Concerns around the loss of jobs to new technology dates back to the Industrial Revolution and the machine-smashing riots led by “Luddites”. Workers at the time were right to revolt. The initial effect of the factory system was not only to destroy the cottage industry of handloom weaving but to drastically increase the hours and intensity of work. Average working time in Britain reached nearly 70 hours a week in the early 19th century, with some factory workers doing as much as 12 hours a day, six days a week.
But from the middle of the 19th century to the late 20th century, the benefits of technological progress were reflected in steadily reducing hours of work.
I don’t think working hours went up at the IR.
Market working hours – working for The Man for pay – definitely went up for males at the IR, yes. But when we consider total household hoursw, no I think they fell. Because hand spinning took hundreds and hundreds of annual hours for every woman. And the first automated task? Spinning. I think female household working hours fell so much that total household hours, both in the market and in the household, fell.
By 1980, the Australian Council of Trade Unions launched a push for a 35-hour working week. But the balance of power had changed, with unions much weaker, and governments, both Labor and Liberal, taking the side of employers. Standard hours were reduced to 38 per week, where they have stayed ever since. Annual leave, increased to four weeks under the Whitlam government, has also remained unchanged.
Forty to 50 years later, these conditions have been in place so long that they seem like the natural order of things. As a result, discussions of the impact of AI take for granted that any reduction in total hours worked translates directly into a loss of jobs.
But household hours have continued to fall and leisure hours to rise over this period. It is only market working hours that have been stuck. You know, like at the IR itself.
There’s little doubt now that AI will produce real productivity improvements. But there’s no guarantee that most of us will share the benefits of these improvements. A return to the long-paused process of gradual reductions in working hours is urgently needed.
Ah, but that’s a bad idea too. Assume AI increases productivity. We all therefore face a choie. Get richer on the same hours of work or be sa rich sa ew are on fewer. So, some will choose one, some the other. Pretty normal, some do, some don’t. But JQ here is insisting that everyone must take his choice – fewer market working hours. And, you know, some might prefer to do more market working hours, buy more kit to automate household working hours and gain their increased leisure that way. You know, maybe? But they can’t, ‘coz JQ says so.
Very liberal, that….
There’s another trade off that people make he’s missing.
The lifetime trade off.
More hours now, this decade, 1/4 century whatever & retire at 40 /50, after saving enough from personal earnings to keep your family in the chosen lifestyle.
Pro sportspeople do that already, 100 hr weeks to get to the top of their field.
Entirely a personal choice.
The big risk is the statists seeing a pike of money someone has saved, hence Dubai, UAE etc
By dedicating 2 hours daily to this online job, I brought in $16,453 last month. It’s incredibly simple to start and doesn’t require any specific skills, making it perfect for anyone. For a student like me, this has been the ultimate solution to balancing my studies and finances…
For More………… Rb.gy/axcdam
The IR changed how cloth was made from work at home to work in a factory.
No one ever paid the home workers by the hour, it was by the piece. Our ideas about hours worked at the time are from models, i.e. they’re made up.
The model of paying by the hour I suspect started because some of the workers in the factory were trying to make the machines run faster to get more pieces out, and this was causing problems…
It sounds plausible. Also greater specialisation and their synchronization. You need the bloke who repairs things to be there to repair when it happens to keep the other people working.
And to take various body parts from machines which had their guards removed, or in the 18th C never had them.
I got called out for a quote on an automation controller for, wait for it, a fabric cutting machine under construction. 1/4 horsepower circular saws at each end to trim the edges. I said we’ll need a switch and input for the guard interlock. The guy building the machine said no, we’re not putting a hood on, how will people smooth the fabric down? I said we weren’t doing it otherwise.
This was late nineties. We didn’t get the job. Thankfully. My boss backed me up too.
I have some sympathy for the guy building the machine there. He obviously knows the job & you don’t.
