[lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!

[andie nachgeborenen]

Actually sleeping less and working longer hours does not make you more but less productive. This is a result of industrial psychology that is so robust it could be the foundation of the field. I know of no, zero, zip work even disputing it, and every one of the dozens of studies that look into this variable suggest that more sleep and shorter hours make you more productive. I mean every single study, without exception. If you make people work 14 hour days over six or seven day weeks, you will get no more work, in fact less, than you would if you had them work about five hours (the limit of productive work) about four days a week. You just get the same amount of work done spread over more time. 

This raises the question of why there has been what the old man called the struggle over the length of the working day. It is actually against capitalist material interest for the bosses to keep you chained longer to your machines. In some contexts, rare, such as hourly billing for associates in law firms, where number of hours put in rather than actual productivity is the basis of profits, there is a rationality to it. But for most workers, where profits depend directly on increasing unit production per hour, it's irrational in the individual capitalist case.

As a first approximation, I hypothesize that the struggle over the length of the working day, the absolute intensification of exploitation, is an exercise of capitalist class power to keep workers in their place. In the early days of Sir Andrew Ure, as documented by, e.g., E.P. Thompson in The Making Of The English Working Class, it was necessary to "break" newly proletarianized former farm laborers to factory discipline. 

Now of course we are all thoroughly broken, so the question is, why does this efficiency-wrecking (as well as soul-destroying) practice continue? It's not as if the psychological results are not known. Maybe they are not believed, probably managers don't believe them, but you'd think that just a few companies that were sensible about this would have a serious competitive advantage. And this isn't rocket science; you'd think it was totally obvious that rested, happy workers would do more and better than tired, bitter workers who need constant monitoring. Nonetheless, the prevailing managerial philosophy throughout the capitalist world is "the whippings will continue until morale improves."

How this can persist, in capitalist terms, seems to me to be a very important question.

--- On Mon, 6/9/08, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:


> From: B. <docile_body at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!
> To: "LBO Talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Date: Monday, June 9, 2008, 2:04 PM
> [Not only does that (what's in my subject line) seem
> to be a common theme of conservative groaning, it's
> something I've encountered not infrequently among
> crusty, cracker-barrel wisdom types.
> 
> Yet, not only have measures of US worker productivity
> shown this to be untrue (right?), but, check this
> out:--
> 
> B.]
> 
> --------------
> 
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20080608/hl_hsn/sleepanecessitynotaluxury
> 
> Sleep: A Necessity, Not a Luxury
> 
> By Dennis Thompson
> HealthDay Reporter Sun Jun 8, 7:01 PM ET 
> 
> [...]
> 
> Before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1880,
> people slept an average of 10 hours a night. These
> days, Americans average 6.9 hours of sleep on
> weeknights and 7.5 hours a night on weekends,
> according to the National Sleep Foundation.
> 
> [...]
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