When I first started working as a kid, one “bonus week” during the school year was Thanksgiving. I got to work on Friday and Saturday, rather than just Saturday. All businesses were open on the Friday after Thanksgiving, not just retailers. Almost everyone worked that day, because for hourly workers, you had to work the day before and day after a holiday to get paid for it. Companies that hired kids for part-time work would have set aside menial jobs just for the part-timers to do on that Friday.
That is not true today. I have no clients that open on Friday. Even my clients that do business internationally give their US people off the Friday after Thanksgiving. Many manufacturers that run two shifts will close Thursday and the first shift on Friday. It has become, for most Americans, a four day holiday. In fact, it is starting to become a five day weekend, as many people use their personal time to take Wednesday. This year, the traffic on the interstate was busiest Tuesday night rather than Wednesday.
Something similar is happening with Christmas. I have noticed this year that my e-mail traffic has slowed to a trickle and the commute to the office is light. The kids are still in school, but lots of people are using accumulated personal time to make a short week. Or, maybe two short weeks. Since Monday is the holiday, people are using two vacation days this week and three the next week. Christmas and New Year’s Day have made for a two week period where nothing much gets done, as many people are off on holiday.
When America had a manufacturing base, it was not unusual for employers to close the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, as that was when maintenance was performed, inventories were done and so forth. While the lines might have been idle, the office people were still working and many of the production staff were in doing other things. The line workers were forced to use their vacation time if they were not called in for inventory or maintenance. Otherwise, this time of years was business as usual.
Employers gave workers off for Christmas Day, but they were expected to work a full day on Christmas Eve. Again, as a kid, I had off from school at this time so it was a chance to earn some money. The years when Christmas was on a weekend, it was not a paid holiday, unless you normally worked on weekends. That day before and day after stuff applied to Christmas too. The really generous employers would send their office people home after lunch on Christmas Eve, often after a company paid-for lunch.
Holiday creep in America is mostly due to technology and leisure. Despite our troubles and our looming problems, we are a rich country by the standards of world history. The fact is many people in offices today are performing nonsense work anyway. The amount of money spent on compliance with government regulations, industry quality standards and mitigation against litigation is substantial. The hens in the HR department could be replaced by robots if not for the need to police the ranks for multicultural violations.
Even nonsense takes a holiday. That is another aspect of this. Around the Imperial Capital, they used to announce on snow days that only essential personnel needed to report to work. Everyone chuckled because they knew it meant all government workers would be home, as none of them were essential. Now, they say “Federal workers are to use liberal leave or telecommute.” It is not just the government though. Lots of work in the dreaded private sector is busy work, so giving people more time off is often a net benefit to business.
There is also the fact that attitudes are changing. When America was run by white men, people were defined by what they did for a living. Not working meant you were not needed, which meant you were unimportant. In a world run by hormonal white women, everyone is defined by their latest autoethnographic postings on Facebook. Quality time at home with the cats is now a sign of status. Personal time off, flexible work hours and the ability to “work” from home are the new status symbols of American society.
The reason this is possible is we are a post-scarcity society. Even our poor people are fat and over indulged. Drive through the West Baltimore ghetto next Monday and you will see empty cartons for game consoles, big screen TV’s and other luxury items. Jamal may be headed to court next week, but he is going to get a season of NBA 2K18 in before he has to report to prison. We are a society where work is less and less important, because we have an excess of everything. There is a limit to how much stuff people want to buy.
Whether or not the creeping holiday phenomenon is a good thing is hard to know. Some things are both good and bad or neither. Most people reading this were trained to think hard work built character so a desire to work was a sign of good character. That is a perfectly sensible belief in a world of scarcity. In a post-scarcity society, one where automation is increasing taking over human labor, maybe those sentiments about work are counter productive. Maybe the way forward is self-actualizing leisure.
Regardless, it is a short day for me as I am taking Friday off to have a four day weekend.
“work” from home? I take calls from home just like I would at work. In fact, I get more done at home, since I’m not spending 3 hours driving to work and back.
And, since I work for an ISP, we work the holidays, all of them. That’s why I’m logged into the phones on Christmas day.
The French, famously have 5/6 weeks per year and – never commented upon, have higher productivity per hour than Americans.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-21/baltimore-murder-rate-surges-again-2017-now-tied-venezuela-heres-how-your-city-fared
Stay safe friend.
