The rise of steam power during the industrial revolution didn't just result in people working fewer hours. Workers were much more productive than before, but they didn't automatically get shorter work weeks.

Getting an 8-hour work day required the workers to form powerful unions and go on strike. Those strikes were broken up by private security and cops. People were killed. But, eventually, decades later, the rich people with power were forced to negotiate and 8 hour days were the norm.

I have known individual workers who had skills that were in high demand which gave them leverage. They negotiated deals like 4 day work weeks, or 30 hour work weeks because they could.

But, for the average worker to get a shorter work week, it's going to take collective action. It's probably also going to require that blood be spilled. Unless people are angry enough to getting beaten or maybe killed, nothing's going to change. Step 1 is joining a union.

Capitalism

I have read that with our current productivity we should have a 4-day workweek and much higher salaries. But all the gains go straight to the top.

A lot of that extra hours is because of planned obsolescence. If products lasted longer, if products were repairable, less would need to be manufactured. If less needed to be manufactured, the less work we need to do.

I've been arguing this for years. I'm 10x minimum more efficient since I got into IT almost 2 decades ago, there is no end in site, no slowdown. Just more work work work. So much shit is instant and only takes a few moments when it's not. No way we need to work this much.

In a better world, we’d be paid much more for less work. No loss of jobs to AI, company would just keep on employees to cover for others to take long vacations. CEO and executive team won’t make 300x more then their average employee

It’s meant to make dollars, not sense.

I would argue that you're not thinking about working hours at a high enough level. The notion that someone can tell you that the negotiation for labor exchange is hourly is just simplifying the negotiation. For example, I make $70 an hour after you calculate it annually, but I'm not an hourly employee. I also work from home, which is a net positive because I'm a more laborious worker when I do this which is a benefit to the employer, and it's a stress reducer for me, which is a benefit to me, the employee.

But there's a secondary aspect of this situation which is that I do not have someone else "watching" me and making sure I'm working all the time. That concept is antiquated. It isn't that there's X amount of hours of work to do in a day, it's that there's Y amount of labor that needs to be done, but we don't know what that Y variable is. We fundamentally understand the overarching goal - it might be something like, how can we increase efficiency? But it's a problem solving concept where we need to utilize time (labor) to think up strategies to how we can solve that problem while connecting objective information to those strategies so we can better understand how they can even be implemented.

After all, if I can increase my own efficiency by 5% but doing so requires 6 months of my time, that isn't going to have a payoff for many years and is likely not in the best interest of either myself or the business.

In addition, working more hours doesn't correlate to more work getting done. One man might push a boulder up a hill in 8 hours while another might be able to do it in 6, or even 4. Do you want to pay them both the same amount? Would you want to be paid the same amount if you were the man pushing the boulder in 4 hours as the man pushing in 8? Of course not.

And do you always receive additional reward each time your labor correlates to some kind of improvement? Well no, of course not. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you can go years without seeing anything outside of your salary. The reason is simply because life and human relationships and interactions are complicated and there's a lot more going on than you're going to give credit for.

I make a decent income, but I also have to prove my value to my company. What I do can be in no small part measured, so if I'm not producing value, the business won't want to keep me on the payroll, and if someone cheaper - thus, less credentialed/experienced - can do much of, or even all of the value I can provide, they will just swap me out for that person, and rightly so. Wouldn't you leave a company who's only paying you $40 an hour for work that another would pay you $70 for?

Most of the people complaining about why we still have to work so much isn't seeing the bigger picture, and likely works a shitty job where the average employee needs to be monitored and probably doesn't have the expertise to be doing anything that isn't more or less transactional (meaning, you are asked to specifically perform very informed tasks like on a conveyor line). This is just a byproduct of people without high-level modern skills complaining that they're sick of pushing boulders up hills all day every day.

I mean, I haven't pushed boulders up hills for 20 years.

We really need to start firing rocket launchers at billionaire SUVs

As we all know, after the horse was replaced by the widespread adoption of motorized vehicles, it was free to roam the greenest plains with whichever herd they wanted, with the motorized vehicles serving them for a change, and all the feeding and stable infrastructure remaining in place to serve their needs.

People say they plan revolutions to eat the rich, but because they only ever inherently meant the rhetoric to serve themselves, they will only end up carrying out revolutions to eat themselves.

Why do rich people get to replace human workers with robots and then tell humans they should get a job if they want to live

"Get a job"

"I would, but you're the one who provides jobs and you won't provide them"

Because it is not true.

Scarcity can absolutely be artificially created. Just look at the diamond industry. But I suspect that is not the kind of scarcity this meme is referring to.

There is a reason the 1% exists, and scarcity is certainly part of the equation. We live on a planet with finite resources, and there are people who seek to accumulate and hoard those resources, along with the wealth and power that come with controlling them.

However, the 60-hour workweek referenced in this meme is not an inevitable consequence of scarcity. It is a consequence of how our economic system prioritizes corporate profits, investor returns, and perpetual growth over the well-being of workers.

A company can be profitable and still be considered a failure if it does not generate enough profit to satisfy investors. Revenue growth is not enough. Profit margins must increase. Returns must keep climbing. And when the pursuit of ever-increasing profits takes precedence over everything else, workers are expected to sacrifice more of their time and energy to sustain it.

That is the real rot: an economic system that treats the failure to maximize profits as though it were the same thing as losing money.

Scarcity is real, but it does not explain or justify every form of inequality. The concentration of wealth and power is also a consequence of who controls resources, how ownership is structured, and what our economic institutions reward.

Until we address both the limits of our finite resources and the systems that allow wealth and power to become increasingly concentrated, we will continue to see extreme inequality. The problem is not simply that there isn't enough to go around. It's also that the people who control the most are incentivized to keep accumulating more.