The Contemporary State of Work: A Reversal of Progress?
Working Hours
Historical
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
According to a chart that I found in Our World In Data, workers in the western world (Europe and USA) in 1870 used to work for up to 72 hours per week. While I couldn’t find a reliable source for the average number of work days per week for workers in this period, I think it’s safe to assume that the number would be between 5 and 7. This meant that on average, workers in 1870 worked anywhere between 10 and 14 hours per work day.
While working hours per week stayed relatively flat between 1870 and 1913, it then significantly dropped between 1913 and 1938. What happened then? Actually, what triggered this drop had started to happen decades or even a century prior.
In 1845, Karl Marx wrote about his dream of a society where it is possible “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (source).
In the 1860s, a movement called the Eight-hour Day Movement started to gain more following in the United States. Across the Atlantic, the Geneva Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association happened in 1866, and one of the landmark resolutions reached in that congress was the demand to limit the length of working hours per day to 8 hours.
A preliminary condition, without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive, is the limitation of the working day.
It is needed to restore the health and physical energies of the working class, that is, the great body of every nation, as well as to secure them the possibility of intellectual development, sociable intercourse, social and political action.
We propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day.
— Karl Marx, Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council and The Different Questions, 1866.
In Europe, the eight hour work day was written into law or at least started to be introduced in the period between the late 1910s and early 1920s (sources: USSR, Poland, Spain, France, Denmark), while in the US, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was finally signed into law in 1938 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The FLSA made it a right for American workers in many industries to get paid at least the minimum wage, to work at most 40 hours in a week, and to get overtime compensation if they were to work overtime hours.
With the implementation of working hour limits and increasing technical efficiencies, intellectuals at the time thought that in the future humans might only need to work even less hours to get the same output.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted in his essay titled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren that we — his grandchildren’s generation — would only need to work 15 hours a week “for three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!”
Henry Ford, a practicing capitalist, sees the benefit of shorter working hours. He said that a person who works 15 to 16 hours a day would have no desire to spend or consume since all their time and energy are used up for work. “No industry could ever be built up by filling his needs, because he had none but the most primitive.” From his point of view, leisure time should not be seen as lost time or class privilege, but as a cold business fact which drives consumption and the economy.
Even Richard Nixon said in 1956 that he foresaw the four-day workweek in the “not too distant future”.
In short, thought leaders from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century predicted that working hours would keep on reducing, even to the point that excess leisure time would become a problem. But is that true? Is that the direction that the global industry has taken?
Recent Past
Since 1938, the rate of change of working hour reduction slowed down. Weekly working hours in 2000 is only slightly reduced compared to in 1938. If you look closer, weekly working hours in the US even increased since 1970.
Contemporary State
Since the rapid advancement of mobile technology in the 2010s, work has become more unavoidable. An unpublished survey conducted by the Harvard Business School indicated that managers and professionals in Asia, Europe, and North America spend between 80–90 hours a week being “on”: “either working, or ‘monitoring’ work and remaining accessible.” China, which is often predicted to be the next economic leader of the world, has the notorious 996 work culture.
We also have workaholic businesspeople like Elon Musk who used his influence to preach about stuff like the need of 80–100 work hours per week to “change the world”. And lately, the pandemic gave rise to the working from home/working from anywhere (WFH/WFA) arrangements, blurring the line between work and leisure even more.
From personal observations on people around me in the sphere of Jakarta/Singapore tech and business scene, it seems like working over 40 hours a week is the norm. It is also not too common yet for people to take long (i.e. 1+ week of continuous) vacations or to detach oneself completely from work’s reach during vacations.
While working conditions now are undeniably better than in the 1800s or early-to-mid 1900s (although, as a reminder, things such as factory workers having to wear diapers at work due to their employers extremely limiting break times are still happening in the 2010s), working hours seem to stop shortening and may actually be taking the opposite direction. The prevalence of work in our daily lives even outside of working hours is also made common now since most people are just one phone call or text message away through the internet and portable communication devices (i.e. mobile phones and laptops), no matter where we physically are located in the world.
Quiet Quitting
The term “quiet quitting” has been popular on the internet lately. As shown on the Google trends graph above, people’s interest on this term started to rise in late July 2022 and peaked in mid-August 2022. By some quick browsing, the term can be defined as working to what your role’s job description describes, within the contractually defined scope and working hours, not going above and beyond. Other people also label it “acting your wage”.