Oh, it’s even worse than that! Big employers now have to give a day off for Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. My employer is paying everyone to take Monday AND Tuesday off both next week and the week after.
Compared to Europeans, Americans work too long and too hard with rather little vacation (and some are encouraged to use as little as possible). It’s even difficult for some companies to accept that a heavy cold or bronchitis is a multi-day event, not a one-and-done. So people go to work while still sick and spread their germs far and wide.
I think we need these days off for our mental health, for family, to just RELAX for once. We’re not in an industrial society where work was harder and more physical, it’s all in the cubes today. We’re behind other civilized countries when it comes to how we treat workers.
We may be a “post scarcity” society (possibly) – but the problem as I see it is that there is a subset of the population that still clings to that work ethnic thing. For the most part it seems to be white men and various hangers-on like *some* white women, occasional people of hispanic heritage, many Asians – etc.
The people with the work ethnic are supporting – or more accurately (IMHO) being FORCED to support – all of those cat ladies, government employees, lazy ethnics, gimmeedats – etc.
It is true that a person with a moderate work ethic and under control material desires (doesn’t need a big house, fancy car, toys, etc.) – can pretty easily support themselves without working themselves to death. I see this commented on quite frequently in different forums I visit – it’s pretty common to find people (mostly seem to be white men) who say they have dropped off the radar of the mainstream economy – and are doing just fine.
I my opinion the problem here is that there is a huge overhead to being a working person. And that overhead exists on so many levels that it’s hard to understand how much useless weight you have accumulated on your back as a “working” person without some pretty deep analysis. One easy way to look at it is to take a HARD look at how much you pay in taxes. That money is taken and given away to a whole host of leeches who basically work against you as a working person.
This is something I believe the alt-right really needs to focus on. I really think a full evaluation of the current economic situation – along with the application of the work ethic of old (combined with a complete disdain for welfare in all it’s forms) – would give us a society and economy where people HAD to work to survive – but the amount of work they HAD to to survive would be far less than it was in the old days because of modern economic efficiency.
Imagine for instance that your tax burden suddenly disappeared – what that would mean is at a minimum of 40% less work (and pay) – for the same lifestyle.
All the tax leeches of course would be in dire straights. But that is the point. Get to work. Or die.
If you choose to not work – then you CHOOSE to live a miserable life – or die. A person who chooses to work – can survive. A person who has an obsessive work ethic – can prosper.
This is quite “fair” IMHO.
“Outrunning the theft”, as you mentioned earlier. Very true and important.
My Christmas is going to be a 72 hour workday. Some people spend thousands of dollars on Christmas, I MAKE thousands on Christmas.
I decorate and put up a nativity and all that, though… Just because it’s my most profitable time of year doesn’t mean I have any less Spirit.
As one of the declining number of former Midwest farm boys shoveling feed DAILY in to front-ends and manure away from rear-ends between tilling, planting, cultivating, harvesting – not to mention repair surprises, “holiday creep” STILL does NOT apply. Ya’ll “citYens”and “Coasters” – especially the “NYC financial fraudsters”, “D[e]C[eit] Turd-Pond bottom-dwellers” and “Jerry Moon-Beam Brown Californicators” – are welcome to just go right on “creeping”. Being inland RURAL GROUNDed on a portion of arable, UN-encumbered/UN-addressed county dirt, GATHERed/GROUPed, GUNned, GARDENed, PROVISIONed and . . . S-I-M-P-L-I-F-I-E-D, continues to suit me just fine. Ya’ll might be pleasantly surprised to learn that such a life-style is both very satisfying and fulfilling, especially ….. when – NO “IF” – the “BIG LIE[s]” can no longer be sustained/controlled, entropy will no longer forestalled and the not-yet-known triggering inflection point/critical mass moment occurs. The “Blessings from the Beginning” are revealed and thereby accessible to the faithfully repentING/REDEEMed/GATHERing RemnantS, fulfilled in daily fellowship of collaborative PRODUCTIVE enterprise and the opportunity to assist/gather other repentING in greater need. And as such . . . relieved, humbled and thankful for sight of One’s salvation BEFORE having – unknowingly – “run out One’s clock”.
