Comic Strips

Support your local unions

8 hours of work is too much

If you feel strongly enough about that, you need to do what the organizers did to get to that 8 hour day: organize workers to form powerful unions, then go on strike, survive confrontations with the police where many people die, keep battling for several decades, and then eventually your shorter work day will maybe become a reality.

Getting to an 8 hour work day required a lot of blood to be spilled. I personally doubt that today's workers are motivated enough to put in the work and sacrifice required.

2 hour of commute + 8 of work is basically 10 hours away from home

Forgetting the hour lunch that isn't paid, so to get your time you spend 2 hours commuting, 8 hours working, and 1 hour "on break", so that's 11 hours of your day gone just because of work. With sleep, you are already down to 5 hours to do literally everything else your life requires. Grocery shopping, home/car/lawn maintenance, budgeting/planning bills, etc. God forbid you have kids and you have to figure out how to keep another human alive in that 5 hours on top of keeping yourself alive...

See, the commute is meant to be counted into it... xD

Yes, it's funny how a labour uprising in the US on May 1st ended up becoming the most important holiday in communist countries. Meanwhile, the Haymarket Affair is basically forgotten in the US.

It's also ridiculous how people today think that an 8-hour work day is some natural thing that happened because everybody agreed it made sense. The reality is that the bosses thought that a 12 hour work day made sense, and it took protest and violence to convince them to change their minds.

Anybody who wants a 4 day work week or a shorter work day needs to be aware of their history, and know that the only way to get there from here is massive union organization, and probably violence (mostly violence inflicted on the workers by the powers backing the status quo).

Did you get holiday pay at least? I dont think I got holiday pay even when I worked retail. My husband got 8 extra straight hours, and was paid time and a half for the shift he worked yesterday (unionized labor).

I dont think retail does anything like this. Fuck retail. I know exactly what you went through, and it is why youll never see me shop on a holiday.

The US celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September. It was established by the government through President Grover Cleveland in 1894 as an "apology" of sorts for the fallout of an anti-police-brutality protest (keyword Haymarket Affair) but actually to intentionally distance the day from the labor rights movement that established May 1 as what would be International Workers' Day. This separation was reinforced for the next hundred+ years because the class war never ends.

That's why I sleep on the train 🧠 🧠 🧠

We can do what we want to. We decide. If we want that, that's what we get. The only ones who don't want that are the land/production system owners and the system of capitalism.

There is nothing inherently "normal" or "natural" or "good" about the system under which we toil and slave, except you would be hard pressed to believe it when you speak to people because they are so deeply indoctrinated in that mode of thinking that they will fight to keep it. For some fucking reason.

We'd have to double to triple the workforce in logistics and construction and other necessary sectors. A reduction in work hours necessarily means a reduction in standard of living - even with CEO wages factored in - because the overhead of necessities grows compared to societal achievements. We need the same amount of food delivered and the same amount of houses built, but now it takes two to three times as many people to do it. The same applies to doctors or teachers, so the additional workforce would come from other segments - which finally means reduction in standard of living for the average citizen.

This assumes steady productive output. In some sectors, this assumption is wrong, but I think it's a fair assumption for logistics and construction.

Putting all essential jobs together (health, education, construction, logistics, agriculture, food retail, utilities, public administration, plus the required manufacturing and IT infrastructure) is already 50-55% of the workforce. In order for everyone to halve their workday, we'd all have to exclusively work only for the status quo. Which means no watches, no smartphones, no TV, no cinema, no museums, no parks.

A reduction of work hours would be nice, no question. But we also have to remember that the work goes somewhere and time/energy/resource efficiency matters on a fundamental biological level. We have to be a productive part of society for it to function, and while this is usually co-opted by capitalists to extract money, it remains a fact of life.

E: We're already having healthcare only because we're exploiting healthcare workers to the maximum. Even at the current status quo, treating them fairly would just not work. We're already in a state of broken equilibrium between what we need and what we want. The healthcare workforce would have to double only for them to have a 40h work week.

And then there's people with three jobs who still can't make ends meet. I propose we make the 40h week work for everyone first before we reduce further.

No the dehumidifier is entitled to that.

And the "lunch in your own time" means I'll be at work for 9 hours anyway

Don't worry you have the weekend for those, which you spend 8 hours in bed, 8 hours for chores, 4 hours feeling tired, and 4 hours doing whatever you want while feeling tired.

You didn’t mention unpaid lunch time, making sure you get there before clock in, any phone calls or emails that happen after hours, taking kids to daycare, and all the little things that you wouldn’t be doing if it wasn’t for your job. I guess that comes out of the “8 hours of sleep” time.

Yeah, life was a lot simpler when your wife/servant prepped all your food and work was a fifteen minute walk away.

Tell St. Peter I can't go,

I own my soul to the company store.