To be honest, I don’t understand why the term caught the attention of journalists, why journalists even wrote about it, and why media outlets published articles on it. It seems to me that the definition of “quiet quitting” is just the fulfillment of contractual obligations. This should not be surprising at all given that work arrangements between employers and employees are often defined using contracts. It even makes perfect legal sense: obligations written in a contract are fulfilled by the party who is supposed to perform such obligations, in a manner (e.g. working hours, work scope) that has been agreed upon in said contract.
What’s so surprising about this? Is it even fair to call such actions “quiet quitting” since the word “quit” carries a negative charge in the working world? Shouldn’t this just be called doing your job?
My Opinions on Work in General
My Concerns
With regards to working hours, the great minds of decades past who predicted an overabundance of leisure time in the 21st century are (sadly) getting proven wrong. As a collective, we’ve never gotten to such a leisurely state. As an anecdotal example, even in the tech industry where working conditions are commonly perceived as “more modern” than in other industries, one may easily forget that these tech companies have their businesses available 24/7 on the internet, often meaning that on top of their main duties, many workers need to be put on on-call shift rotations. Zooming back out to the general economy, despite Moore’s law and the higher availability of automations at our disposal, workers in the 2020s don’t work significantly shorter than workers in the 1980s/90s. We may even be reversing the work hour reduction trend in recent years.
With regards to the media promulgating the “issue” of “quiet quitting”, may this be an attempt to distort people’s sense of reality? When one goes above and beyond in their line of duty, his/her dedication should be appreciated but shouldn’t be expected. If it is expected, how is it above and beyond anymore? If one is expected to constantly go above and beyond, shouldn’t the “above and beyond” acts then be clearly defined and included in their scope of work or job description? In academic life, the product of extraordinary effort is appreciated with honors, grants, scholarships, etc. In interpersonal relationships, extraordinary effort is usually at least recognized, if not appreciated, by the receiver of the products of such effort (if it is not even recognized, I opine that the receiver is probably an entitled person who doesn’t really deserve such effort in the first place). Why, then, is the media now trying to redefine extraordinary effort at work as mandatory and normal obligation fulfillment as something less/something negative?
The Playing Field is Not Level
In my opinion, founders/CEOs who are proponents of exorbitant work hours like Elon Musk may work upwards of 100 hours a week because of at least any of these 3 things: 1) literally owning a higher amount of shares than their employees and figuratively owning higher stakes, 2) actually enjoying/having fun in what they do, 3) having directors, managers, personal assistants under their chain of command who help execute many of the actual tasks necessary for transforming their vision into reality. Thus, it’d be unfair for these proponents of long hours to expect the same level of effort out of their employees who don’t have any of the same 3 things.
Just as an anecdotal explanation, when I was a college student, I had two of the three things I mentioned above. I was 1) responsible for my own study outcomes and 2) genuinely enjoy the subjects in my major. With at least these two things, I truly felt incentivized and motivated to work on a difficult homework problem set from my Computing in Industrial Engineering class overnight until 6 a.m., not minding the fact that I would only have 3ish hours of sleep time before my next class. I did so because 1) I knew how my hard work would directly affect what outcome I’d get and 2) I had a genuine interest in the subject. Working upwards of 12 hours on a single day to finish that homework felt like solving an interesting puzzle from which I can’t take my attention off, while for students who didn’t have any interest in that class and were taking it only to fulfill the requirement for graduating the major, the same homework might felt more like an evil, torturous necessity.
Let’s Add These All Up
Unless one still lives in a society of extreme poverty where people still farm their subsistence food and craft their own shelter and clothing from physically accessible materials, I’d say that money replaces food, shelter, and clothing as the basic need. Many of us today use money to get our food, shelter, and clothing. If anything, money becomes the requirement to get food, shelter, and clothing, and money is most commonly gained through work.
Let’s say someone 1) lives within the systems of a non-extreme poverty society, where money is a basic requirement to live, thus he/she does not have much choice but to get money, 2) doesn’t own any stake in the company for which he/she works, 3) is not actually passionate about the work he/she does, and 4) is at the bottom of the management chain, thus not having any subordinates to which tasks can be delegated and ideas can be outsourced. How is it fair to demand that this person should work as hard and as passionate as the company’s founders/C-levels?
With my argument stripped bare to its constituents, it may sound entitled/too extreme/improbable. But just give a bit more humanity and I’m sure it will sound more common. A John Doe that is passionate about engineering design just graduated from the engineering school of a reputable university in Bandung, Indonesia. Like many of his colleagues who are passionate about engineering design, he couldn’t find too many engineering jobs that would be intellectually fulfilling since many engineering roles in Indonesia are just factory operator roles, with the design roles taken by people in the companies’ headquarters in Japan, Korea, Europe, or the US. He then tried his luck with the business sector in Jakarta, which is usually quite open to hiring fresh graduates from any major. He then landed a job as an entry-level advisory analyst in a financial firm with a compensation of a monthly salary of IDR 6.3 million (~USD 420), health insurance, and no stocks or options or any other form of ownership of the company (as is the norm in the industry). Since it has now been a few months since his graduation and he needs to fend for himself, he took the job.
