"Since the beginning of capitalism, workers have struggled against the imposition of fixed working hours, and the demand for shorter hours was a key component of the early labor movement. Initial battles saw high levels of resistance in the form of individual absenteeism, numerous holidays and irregular work habits.
This resistance to normal working hours continues today in widespread slacking off, with workers often surfing the internet rather than doing their job. At every step of the way, then, workers have struggled to escape normal working hours, and many of the labor movement’s earliest successes had to do with reducing work time. The two-day weekend, for example, emerged spontaneously from workers’ predilection for drinking and spending an extra day recovering rather than working.
The weekend’s eventual consolidation as a recognized and bounded period of time off was the product of sustained political struggles (a process that was not completed in the Western world until the 1970s). Likewise, workers achieved significant success in reducing the working week from sixty hours in 1900 to just below thirty-five hours during the Great Depression. Such was the speed of success that, over a period of five years in the 1930s, the working week declined by eighteen hours".
"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” writes Karl Marx in Das Kapital, likely the most direct invocation of architecture in his influential, and controversial, writings. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”
Regardless of the veracity of his claims about the imaginative faculties of bees, Marx’s point stands: humans don’t just work, they also create the conditions within which they work. And the social attitudes we have towards our labor are constructions as well.
“Four jobs in 20 years, oh this can never be, we only take on men who work on until they die,” sings Donovan in “Gold Watch Blues,” assuming the voice of a boss. This seems ridiculous today – more like four jobs in two years, just to get a good CV – because the availability of jobs, as well as their character and pay, has radically changed in the fifty years since the song was written.