As a FIRST-year “Boomer” (’46) when the violent mass blood letting and carnage was replaced with ejaculate during mass divine co-minglings of [returning war vet] Man to [waiting] wo[mb]Man; now at 71+, after experiencing war “up close and personal” in ‘Nam (’69) followed by a couple of years of int’l careening – pretty-much ripped to the tits 24/7, culminating in 5 years at Bang-Kwang, Thailand’s notorious maximum security prison, I am now increasingly mollified daily by the thought of being “a little closer to Home”. Considering the “State” of absolutely blatant and pervasive “official” criminality, PRIVATELY-held [NOT]Federal[NO]Reserve on-going FIAT debt-enslavement, corp-owned media DISTRACTION “DISinfo-tainment”, BigPharma/al-CIA-da mass drug-pushing, debilitating MonSATAN GM/chem saturation, vaccine adjuvant/chem adulteration, corp/gov-controlled lib-turd academic cry-bullies, AI killer drones/robots, cyber and space weaponry, brain chips, etc; I hope the “almighty Author/Lord” has already “checked me out” – as Jim Morrison was purported to have once not-so-eloquently stated, ” . . . before the whole sh*t-house goes up in flames”, and the radioactive ash begins to settle. Now, as a [daily] repentING and therefore REDEEMed reprobate, it is [continuously] incumbent upon me to both “give Notice” and humbly seek the forgiveness of each and every other very special and unique Man/wo[mb]Man, created in the image of said “Author” and manifested IN to this world, but . . . “NOT OF it”. ‘Nuf said – ya’ll been – respectfully – NOTICED!
You sound completely deranged. Farming is a dog’s life. Have been to the midwest (which you sound like you are from) and it blows, big time. If you are so god damn satisfied, why do you sound so angry about your circumstances?
That guy is clearly a liberal troll. Notice the strange spellings and weird capitalization on words. Z man talks about that. It’s a liberal trope
Dude, if you had mentioned Black Helicopters, you would have covered the complete panoply of rightwing tropes, You really should have been paying attention. Merry Christmas!
Wanna Hire a white boy? Old but still spry.
If it were not for oppressive taxation and inflation, we should have already had a 30 or 40 hour work week where are all needs are mostly taken care of with a decent income. But corporate greed and government greed conspire against all of us.
To me, nothing wrong with a decent amount of vacation. I work to live, not live to work. Not like on my death bed I’ll remember how I should have worked 80 hour weeks instead of 35.
OT, but relevant to themes on this blog, well any alt blog these days.
Lol… It’s not even a secret, its openly advertised.
“Cheap flights from Mogadishu to Minneapolis”
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Flights-g43323-o294440-Mogadishu_to_Minneapolis.html
Through speaking with two African immigrants, one a nurse and one a mechanic, somewhere between 103% and 110% of African immigrants game the system to get to the US. It’s inconceivable that anybody would think of doing otherwise. If you were standing in a line in which everybody cuts in line you would just be standing in a longer line. The nurse employed a sham marriage.Thirty years ago my brother was offered 20k and free sex to marry a Chinese girl for a year. Just one scam.
And how many of these scamsters are doing it for the opportunity to pay the high taxes in the US?
Corporate short propaganda films predicting that productivity would be so high that we’d only work a couple of days a week were pretty common back in the 1960s: https://youtu.be/0RRxqg4G-G4
I think that the American way of keeping everyone busy — even if with busy work or fake jobs — really is the best way. My life has convinced me that the idle mind is the devil’s workshop.
P.S. While looking for this video, I stopped by Paleofuture. I had no idea that he’d moved to Gizmodo. When he ran his own blog, he was fairly conservative. Now its all about the evil Trumpenfuhrer and the fever dreams of pre-1990 patriarchy. I guess you gotta do what you gotta do to pay the rent.
We live in a society that has plenty of scarcity, but it has been concealed by media propaganda and the avalanche of printed money and debt. The nutritional content of food has been declining for more than a century, likewise fresh water, open spaces, and quiet places. Most important, intelligence in America has been declining rapidly, as confirmed by SAT scores and this…http://www.unz.com/jthompson/does-the-rot-start-at-the-top/…But we do have an abundance of high carb manufactured food, and therefore diabetes, and cheap gimcracks from China
Merry Christmas to you and yours, Zman. Thanks for all you do on this blog.
