Hey everyone,
I'm getting into the thick of a master's degree in economics and today in class our professor showed us a graph like the one i've attached. I recreated something like it with data from Our World in Data (which I think was the original source of the data but it not, it showed the same trend).
The graph shows that in most of the western countries, the average hours worked started dropping around 1950 and continued to fall until around 1980 before settling at a new level.
My question is, what explains this? We went into some nonsense neoclassical model using marginal utility and other fake stuff, but I'm curious what could explain this? It sure does seem like everyone is working more and more (at least everyone talks about it).
My intuition is that women entering the labor force could explain it. The total labor being done went up (women do the domestic work and also working jobs) but only the commodified labor went down on average. It could also think that unionization rates and union pushes for reduced working hours are the cause but most of the reductions from those were before WWII and not incremental (unions typically demand more hours worked or higher pay/benefits instead of less time on the job once the workweek is at 40 hours).
The USSR is conspicuously missing from that graph, as is the entire global south. If I'm not mistaken the USSR was always leading the charge of workweek shortening. Also the time axis is much too short. Allow it to stretch back 1000 years or so and another picture should emerge. Less hours also means very little if the rate of exploitation is going up at the same time.
Women entering the workforce has increased the rate of exploitation if I'm not mistaken. David Harvey was heavily criticized by second wavers for pointing this out.
I'm not sure where you're getting the pre-WW2 notion from, post-WW2 unions were very strong.
When I mentioned the pre-WWII unions I was referring to the fact that most of the workweek shortening movements in western countries were before WWII. The struggles for the 10 hour day, Saturdays off, the 8 hour day, etc. were all before the start of this graph.
And I'm not saying that there wasn't some larger trend going on or that this is somehow all the countries. I was just curious in what caused this speciic trend among the imperial core countries.