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Longevity is not a synonym of old age. The increas Longevity is not a synonym of old age. The increase in life expectancy shapes lives from childhood to old age across different domains. Among those, the nature of work will undergo profound changes from skill development and the role of retirement to the intrinsic meaning of work. To put the striking potential of a 100 year life into a historical prospective it is useful to start from how technological and demographic development shaped the organization and the definition of work in the past. This longer view can more thoughtfully explore how different the nature of work has been, from working hours to the parallelism between work, employment and task-assignment.
Throughout history the role of work has been intertwined with social and technological change. Societies developed from hunter-gather to sedentary farmers, and they transitioned from the agricultural to the industrial revolution. The latter transformed a millennial long practice of self-employed farmers and artisans, working mostly for self-subsistence, without official working hours, relying on daylight and seasonality at an unchosen job from childhood until death, into employees working 10-16 hours per day for 311 days a year, mostlyindoorsfromyouthtoretirement. Thisdrastictransformationignitedfastshiftsofworkorganization not only in the pursue of higher productivity and technological advancement, but also of social wellbeing.
Among the first changes was the abandonment of unsustainable working conditions, such as day working hours, which sharply converged toward the eight hours day tendency between the 1910s and the 1940s, see Figure 1 (Huberman and Minns 2007; Feenstra, Inklaar, and Timmer 2015; Charlie Giattino and Roser 2013). Although beneficial for the workers, this reduction worried intellectuals, such as the economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote: “How will we all keep busy when we only have to work 15 hours a week?” (Keynes 1930). Keynes predicted people’s work to become barely necessary given the level of productivity the economy would reach over the next century: “permanent problem would be how to occupy the leisure,
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whichscienceandcompoundinterestwillhavewonforhim. [...] Afearfulproblemfortheordinaryperson” (p. 328). For a while, Keynes seemed right since the average workweek dropped from 47 hours in 1930 to slightly less than 39 by 1970. However, after declining for more than a century, the average U.S. work week has been stagnant for four decades, at approximately eight hours per day.1
Figure 1: Average working hours per worker over a full year. Before 1950 the data corresponds only to full-time production workers(non-agricultural activities). Starting 1950 estimates cover total hours worked in the economy as measured from primarily National Accounts data. Source: Charlie Giattino and Roser (2013). Data Sources: Huberman and Minns (2007) and Feenstra, Inklaar, and Timmer (2015).
Technological change did not make work obsolete, but changed the tasks and the proportion of labor force involved in a particular job. In the last seventy years, for example, the number of people employed in the agricultural sector dropped by one third (from almost 6 million to 2 million), while the productivity tripled. Feeding or delivering calves is still part of ranchers’ days, but activities like racking and analyzing genetic traits of livestock and estimating crop yields are a big part of managing and sustaining the ranch operations. In addition, the business and administration activity like bookkeeping, logistics, market pricing, employee supervision became part of the job due to the increase in average farm size from 200 to 450 acres. Another exampleistheeffectoftheautomatedtellermachine(ATM)onbanktellers, whosenumbergrewfromabout a quarter of a million to a half a million in the 45 years since the introduction of ATMs, see Figure 2 (Bessen 2016). ATM allowed banks to operate branch offices at lower cost, which prompted them to open many 1Despite the settling, differences in the number of hours worked between the low and the high skilled widened in the last fifty years. Men without a high school degree experienced an average reduction of eight working hours a week, while college graduates faced an increase of six hours a week. Similarly, female graduates work 11 hours a week more than those who did not complete high school (Dolton 2017). Overall, American full-time employees work on average 41.5 hours per week, and about 11.1% of employees work over 50 hours per week, which is much higher than countries with a comparable level of productivity like Switzerland, where 0.4% of employees work over 50 hours per week (Feenstra, Inklaar, and Timmer 2015) and part time work is commonplace... |