Yes indeed. Merry Christmas Zman, and thanks for what you are doing.
Was at a Christmas office party yesterday and people were talking about “taking PTO”. I had to ask what it was. I don’t speak the clock-watchers’ language.
The corporation I work for shuts down North American operations between Christmas and New Year’s. We’re not charged vacation time. It’s glorious. Everyone having that week off makes an already joyous time of year even more so.
If this is becoming more common, so much the better. Peace on earth, good will toward men.
1 Timothy 6:6-10 (NIV)
But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
” The hens in the HR department could be replaced by robots if not for the need to police the ranks for multicultural violations.”
With a wig and the right programming, C3PO could probably do the job.
AIs would do a far superior job, and cost a lot less…
Merry Kwanzaa everyone! No, wait. That’s not it. Happy Winter Solstice celebration everybody! No, that’s wrong, too. What’s that holiday that everyone used to celebrate, something about someone dying to provide us with eternal life? Some guy named Chris? Oh, yeah, that’s it. Merry Christmas to all!
This is Joseph Pieper, Leisure The Basis of Culture, vs Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This argument will go on forever.
One thing I will point to is that in the Philippines under Marcos there seemed to be a party going on in every barrio all the time and people were in poverty. Now people are much better off materially but there seems to be little celebration, and the culture seems weaker.
We, on the other hand, have more leisure on our hands, not because there are no jobs to go to, but as you say, we don’t seem to have to work as hard. And our culture suffers, too.
I don’t think there is a materialistic answer to this.
Nobody says work is good for the soul anymore. And maybe it’s not for everyone. But it definitely is for me. I actually wouldn’t know what I would do if I didn’t work. And it’s not like I even do something that important but it’s my business, I enjoy it and I plan to do it till I die. I went through a long period of idleness years ago and it was a deep dark time. So I can say definitively, work is good for my soul
Owning a business and working for one’s self is usually more satisfying than being an employee.
Back in the previous century before I retired, it was well known that nothing was done between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Back before I retired the first time, nothing was done between Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Henry;
It all depends where you live. Where I hang out now, nothing gets done during *deer season* !
Merry Christmas one and all.
It’s just a feeling but It seems to me society is just exhausted by things like Christmas. We have accumulated excess to the point where many people become prisoners of their own stuff.
We rag on the lefty boomer generation a lot but they werent wrong about some of their criticisms of consumer society. Those same criticisms are valid today and their effects magnified with each passing decade.
“We rag on the lefty boomer generation a lot but they werent wrong about some of their criticisms of consumer society. Those same criticisms are valid today and their effects magnified with each passing decade.”
Every Boomer I know, even the losers, have a big house full of superfluous stuff.
Work is for schmos, it really is. 16 tons, and what do you get. A certain amount of it is usually necessary, but in no way should it be glorified or seen as a virtue. It is a mental illness (for those that praise “hard work”). You know “who” else works hard? Plough horses and donkeys. Life is too precious to devote to work. If you wouldn’t do it for free, then you are wasting what time you have chasing mammon.
Slaves do hard work. Free men “work” in cubicle farms selling insurance.
People need work. Without it, they are aimless…But shift work is hard on many people…
People need to work because they need to eat and put a roof over their head at the bare minimum. Again: There is nothing free in this world. And mother earth does not “provide” you sustenance without at least a bare minimum of labor input to turn the things that come out of the earth (food, wood, metals, water, – etc.) – into usable things for human existence. “Civilization” requires actual work. If you want to live in a “modern” nice house and aren’t satisfied with living a meager existence in a cabin built out of sod – well then work is required.
The level of infection of commie “everything is free but the man has been stealing it all from us” bullshit can be seen quite clearly in some of the comments in this thread.
Women especially do not understand REAL work. That’s because they are by and large incapable of it IMHO. You won’t find women humping their asses away day after day at construction sites. Their bodies simply cannot take the strain. Because women historically have been protected and provided for – and I do realize that women often worked the fields back when farming was an endeavor that a high percentage of the population had to engage in – but when it came right down to it….. women didn’t build the railroads, or build the cathedrals of Europe, or dig the canals, or sail the oceans, or fight the wars, or erect skyscrapers, or dig holes in the ground for pipelines and sewers…… etc.