I’m pretty sure that you know a few of these John Does around you, who took a job due to necessity and because of the immediate opportunity more than anything else. Let’s re-ask the question now: how is it fair that the industry demand that John work as hard as his CEO who has higher stakes and gets 15–20x more pay, or as passionately as his colleagues who are truly passionate in financial advisory? Or let’s shift the perspective a little bit, why would John work as hard as someone who is paid 15–20x higher? What is the incentive for John to do so?
In this situation, if John is able to learn the ropes of financial advisory in a short enough time, produce adequate work outputs that fulfills the standards of the company and fulfills the mandates of his work contract, but John has less domain knowledge and genuine passion about his work than his counterparts are — thus may be perceived as not as willing as his passionate colleagues to go “above and beyond” — , is John still a “quiet quitter”? Isn’t the fact that John is able to adapt, fulfill his obligations, and produce adequate results in an unfamiliar domain already prove him going “above and beyond”? Especially for someone who’s only there for the basic need of money?
With all these said, I still think that the experience of hard work is a critical ingredient to make someone a well-rounded human being, as only with the experience of hard work would one be able to appreciate leisure and other finer things in life. I just very much disagree with the hustle culture. Broken down into more detailed ideas that don’t necessarily cover my thoughts exhaustively, what I mean by hustle culture here is: 1) The act of equating hard work to long working hours, 2) the backwards idea/trend that promotes working longer than 40 hours a week on average rather than shorter, and 3) the act of calling adequate work efforts as “quiet quitting”.
I only insist that meaning is available in spite of — nay, even through — suffering, provided, …, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.
— Victor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning, on editions that contain the 1984 Postscript
More Nuances on the Unlevel Playing Field
My hypothesis is: there are two broad types of people. For the first type, work or the domain that they work in brings joy to their lives. Work may be their passion, their ikigai, their escape from worse things in life, maybe the compensation from work is well worth it, or they simply are workaholics. For the second type, work is more of an evil necessity, it is something that must be done no matter at what cost or what compensation to ensure livelihood, or they simply haven’t found a domain of work that has a greater intersection with their lives’ values yet. Another hypothesis that I have is that the second type has a bigger population than the first.
For people of the first type, challenging work and continuous competition sounds like an interesting situation that breeds growth, while for people of the second type, the exact same thing sounds more like a depressingly inescapeable rat race — a dystopian way of living life.
If you are part of the first type, congratulations. The overwhelmingly capitalist society that we live in today has been shaped to favor people like you. By all means, bask in your ambition and do as much work as you please since it is beneficial for you. For people of the second type though, there is way more to life than just merely work. Work is primarily a means to get money so they can afford to live, while they derive most of their learning/joy/passion from other dimensions of life. For people of the first type, work is play and thus recharging, while for people of the second type, work drains their energy and they need to spend time/effort to recharge somewhere else. Thus, how can it still be fair to demand everyone to go above and beyond at work?
Just like how each person has different physical conditions and thus different limits of how much exertion drives growth for their muscles versus how much causes injury, I believe that everyone has different limits on how much work is healthy for them. The same amount of work hours/workload/work pressure that is a growth driver for some people may very well be a breaking force that induces mental or physical harm to others.
If a monkey and a fish went for a tree-climbing competition, the monkey would easily win and the fish would look like a fool although it has a real talent for swimming. The problem is, widely-available work is analogous to the tree-climbing competition here. A big chunk of available jobs and work domains are more suitable to certain types of people, but not all people. Yes, there is a plethora of different roles in a virtually limitless number of domains/industries, but we have to admit that the distribution of roles and domains is definitely not uniform. Many people are not lucky enough to work in a role or industry that they like, that they are good at, that the world needs, that pays, or let alone that has an overlap between any of these four factors.
Epilogue
Imagine you are on your deathbed, breathing the breaths of the last minutes of your life. At that moment, would you regret “not putting a few more hours at work to go above and beyond”?
Such a thing for sure won’t be regrettable for me.
P.S. If you’re interested in these topics, some good reads that I can recommend:
- A philosopher’s view: the benefits and dignity of work by Nicholas Smith (2011)
- Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren by John Maynard Keynes (1930)
- Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman (2014)
