Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.

Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.

Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.

There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.

EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.

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cosmotic 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yet people still have to work the same number of hours each day - they are performing the same amount of labor, just in a different form.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There’s more to labor than hours worked. Sitting at a computer for 8 hours is a different load than landscaping for 8 hours in the middle of summer.

Number of hours worked has actually been trending down for a very long time.

	▲	Fricken 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most people landscape their own yards recreationally. They do it for fun, in their free time, at their own expense.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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tptacek 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.

	▲	TheOtherHobbes 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It was explicitly socialist in the UK. There was a paternal element of duty-of-care-and-welfare to factory/business ownership in the UK - patchy, but very real - which flared briefly in the US but is completely absent now. It's still present in Europe, to varying degrees.
	▲	Fricken 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It was signed into law with the fair labour standards act of 1938, as part of the New Deal under FDR.