This was brought home to me one time while touring NYC with some friends of the wife. The women were walking together (there was four of them) and I was walking ahead with the husband of one of them. The women somehow degenerated into a bitchfest about men. Men are bad because this – and that and this , and this other thing. This was around the era of “Sex And the City” – which was one of those prototypical shows women love. Let’s go live in the city – the city is great. We’ll all lead these great lives going to museums and hanging out in trendy cafes………….
The irony was : they’re bitching about men – while dreaming about how great it would be to be living that Sex in the City lifestyle – while walking down a sidewalk – built by men. Surrounded by skyscrapers – built by men. Next a street – paved by men. The street is full of cars – designed and engineered and built by men. Across the street is a work crew fixing a steam pipe – the work crew is all men. Those steam pipes in the ground were designed and installed (my grandfather was one of them) – by men. A couple of hours earlier they had been admiring the Brooklyn Bridge – designed and built by men (some of whom died doing it).
Women are often completely full of shit – and utterly unaware of the world that they live in – and completely clueless as to what it takes to keep that world going. Many of them think that if they just suck dick well enough – all their problems will be solved.”I’m cute – somebody should support me” (I’ve actually heard those words come out of a soon to be divorced woman’s mouth).
The Free Shit Army needs to go down in flames. A healthy respect for work needs to be brought back to the forefront of virtues promoted by the alt-right IMHO. Without that – society is going to continue to be the plaything of the progressive left and all their assorted hangers-on who just want to game the system and use their vote to get free shit from whomever can be coerced to provide it.
You’re never going to fix this problem long term without wiping out the “I deserve free shit” mentality. And one of the vital ways to get rid of that – is to somehow push respect for work back into the mainstream of society.
Stop supporting non-contributors and all sorts of things will change.
It’s a similar problem to the “let’s feed all the Africans” – and then a decade or two later you get an refugee invasion of Europe. What you subsidize – you get more of. Stop subsidizing useless eaters and the whole world will change.
“Life is too precious to devote to work. If you wouldn’t do it for free, then you are wasting what time you have chasing mammon.”
Perhaps you could explain this to all the millions of people that work because they are the wrong race, didn’t win the lottery, or weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Maybe they’re not chasing mammon. Maybe they are chasing food, shelter, children’s expenses, medical treatment, utilities, transportation, energy costs, etc.,etc.,etc. Someone offering the cliche that you should enjoy what you do for a living is oblivious to reality. Most people would love to do that but they made incorrect choices, did not have that opportunity dropped in their lap, or never loved something enough they could generate income from AND actually make enough to raise a family on. Hey, some people love to golf but are never going to make money at it, no matter how hard they practice. I know people that wanted to be musicians for a living. They ended up teaching music lessons to other people’s children, something they don’t really enjoy. And don’t make a whole lot doing it. Some people want to be a chef. There is a difference between loving to cook and cranking out 40 meals an hour in a sauna. If it happened for you, great. Just don’t be simplistic enough to believe that everything works out for everyone they way they wanted it to. And please, spare us the “If you just convince yourself you are happy with positive thinking you will prosper and be content!”
You should have found out what you love and started doing that before you had a family.
that’s why men are superior. Because we have that option.
I wasn’t speaking of myself. I was speaking of the majority of people in the West. Simplistic platitudes to try and cover millions of people when there are only a limited number of decent alternatives available is intellectually dishonest. There are always going to be losers in any permutation of reality. Just an exceptionally large number in an economy that engages in debt and fiat currency.
Debt and fiat currency are just another mechanism of welfare that ultimately subsidizes things that are bad for society long term.
LOL. Ever tried to start a business? Most of them fail. That means “finding what you love” can often take many years of doing a bunch of things you hate. Good luck with trying to find a fertile woman and start a family – if you’ve finally found success and doing something you actually like – and it took you until you were in your 40’s.
I agree with Anonymous White Male: simplistic platitudes about “doing what you love” are just that – simplistic platitudes. The reality is that they’re just bullshit on the same level as Nancy Pelosi telling people they can all go out and become artists or poets or musicians or whatever – because big government has just passed the ACA and everything is going to be perfect now.
I said doing what you love, not starting a business.
