How should one spend their remaining 60+ hours in a week?
What about all the time spent commuting, taking care of children/family/pets/friends, grocery shopping and cooking, cleaning the house/clothes/dishes, learning things (at school or not), etc? What makes these things so different from work? Should the government put a weekly limit on these things too?
Why should a narcoleptic crippled 50 year old, single-earner, single parent, with 4 young kids, a house, continuing education, narcolepsy, 2 hour daily commute and minimum wage job, have the same working week limit as a single 20 year old with no outside responsibilities who loves his fulfilling job and have an employer that takes care of most of his needs?
Are you implying the 50 year old should be allowed to work more because they need money more, or the 20 year old should be allowed to work more because they are more capable of working long hours? Why not both? But then why are you juxtaposing the two?
Not really many studies have shown that after 35 / 40 hours of work in a week has negative effects. maybe like Japan Korea has a presentism problem ie people stretch out work or bike shed to look good.
Anyone who has pulled an all nighter knows that after about 36 hours awake you start to see things and can make serious mistakes.
I'd recommend reading Lordon's latest book, "Willing Slaves of Capital: Marx and Spinoza on Desire", which attempts to get to the very heart of this - how come employees enjoy their work, and sometimes even willing to forgo compensation? It uses Spinoza's theories of desire to augment and transform Marx's idea of the basal desire within a worker for material reproduction. Lordon describes quite elegantly how levels of management within the modern capitalist firm work to enforce strong feelings - not only of hope (joy) but also of fear (of losing one's job). Here's an excerpt:
>At each rung [of management], the desire to keep the advantages associated with one’s own position can only be satisfied at the price of a supplementary effort exacted by the rung above. Everything else remaining equal, the probability of success diminishes. The injunction coming from on high and propagating through the thick of the system diffuses in that very propagation an effect of fear, that ‘inconstant sadness, born of the idea of a future or past, things whose outcome we to some extent doubt.’ By the very logic of desire, fear and hope are its nearly permanent backdrop once taking hold of the object is postponed, and the time that separates desire from fulfilment ‘necessarily’ creates (from the point of view of the agent) some uncertainty. This temporal tension in desire gives the pursuit of its object its ambivalent passionate coloration (fluctuatio animi, the vacillation of the mind, as Spinoza calls it), since the joyful affect of hope (success) is (logically) accompanied by the sad affect of fear (failure). The ‘external’ conditions under which individuals pursue their desires determine the particular balance between hope and fear in each case, hence the dominant affective tonality that accompanies their effort.
In the UK its the average hours worked over a 17 week period must not exceed 48 hours - I suspect this is how it will end up working.
Of course what the article doesn't touch on is are there any "Spanish" practices around over time that happen in Korea eg deliberately going slow and holding back work to get more paid over time - or similar tactics that usually where solved by an under the counter brown envelope.