I’ve worked with lots of industrial machinery. I’ve had things like big multiple horsepower spindle molders which’d tear a limb off. There are just some things have an element of danger to them. Remove the potential for danger, they’re impossible to do. You ever seen what’s involved in changing an oil drilling string? Part of the skill of the work is being able to do it without taking unnecessary risks & losing fingers. Or it isn’t going to happen. What you actually do is train & supervise to work in a safe manner.
I implemented automation on a factory production line in the mid 80’s. The one part of the line we didn’t do cost a girl a finger. The logic on the controller was:
Her role was to put the part into the machine, close the guard, wait for the machine to do its thing then open the guard and take the finished part out.
Whilst the controller logic superficially appears to be make this process safe with the clamping and drilling protected with a guard it is hideously flawed.
Operating the machine was a mindless repetitive task and unfortunately her brain went out of sync with waiting for the machine. She managed to put in a part, close the guard then reopen it again immediately and reach in the take the part out with her finger. Her timing just managed to hit that fateful spot between the controller checking the guard was closed and locking it shut. The hydraulic clamp sliced the end of her finger off and the drills made sure it wouldn’t ever be reattached.
Interesting. Why are you writing code for this? The guard should be analog. The machine shouldn’t be able to run without the guard closed & locked & the default should be ‘not run’. Usually one would put a key switch into the system for maintenance operations so you can run open if required. But the operator never has the key. Someone forgot how analogue systems work?
Eeek! It’s Therac-25 all over.
Well, yes BiS. There are tasks where risk can’t be eliminated. This was not one of them. And it was meant to be for unskilled workers to operate and was ridiculously dangerous.
Hard-wired control over critical safety interlocks, totally agree. That should not be in code. An input to say why it’s stopped is fine. Relying on that to stop an accident is not.
With hazardous operations, you set them up so that each action is separate & considered. It’s the opposite of automation because you’re trying to prevent people doing things automatically.
And yes hardwired default, to no voltage. With the machine described, it shouldn’t be possible to open the guard whilst it’s running. Even when spinning down, the motors will produce a voltage & that,can be used to preserve the safety locks..
Paying by the hour or day predates factories by millennia
So the bit that government interferes with the most has failed to improve.
For a long time after the Industrial Revolution, the typical worker didn’t pay income tax. That lasted until, when, WWII? (that’s certainly when PAYE came in, and I doubt they’d have managed to collect tax from most of the workforce without that).
So where technology has improved our hourly rate, which should have given us that ‘more wealth v fewer hours’ trade-off, we didn’t get it to anything like the extent we should because the government has snaffled a large part of it.
Perhaps an across-the-board decrease in working hours will allow more families to take care of their elderly relatives rather than expose them to the ever more questionable and diverse care sector.
Either that or hope AI can translate into bum-wiping robots to keep hypnotits happy.
This is a good point actually – is increased longevity in the end going to push up household working hours once you include caring responsibilities?
The need for goods and services, and therefore their provision, will never end. Their type, and whether paid for in a market or unpaid quid pro quo by rellies, change constantly.
Yesterday there was a DT article about wimmin complaining that despite loving their kids they hate motherhood. You ain’t seen nothing yet, girls.
AI better and faster at ticking boxes than box tickers.
Bloody Aussies.
Wot Nessimmersion said.
Lifetime working hours have decreased – school leaving age has gone up, more dustbins now go on to Uni, increasing the effective average leaving age, and retirement ages have gone down, whether the standard, average, working week is 40, 38 or 36.7 or whatever it is the ONS reports or pulls out of the arse of what’s left of the LFS.
Effective hours would be lower anyway, possibly quite a bit lower given smartphones and the intertubes, thus the whole whining about workplace monitoring a while back.
“There’s little doubt now that AI will produce real productivity improvements.“
In Quiggin’s head. It won’t be evenly distributed, and maybe the ONS ought to start measuring the number of PowerPoint presentations created. Anyway, managers and secretaries.
Interesting surely if someone has to study to get a job. Shouldn’t the hours studying count as working hours?
Ah – they ain’t getting paid. Or successful study hours count as deferred wages, paid later, so graduate premium (which was back loaded anyway).