And if it takes you until your 40’s to find the right job, well, you should be stable as hell by then.
If you really believe that, you are in the wrong Career.
Work is finding something you love, something you cannot believe people will actually pay you to do, and getting paid to do it.
Happy people work hardest doing what makes them happy.
Maybe you need to become a bank robber.
“Maybe the way forward is self-actualizing leisure.” That’s what Karl Marx thought, anyway. His description of the Communist Utopia was something like “a few hours on the farm in the morning, a shift in the factory in the afternoon, opera criticism in the evening.” If we really want to turn Western Civ around, we need to find something that a) only the self-proclaimed “elite” can do, that b) is really conspicuous but c) doesn’t involve politics. Renaissance princes used to sponsor art because it was the ultimate virtue signaling. Nowadays even Jamal can afford a MacBook and Photoshop, should he choose. Maybe we can get the crazy cat ladies to take up “yoga painting” or something, on canvases made from home-grown hemp. So long as we praise to the skies whatever crap they turn out, that might keep ’em off politics for a while so we white men can get back to quietly making the world sane, safe, and prosperous again.
In the world of corporate medicine run by university mega corporations the day after Thanksgiving is a work day unless you specifically ask for that time off. No more just closing the office and letting staff be with their families.
I’m waiting for all the jews over at lion of the blogosphere to come here and comment how prole working is. Working as in productive value creating work, rather than say legalizing everything. Because it really is all about money and wealth transfer (law) these days, not value creation. “Value transference” and knowing the right jews is the way forward, according to them. Only low IQ suckers work outside of F.I.Re and its associated bureaucracy.
Working is important but so is leisure. The Germans manage to run one of the world’s richest economies with the insane work practices of the U.S. Balance is something people have a really hard time understanding.
This Low-IQ sucker can get a job in a post apocalypse wasteland.
I tend to think it’s a good thing, though as you say, moderns are guaranteed to use their leisure time in the most trivial ways imaginable.
America (and to a lesser extent Canada) are outliers in the developed world in terms of the work/leisure balance. Our current Spanish clients are a large industrial concern, but even they get Friday afternoons off in addition to the peculiar Spanish work day, plus tons more holiday time. North Americans have historically tended to view European work conditions as soft, verging on lazy, but after all, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. I guess we can blame the Puritans for this, as with so much else.
“I work to live. I don’t live to work.” That’s the way I have heard it phrased. That’s not entirely wrong. On the other hand, if you love your work, then it really does not feel like work.
if
If you’re one of those who loves what they do at that level, count your blessings. There are many more of us out here merely slogging it out.
I’ve been at it for over three decades now and the thrill is gone!
You need to find a new job.
It’s true, unless your work is also your hobby. But most of the people spouting that line, in my experience, don’t do much work.
New experience, then… I love my job. I work for myself, and work longer hours than I ever have in my life.
I generally stream from 4 oclock in the afternoon until 2 am, with longer streams on weekends and holidays… and sometimes I do 72 hour streams on holidays where I hold “Drunk Sketches” after about 48 hours where I am groggy and everything gets weird… Those are very popular.
About thirty years ago I worked for a guy from Scotland. He always marveled at all the work that got done in December. He claimed everything began to shut down weeks before Christmas.
Most people still have an IQ of around 105 or less. What you expect them to do ?
We built civilization so we could party more often and have materially more comfortable lives
everything else is just gravy
By law, German employees with a five-day working week are entitled to vacation of 20 working days. Most companies grant a higher vacation entitlement, which normally varies between 25 and 30 days per year. Generally, employees over 50-years old gain an additional day up to a maximum of 6-weeks holiday per year. Then we have the national and regional holidays as well.
We are also required by law, to take two consecutive weeks off at least once a year.
I think Americans work far too hard and should have more time to spend with their families.
Early in my work life, I was working with a guy from Germany. He was puzzled by our attitudes toward work. At 5:01 he was headed to his car, while many of us would work late finishing up something. He was not lazy or incapable. He just drew a sharp line between work and personal, while Americans tend to blur the lines.
It’s not a universal though. In the American West, people are more causal about work, while in the Northeast, even lazy people work long hours.
