sheets containing exactly the same information expands as real work contracts.

[Tyrannical]

Ironic that a college professor wrote it, since I don't think there is anything as bloated as a university.

except the upper echelons of a multinational corporation or a state administration, of course.

No, I don't think even government reaches the bloated level that universities can. At least in the US.

[Thinking Aloud]

Hey, but if I didn't have duplicitous union leaders filing onerous information requests that take months to collect (only to be never looked at), and out there stirring up bullshit non-existent "problems" and prematurely filing complaints with every regulatory agency know to man to grind us all to a halt in the ossified bureaucracy and nonsensical over-formality...what would I do all day?

Watch porn.

[Bella Fortuna]

Ironic that a college professor wrote it, since I don't think there is anything as bloated as a university.

except the upper echelons of a multinational corporation or a state administration, of course.

No, I don't think even government reaches the bloated level that universities can. At least in the US.

Not really true. Some of us have long been on skeleton crews because there's no money to support adequate staffing.

[Bella Fortuna]

Hey, but if I didn't have duplicitous union leaders filing onerous information requests that take months to collect (only to be never looked at), and out there stirring up bullshit non-existent "problems" and prematurely filing complaints with every regulatory agency know to man to grind us all to a halt in the ossified bureaucracy and nonsensical over-formality...what would I do all day?

Watch porn.

Not at work!

Besides, I have to differentiate the evenings from the day somehow...