That depends on whether they are studying while employed as a condition of employment or before getting the job
By coincidence, I came across this article from the FEE this morning. It starts with the difference between the effect that ATMs had on bank tellers and the effect of the iPhone, and goes on from there to discuss the effects of AI.
‘So the real question is not whether AI will destroy jobs in the abstract. The real question is how AI will reorganize the architecture of production, consumption, and coordination. Not “AI does what lawyers do, but cheaper”, but rather “AI enables a new way of resolving disputes or structuring agreements that makes the current institutional form of legal services less necessary.”
‘That requires the kind of economics that classical liberals used to do well: the economics of second-order effects, the economics of the unseen. That is why we cannot assess AI’s impact by looking only at occupation-level snapshots, however sophisticated. That does not tell us what new business models will emerge, what new kinds of skill will become valuable, what new layers of entrepreneurial discovery will appear, or what old institutions will prove unexpectedly resilient.’
One that I’m going with is people making funny little videos.
People are looking at video generation and saying it’s not movie quality, and that’s true, but you can still make something amusing with it and quite quickly.
Was it Tim who once posted a debunk about medieval peasantry being better off than modern day wage slave. Someone counted up all the saint’s feast days and worked out they had 50 days holiday a year. But yeah percentage of peasants not feeding their livestock everyday was zero.
I have relatives in a country that was still economically “third world” a decade after they married. Having witnessed people starve to death they would work all hours needed to put a bowl of rice on the table.
I have relatives whose parents paddled a inshore boat 50 miles across the sea to escape *to* a life of working 70 hours a week to provide for their family. Their descendants now include an airline pilot, a customs official, a retired social worker, and a professional poker player.
50 saint’s feast days a year is not 50 days holidays a year, it’s 50 days doing stuff unpaid for the church *on* *top* *of* their normal daily tasks. Moron thinking “holy day” 500 years ago means the same as “holiday” today.
The person responsible for this idiocy is an American “academic” called Juliet Schor. It’s now in US textbooks as Gospel truth.
Greg Clark did a monograph on it and missed that he was counting only days working for the Lord of the Manor – so, to pay the rent. Completely missed working one’s own land. He did, decades later, revise his numbers – but the error escaped and is now “common knowledge”.
If I ever get rich that’s going to be my PhD. Showing that working hours went *down* at the IR.
Juliet Schor is a professor at Boston College who studies working time, consumerism, work-family balance, women’s issues and economic inequality.
And she looks exactly as one would imagine. Get the tea on, pet.
The person who wrote this assumes his/her readers are functionally innumerate. A minority of factory workers worked 72 hours per week and the *average* working week was nearly 70 hours?!? A significant minority worked only 9 hours a day (some schoolteachers worked less).
Increasing lifespan.
My wife and I both have senility or dementia in our families, hers more than mine, so if I don’t peg first there’s a good chance I’ll become a professional bum-wiper. These are “hours worked”.
As payback for several decades spent married to the nicest person I’ve ever met I think that cost is reasonable.
Everyone assumes that the impact can be spread around and that everyone will have a shorter week, at the same salary of course. That is not going to be the case.
ML, or AI as it is called, is going to reduce the number of hours worked but it is going to impact unskilled workers the most. Tasks that can be automated and are repetitive are usually entry level jobs and will impact women and the young more than more skilled work.
Many jobs around nowadays are non jobs, HR, admin and service type roles that are mandated by laws to ensure H&S, Tax monitoring, snooping and DEI. These jobs will be destroyed by cheap machines which are available now and won’t need sophisticated ML.
For people who claim to care so much about women they have no idea what women used to do. A huge amount of home labor was reduced through mechanization – most of that home labor was done by women.
Men did not see that level of labor reduction, they mostly saw a massive increase in their productivity.
Women – same work, less effort.
Men – same effort, more work.
See that Women- same work, less effort thing?
Wonder what impact that has on body shape.
Even more so when they become power skirts (and to be fair WFH soyboys as well)