American work ethic descends from religious beliefs. The Puritans and some of the other religious groups who settled in places like New England didn’t look kindly on layabouts or welfare recipients. One of the things that has broken our society IMHO – is the removal of welfare from private organizations and it’s placement into the hands of the government.
Local organizations (like churches) could be expected to know damn well who actually NEEDED support , vs. who was just lazy and looking for a handout.
Is that why Merkel opened the flood gates? Now you not only have traditional German holidays, you now must observe Turkish holidays…or else!
It might depend on what kind of family you have.
I do keep hearing that we Americans work too hard. My retired brother in law from the auto plant some times helps me in my business and keeps saying I work too hard. I feel like a slouch sometimes but then again a guy who had a union job all his life probably didn’t work that hard either, just put in a lot of hours.
I was helping out a friend on a construction project, and he kept telling me to slow down, I was working too hard, he billed for 5 budgetted days, and if I kept working too fast he was going to have ‘dead time’ and couldn’t bill them for it.
Jobs are often an escape from the family and if your job is miserable too there’s always the bar.
I don’t think Germans work ENOUGH. They have far too much free time to meddle in the affairs of others.
Not like the US then
SOME of us work very hard. There’s a large contingent of people who live in the U.S. – who don’t do shit. But are able to get by more than sufficiently by their own standards. I know numerous people who basically live their lives thru ‘scams’ of one form or another. These people are typically full of excuses as to why they don’t just go work a job and support themselves.
Then there is the gimmee-dat portion of the population. With low standards it’s pretty easy to get by on government assistance of one form or another – and still have a roof over your head , more than sufficient food in your stomach, and a big screen TV and all the drugs you need to shove down your throat or inject into your arm.
The problem is that the working people – are bearing all the burden of those non-working people on their backs. So if you want to live at a certain level (let’s say live in a nice neighborhood of a city or a suburb full of white people) – then that costs you $$$. Housing prices vary widely town by town in my area. The city next to me has affordable housing – with a median home price of $263k. The median home price in my town is $410k , and the three “rich” suburbs that surround my town have median home prices of $531k, $899.9k, and $841k.
Don’t want to live in that city surrounded by welfare recipients and a bunch of people too stupid or too full of bad habits to hold down a well paying job? Well that is going to cost you.
I’ll be enjoying a vastly creeping holiday season myself, so a very Merry Christmas to the Z Man and all of the witty denizens of this excellent blog!
What is increasingly talked about now is the Price Principle or relatedly, the Pareto distribution. Numbers vary but basically says that a small minority of workers do most of the productive work in any environment. Now I have heard it said that it is 20% or with Price the square root. So in a company of 100 people, 10 do half the work and the other 90 do the other half. Lose a few of those 10 and the company is screwed.
Screw the science, it jibes with everything I have ever observed in the work environment, creative and others. Most people are basically non contributing zeros just marking time and getting a paycheck. Think of the movie Office Space.
I used to schedule pilots as an additional duty. Believe it or not, the same applies to the gung ho field of aviating. You wouldn’t believe the lengths pilots would go to to avoid a trip when they were supposed to be on call.
In civil service, it is even a smaller percentage of workers, generally 10% who hold the dept together and get the work done efficiently and competently.
Generally, 80% are mediocre to barely competent and are simply there for the paycheck and benefits, caring little about the quality of their work. The other 10% are employees who should Never have been hired from the beginning. This bottom 10% are a plague upon the agency with disability claims, missing work due to drink, drugs, personal drama, and they are a disciplinary cornucopia of shit.
Jordan Peterson explains it very well, worth the 5 minute viewing here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoPlMU4KiGI
A friend of mine was the “man with the knack” for an organization. He could fix anything and everything. However he had not had a raise in many many years , was rebuffed at every turn and was no longer able to make ends meet period despite being very frugal.
Once he found a new job that doubled his pay, he moved on and the old organization started to fall apart within days.
They called for months after to try and get him to come back or fix some things or whatever but no can do.
