https://piped.video/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo
Sources: Juliet B. Schor, “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure”
David Rooney, “About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks” E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” | https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749 James E. Thorold Rogers, “Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour” | https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/rogers/sixcenturies.pdf George Woodcock, “The Tyranny of the Clock,” Published in “War Commentary - For Anarchism” in March, 1944
GDP per capita in England, 1740 to 1840, via Our World in Data | https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-since-1270 Nominal wages, consumer prices, and real wages in the UK, United Kingdom, 1750 to 1840, via Our World in Data | https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nominal-wages-consumer-prices-and-real-wages-in-the-uk-since-1750
I found this interesting to watch, thought-provoking. I also enjoyed the animation style. Amazing how much emotion you can put into squares.
I’m unsure how much of it is true. It’s the first time I heard this story. My previous conception was that people “before” had to work longer just to survive, and working hours reduced over the course of history. Maybe that’s true for the last hundred years, but inaccurate otherwise.
What I wonder: Why don’t self-employed people work much less, without the pressure of a capitalist overlord?
Especially farming the land has not become harder. The influx of sunlight and the amount of calories a person needs remained pretty stable.
If farmers back then managed to take off every other day on average, why do I hear from farmers nowadays they can hardly make holidays whatsoever? The reasons they give seem compelling; animals and plants don’t take holidays either.
Interested in other comments and viewpoints in either direction.
Ironically, if a job’s workload starts to require fewer people, it’s often harder for any individual to step away. In the past, there were more people working a plot of land, so there was more ability to cover for people stepping away. Now with only one person doing all the work, that person can’t take time off or the whole thing collapses.
plants you can likely skip a day if they don’t need water and the system is not automated. Animals are a bit harder but that is very dependent on how they are kept. Today we don’t tend to graze them so they have to be watered and fed and mucked out. If they where in a large fenced area that included a water source then they should do fine if you take a day off which was the way it was done in farms longer ago. There is a ton of farmland today that would not be farmland in yesteryear.
The narrator makes the point that there wasn’t much else for a medieval peasant to spend their money on besides food, shelter, and clothing. If you want to subsist on vegetables and porridge, in a small home in a tiny rural community, wearing basic clothing, you wouldn’t have to work many hours to get by.
The other element is that medieval Europe experienced a huge labour shortage following the Plague. Owners weren’t allowing workers to work less because they were nicer in the medieval period. They had no choice. Exploitative 18th and 19th century capitalism coincides with a massive increase in population, which decreased the power of the individual worker, at least until unions became a thing.
On farming specifically, are you American? American farming is extremely inefficient and unproductive. “Family farming” is not usually an economically sustainable farming model. Throughout history, collective farming with a larger labor pool is much, much more common, and family farms only show up under very specific conditions – when land is very cheap. American land use programs were purposefully designed to displace indigenous people first and farm second. The government made the land cheap (or free) to entice farmers to move into it. As a result, we’ve inherited a family farm system that no longer makes sense, and we’re struggling to figure out what to do.
Sarah Taber writes about this a lot: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/america-loves-the-idea-of-family-farms-thats-unfortunate.html
On your general point, on how much is true, I’ve read a lot of criticism of this video, and I think most of it comes down to interpretation. What is free time? A lot of people criticize the video for not acknowledging that peasants had to work outside of the time they were working for other people, but so do we. Our lives are very different from theirs, and it’s just really hard to compare.
For example, when I say I spend a lot of my free time renovating an old house I’m fixing up, that sentence makes perfect sense, but I’m implying a very specific idea of “free time” that’s actually a little weird, when you think about it. Right now, I’m spending my free time writing this, but to a many a peasant, I assume writing was probably serious work done by serious people with specific training, not something they would consider a leisure activity.
