Proud to Work 80 Hours a Week

If you just bragged on Facebook or Twitter that you or your spouse works 80 hours a week just to get by, this is for you.  If you are not that person, read on anyway, and enjoy the show.

Jane McGonigial, a rather well known woman who works in the video game industry and who has started doing research on the effects of games on humans, has given a number of TED talk which I highly recommend watching.  In one of these videos, she describes some research she was involved with.  In this research, a number of nursing home residents were asked what their biggest regrets were.  The two most common answers were, spending too much time working and spending too little time with family.  Someone (who I have been unable to identify) once said something to the effect of, "Any fool can learn from his own mistakes; it takes a wise man to learn from the mistakes of others."  If you are working 80 hours a week, you should be asking yourself, are you going to be the fool who learns from his own mistakes only after it is too late, or are you going to be the wise man (or woman) who learns from the mistakes of a majority of old people who wish they had spent their lives better?

I also want to point something else out: Even black slaves in the South, before the Civil War, did not typically work 80 hours a week.  Slaves were expensive, and owners were fully aware that frequent 16 hour work days would cause injury, making the slaves unable to do their work.  Now days, this is not a problem.  Most employers do not pay any up front costs, so working people to death is quite profitable, so long as there is a line of replacements waiting outside.  If you are working 80 hours a week just to get by, your employer considers you expendable.  Does a wise person continue to work a job where the goal is extract as much work as possible before throwing an employee aside and bringing in a fresh one?  Further, slaves in the South did not have to worry about where their food was going to come from, or how they were going to make rent next month.  It sounds like your employer is great.  You are working more than a slave, you get less compensation than a slave, and you do not even get to have the peace of job security.   Your life sounds awesome.

So what about the people that are working 80 hours a week, but could get by on less?  Can I ask, what is the point?  I suppose if you like your job a whole lot, maybe you could justify neglecting family and other relationships to spend all of your time working.  And maybe you do not really care about having time to put all of your hard earned money to good use.  Oh, and maybe you just do not care about your health either.  Actually, you are beginning to sound like someone with severe depression.  You should probably get some help for that.  In fact, people who spend all of their time working, even if they like their jobs, are at much higher risk for depression than others.  Not only does this cause major relationship problems, depression causes reduced productivity.  In other words, if you are working 80 hours a week, good luck continuing to be productive enough to keep your job.

There was a time, long ago, when working for someone else was humiliating.  The single exception was apprenticeships, where someone was paying for you to work for someone else, in exchange for that person to teach you their craft, so you would never have to work for someone else again.  Some jobs were not that bad, for instance, being a banker.  Obviously not every banker could afford to open his own bank.  The President of the United States (or any other elected government position) is another example.  On the whole however, most hired jobs were menial labor or mindless brain work that only the desperate were willing to do.  Many people bought land and started their own farms, to avoid the humiliation of working for someone else.  These people often worked 60 to 80 hours a week, and those with large families sometimes worked more.  They worked for themselves though, and they took pride in the fact that no one was their master.  During hard times, these people sometimes had to humble themselves and accept welfare from others, but while they preferred not to, they considered it better than working for someone else.  During better times, these people often paid it back by giving to others who were in need.  They only ever worked for someone else when there was no other option.  Working for someone else was rock bottom.

Now, however, I hear reports of people bragging on Facebook that they spend 80 hours a week working for someone else and barely even get compensated sufficiently to survive!  How low has our society sunk that the slave looks down on the freeman?  How bad has it gotten that social pressure encourages people to voluntarily become slaves, and people do it?  Gone are the days when slaves must be guarded day and night to prevent their escape.  Now, slaves will stay in bondage even when there is no legal ownership demanding that they stay.  Is this really the American Dream?

