Do these figures about the glorious explosion of leisure control for the increase in two income families?
There just must be something wrong, not just something "subjective," and so "to be explained" (away) as leftist prejudice or false consciousness of the working classes deluded about the joys the increasingly unbridled capitalism has brought them.
Real wages have been falling for thirty years, A vastly increased number of families have been forced will-they-nil-they to put both parents in the labor market. Union representation has dropped through the floor. The number of workers (in the US) covered by the FLSA mandating the 40 hour week has shrunk dramatically. Productivity has risen while the labor force has shrunk. How is all this consistent with the supposed explosion of leisure? I don't think it's just that folks are spending more tome at the gym, btw.
--- James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> It seems to me that Marv, Gar, Chuck, Carrol and the
> Bitch are all
> illustrating the point by their subjective reaction
> (disbelief) to the
> objective statistics.
>
> The Time Use studies show that US leisure time is
> holiding up pretty well
> despite the pressures from work time and domestic
> labour.
>
> Which is interesting (ok, maybe in a bit of a
> geekish way) because nobody
> believes that to be the case (i.e. their subjective
> experience is that they
> are very short of time). The disjuncture between
> subjective belief (we have
> no free time) and objective fact (you have) is
> something (maybe not the only
> thing) that has to be explained.
>
> Wainwright's (in his book with Calman, Work Stress)
> point is that other
> social changes make people experience work pressure
> more intensely than
> before.
>
> Doug asks does this mean that people are less
> willing to put up with what
> they did before?
>
> Maybe. My answer would be to look at what has
> changed - principally the
> declining role of organised labour, which leaves
> people in an unmediated
> relationship with their employers. That makes them
> more vulnerable. And it
> makes them feel even more vulnerable.
>
> I also think that the anarchist point about unions
> ought to be taken into
> account. Unions did not only defend workers, they
> also acted as 'labour
> lieutenants of capital', enforcing negotiated
> settlements upon the
> workforce. The wage-labour capital relationship was,
> ironically, more
> disciplined with organised labour's role.
>
> Older generations of more organised workers felt
> loyalty and confidence.
> They also felt greater pride in their work, and a
> greater sense of duty
> towards work and family, and approached that duty
> with a degree of stoicism
> that is less widespread today. That is because they
> felt more ownership of
> the workprocess themselves, because, even if they
> did not own it, they felt
> that they had at least a stake in it, that people
> are less likely to today.
>
> Not in the way that craft workers did, but as
> industrial workers, they
> identified with the work process because they had
> tentatively some
> identification with the organised labour side of the
> bargain, that
> translated into a degree of loyalty to the firm, the
> product, the work
> process, that today's more atomised workers are much
> less likely to feel.
>
> That is the overall psychology of which the
> intensity of belief that we are
> more overworked than our parents persists, even
> though it is not true.
>
>
>
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