"Well, I get up at seven, yeah And I go to work at nine I got no time for livin' Yes, I'm workin' all the time
It seems to me I could live my life A lot better than I think I am I guess that's why they call me They call me the workin' man"
-Rush, Working Man
A brief entry today, shoehorned between work and funeral obligations as I get ready to leave tomorrow for Dallas.
Two related inputs arrived within a few hours of each other, and got me thinking.
The first was this meme on Facebook about how much more leisure time our ancestors enjoyed between plagues and spurts of brigandage.
Not precisely true, I've surmised, because the figure only accounts for work on the master's fields, which in turn was the rent for the peasant's own farm. They worked more than 150 days almost certainly. But a review of the church calendar at the time reveals about sixty holy days. That's two months off, not counting the one-off debauches that accompanied weddings, funerals, and the like. Not too shabby.
Later, on the drive over from the farm I listened to an article on Morning Edition (yes, I'm an NPR libtard) about the lack of guaranteed paid vacation in the U.S., making us an outlier in the developed world (setting aside the whole health care debacle).
Why is that? Well, according to our correspondent and a bunch of labor historians, during the 1930s the union movement brought us workplace safety standards, overtime, social security, and a basket of benefits that were extracted from capital while the Fords of the world cowered at the possibility of Soviet-style communism sweeping over the industrialized west. This gave the unions leverage to press for legislation that made the working person's life a lot better.
But when it came to guaranteed paid vacations, the unions worried that a law mandating such a right would leave workers wondering why they should pay union dues at all, what with the government already providing the safety net and benefits package only organized labor provided before. So they chose to leave that one on the table.
The bad news for those of us who came after was that unions withered anyway, as workers questioned what they were getting for their buck, and the captains of industry moved their jobs overseas. So for the emerging service economy, the government became a sort of union of last resort. Unfortunately, it was also for sale to the highest bidder, unlike the unions it supplanted, and so the ownership class simply bought their way out of any further obligations that might depress shareholder dividends and slow the massive growth of income inequality over the last four decades.
But other than that, this whole experiment in free market capitalism has been a huge success. Now get back to work.
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