It gets worse.  The U.S. government has setup programs that make the situation even worse.  I would like to believe that this is not intentional, but that might be naive.  Our current welfare systems help encourage slavery very effectively.  Contrary to popular belief, a majority of people on welfare work.  In fact, things like the Earned Income Credit require work to get paid, and most welfare in the U.S. penalizes people who are either not working or who are not looking for work (which is far more work than actually working).  So, the government tells us that we can only have sufficient welfare if we are already slaves or if we are trying to become slaves.  Worse, if we try to escape slavery by finding a job where fewer hours are required for greater pay, our welfare gets cut off, reducing our net income to below what is sufficient for survival.  Slavery may not be explicitly legally enforced, but even the government has designed welfare programs to prevent the escape from slavery.  It gets even better than this though.  All of that money for the welfare system comes mostly from the middle class.  The primary benefit of welfare goes to businesses that do not pay enough for their employees to get by.  You might try to claim that welfare is benefiting the employees and not the businesses.  You would be wrong.  If those employees did not get welfare, what would happen?  Many of these people already work multiple jobs, or spend their free time looking for a better job.  They do not have time to do even more work.  Without welfare, they have three options: keep working for too little to get by and starve to death, quit their jobs and start looking for better work full time (and probably starve to death anyway), or quit their jobs, enjoy life and wait for the end to come (and definitely starve to death).  I suppose they could try to get help from family, but the extra strain on their family members is likely to make the poverty spread.  Ultimately what happens to the businesses is, they loose all of their employees to starvation, suicide, or just quitting, and the businesses fail.  Alternatively, the businesses could raise wages to make up the difference.  Now, notice that the business ultimately takes the brunt of the blow if welfare quits.  The business fails, even if the ex-employees find a better job, unless the business starts paying higher wages.  That welfare money is not helping the slaves so much as it is reducing the costs of the businesses.  If businesses fail and demand for their services still exists, they will be replaced by new businesses that will pay sufficient wages, if welfare is removed.  Otherwise those new businesses will fail almost immediately.  Our current welfare system robs the middle class to make life easier for the slave masters, under the guise of robbing the rich to pay the poor.

Now, do not get me wrong here.  I am certainly not suggesting that it would be wise to eliminate government welfare to fix this problem.  Notice above that the ultimate consequence for most welfare recipients is starvation and death.  This is bad, both morally and economically.  I have also discussed the inevitability of welfare as the primary form of income for a majority of the population, as the consequence of rapidly developing technology.  Welfare is necessary for the survival of our society, and it is necessary for the support of our ever growing lower class.  It needs to be fixed to be more friendly to escaping slavery, not eliminated.

Most Americans seem to have everything working against them.  Slave masters have convinced us that slavery is more noble than freedom.  This has been so effective that now the slaves brag on Facebook about their horrible work conditions and try to tell free men that they are stupid for recognizing it for what it is.  Over the last century, mankind has managed to produce a huge amount of labor saving technology.  We also managed to get the legal work week down to 40 hours.  This was a long drawn out process that was finally codified into Federal law in 1937.  Is has been like this for 76 years, during which time numerous devices have been invented and adopted which dramatically reduce labor.  In fact, the computer has replaced inordinate numbers of people, just in the field of mathematical calculations.  The need for labor is far lower than it has been ever in the known history of the world.  It has been argued, and I agree, that a 20 hour work week should pay enough to support a small family.  Given production costs for various goods and their retail prices, large business can easily afford to pay sufficient wages for this, if they quit paying their CEOs and upper managers hundreds or thousands of times what they currently pay their other employees.  Instead we have laws and social expectations that keep what is approaching a majority of Americans in poverty.

If you want to complain that you are working 80 hours a week, or even that you and your spouse are working 80 hours a week put together, just to get by, you are telling me that you are stealing needed work from three other families.  And one of those families is the person that you just accused of freeloading.  Those three families that cannot find decent jobs and are forced to live on crummy government welfare because you are stealing their opportunity to work have far more reason to be angry with you than you have to be with them.  At this point, government welfare is designed to make up the difference between what your employer pays and what wages would be fair.  By taking four times the work you should just to avoid taking what you consider an unfair handout, you are robbing others of the opportunity to earn money by working and the opportunity to get enough welfare money to make up the difference.  That is certainly nothing to brag about.  Shame on you!