On Sat, 13 Feb 2016 15:42:36 -0000, (PeteCresswell) wrote:

Per Mr Macaw:

Mass production, robotics, etc, etc we should be working less!

Seems like the Europeans are working less.

But in the USA the fruits of increased productivity have gone to the
owners and upper management, not the workers.

I think one diff is unions. Europe seems to be heavily unionized and
the USA does not.
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Had an interesting situation a bunch of years ago: the #2 daughter and
my nephew both worked at basically the same jobs as travel agents.

The daughter in Philadelphia PA (USA) and the nephew somewhere in
Germany.

The daughter got paid for 40 hours but had to work whatever it took to
cover the calls. Busy at noon? You might get a few bites of lunch
down, you might not. If they worked through dinner into the night, the
employer didn't even send in sandwiches... they just went hungry.

And, of course, no vacation time, no retirement plan, no medical
coverage... no nothing....

Nephew's job was union. 40 hours pay for 40 hours work.... paid
overtime if he chose to accept it. Six (6!) weeks vacation, retirement
plan, full medical coverage.... You get the drift...

In the UK, only jobs paid by the government are like your German example. Private companies are the same as the USA.

The thing is, we shouldn't be doing 40 hours of work. Machines are doing way more than they used to, we should be working a fraction as much as we used to. What went wrong?

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