The ever changing work week; history and technological change

 

     Once upon a time, long long ago, people did not divide their time between work and non-work. People spent the time needed to survive and did whatever they wanted the rest of the time. In certain "tropical paradises" with ample food and few dangers, most of the time was spent doing sports, enjoying flowers or doing crafts, building monuments, or whatever. In less amenable environments, most of the time was spent trying to survive and the only non-work time was during winter months when activity was severely restricted (but, often, the time was still allocated to doing activities to prepare for the warmer periods).

     As humans developed technology, including agricultural, animal husbandry, and environmental adaptive technologies, the less hospitable areas had less time required for survival. Society moved in two directions to make use of this non-work time. One direction was social stratification -- some had lots of leisure while others lost their leisure to perform labor for the higher social layers. The other direction was religious and familial development which provided more structured activities for use of non-survival time.

     Societies which had developed in the less stressful areas did not shift as much -- continuing to spend most of their time at leisure activities. In the other areas, a dynamic developed between the two directions of the shift of people's time with some wanting to do less and less for themselves and the others wanting more time to develop leisure activities. This dynamic continues unto today.

     But technology continued to develop and this push towards reallocation of survival labor time to non-work changed. This was buffered, in part, by continued population increases. The more people, with the greater strain on resources, the more efforts needed to survive -- but technology changes have continued to move somewhat ahead of those needs.

     In some areas, bolstered by religious mandates, the working people started having times, and days, where mandated activities could be forgotten. Children started to be seen as developing people rather than just another labor resource. Days were allocated for worship. Lastly, the work day was shortened to allow non-work time before and after the work day.

     In our present time, between automation and AI, we find our society entering a new period when the amount of work hours needed is becoming a smaller, and smaller, part of the total number of hours available to be produced by people. And, with automation and AI, the training and abilities needed by people who do work becomes more difficult to achieve.

     This leaves us with many hours not needed to be worked. It is no longer a survival situation -- it is a political and economic problem. If we reduce population then all of our production, and economic flow, will be at overcapacity (more than we can use). If we do NOT reduce population then there is not enough work for everyone. One possibility is to have each working person work fewer hours. Shorter days or fewer days? With commuting, fewer days means less overhead and more efficient labor movement.

     There is probably no universally "correct" solution but, unless civilization does a "reset" due to societal collapse, we need to face the problem of not enough hours of work for the number of people we have. Many object strongly to people not working but, if that is to not be the case, there must be better distribution (and better education) to spread the number of work hours among the many people.