• LwL@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Seems to work fine for practically all of europe where we have mandatory paid time off. And some countries like france with standard work weeks less than 40 hours.

          In a perfectly equal system with perfect division of labor efforts, we could most likely keep our standards of living and all work less than 2000 hours per year. As it is that’s not the case and we’re practically reliant on worker exploitation in asia, africa and south america to maintain said standard where I’m assuming a lot of people work more. But that’s not inherently because of their job, it’s because their employer isn’t willing to pay them more and hire more people to lessen individual workload.

          • SCB@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I literally work for a global company and our EU teams definitely put in more than 40 hrs per week, exempt.

            we’re practically reliant on worker exploitation in asia, africa and south america to maintain said standard where I’m assuming a lot of people work more

            It’s not exploitation for comparative advantage to benefit both parties

            • LwL@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Chinese sweatshops are known for how they’re not exploitative you’re so right.

              And yes obviously some people work overtime or in some cases have contracts with longer work hours but that’s literally only because of the same problem of unwillingness to hire someone else to take over the needed workload. There’s always some org overhead with having more people but the point is that it’s not inherently necessary.

              • SCB@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                You can’t just hire multiple people to do a job all the time. That’s not how high-skill jobs work. I have a huge workload, and if they hired someone to “help” with that workload, the amount of work to be done would actually go up.

                And certainly you understand that the Chinese government is a hellish dystopia, but also that people choose sweatshop labor over subsistence farming even in that hellscape.

                • LwL@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  If more people make the workload per person go up that very much sounds like a lack of or insufficiently developed processes to allow those people to actually effectively work together.

                  And it should be obvious that something being less bad than any available alternative doesn’t make it not exploitative.

                  • SCB@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    If more people make the workload per person go up that very much sounds like a lack of or insufficiently developed processes to allow those people to actually effectively work together.

                    My job is building internal infrastructure at companies, and yes this is often absolutely true. However, it’s also the case when any specialist is doing a complex task - I work with a lot of instructional designers, project managers, etc and “too many cooks in the kitchen” is absolutely a thing.

                    That’s not even getting into highly specialized manual labor. My buddy is a Lineman, and the backlog for new Lineman is years long, because the job is extremely dangerous and skilled. You can’t just swap people in.

                    Even something like press operators - I’m currently working in sustainable packaging and all of our manufacturing employees do 4 12-hr shifts (with unlimited OT opportunities) - this is because the practical realities of changing shifts cuts production severely. It’s better to just pay people (a lot) more to work the 12s and only have one (two?) shift change(s)/day.

                    I have a feeling we’ll never meet on the “exploitation” thing because I’m not a socialist, but hopefully these examples help demonstrate the other points.