This also happens in better run organizations, a few key people leave and all kinds of hell breaks loose
Problem is wage allocation, in real terms labor demand is low enough to strangulate wages
In a system like that you end up with parasites making good money, a tiny well paid middle and upper that have managed to socially signal enough to get good money and have to be well paid and who do useful work (surgeons, a few lawyers, quants) , key people who are under paid and a huge demand for below the cost of slave labor to keep labor intensive industries cheap . All this kept together with debt
Its not stable and it a huge part of the reason the US infrastructure is crumbling
This trend was mostly driven by automation and by globalism and until we repair it, the US is going to get more and more dysfunctional
And to those thinking an infusion of free social capital from religion will help, well unless this effects the elite, it won’t help. Plenty of poor countries are very religious
The company that I worked for rewarded those few who were competent and got things done with allot more work.
This seems to be universal these days
Now people here in California, many of whom are from lower trust cultures are aware of this and the fact they are human resources, not people and respond by doing no more work than needed and by having no loyalty.
Needless to say as this spreads into every race and culture, well the results will not be pleasant
I have heard the same principle applied to soldiers – vs. warriors in a battle. The bulk of the actual fighting is done by a small subset of the soldiers present in any battle.
The Vitality Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
To be fair, some people don’t seem to be as productive but they do their part in keeping things running smoothly and helping the great performers get their great things accomplished.
A truly “fair” economic system or society would recognize the Pareto principle and Price principle – and let it play out. That economic / social system would benefit men (BTW) – white men more than others IMHO.
Commies and progressive leftists (women too) hate those principles in my experience because they completely contradict every bit of their worldview.
The problem with being one of the 10 or 20% that do all the real work in a society designed to extract your work from you to support the Free Shit Army – is that you are bordering on being a slave. Many of that 10-20% of truly productive people don’t have to acknowledge how much their work is stolen from them – because they are SO productive that they basically outrun the theft. The theft is seen as just a price of doing business. I also think it often leads to a guilt complex of a sort – because the people who are overly rewarded for their hard work – can’t seem to relate their “work” to their reward. So they end up going all progressive – and supporting the theft.
The problem comes in if you’re slightly lower down on the productivity scale – working in a field where you CAN directly relate your work output to your financial reward……. It starts to become very obvious that you’re getting screwed. I think this is why I run across so many middle class workers who are completely pissed at the system.
we need more holidays, not less…europe has much more holiday and vacation than us
All they’ve done is swap Christian holidays for Muslim ones.
Some people may be working less, while others are working a lot of overtime. Was there ever such a thing as a 9 to 5 schedule? Did anyone every really get a lunch hour every day? I’m over fifty, have been in the workplace for over thirty years, but I can’t remember these things as anything but myth. Asset inflation has stolen a lot of the standard of living improvements that should have come with advanced technology and improved efficiency. If the USA did not have the white flight problem, the European pattern of long holidays might have appeared on the US side of the Atlantic. The US middle class has been forced to squander much of their increased wealth on house and car payments. Europe is about to get squeezed. The long holiday will become a dimly remembered myth–like 9 to 5.
A paid lunch hour was a huge up, and overtime was at straight time. No such thing as time and a half. If you were a screw-up, you summarily were fired. An Honorable Discharge meant something and people generally took pride in their skills and abilities which they developed over years of experience. Racial quotas were unheard of and women were not found in certain occupations that required physical strength, stamina and bold action. Progress and Change were not synonyms.
Yep, outside of a few personnel the real needed work week is about 30 hours with most women not being in the work force
This also pencils out to about 6 weeks vacation/time off a year
Its not easy to make this happen, the Kellogg company had a 30 hour work week in the 1930’s got everything done. Stockholders threw a shit fit, the idea that someone could enjoy life meant clearly they personally were being robbed
The forced the work week up and gained no extra productivity and a less happy workforce
No wonder Leftism thrives, a fair number of people can’t help behave in exactly the same selfish stereotypical way Leftist say they will
A.B.;
Same deal with snow days. Nothing got done while the white stuff rolled in. Everybody was comparing commute time horror stories and scheming about how to slip away early.
When new, I marveled at the apparent idiocy of not just closing the business on the occasional snow day. Later on I discovered the reason. As soon as the first senior manager closed his operation, the others would gratefully follow suit almost immediately. But they would all blame him for missing the profit plan that quarter.
It had nothing to do with workers or snow.
That worked out so well for Greece
That’s one of those differences that Europeans like to point out. That when first meeting, Americans will talk about what they do for a living. Where Europeans will chat about where they’re going on “holiday” next.
Euros are odd ducks.
There is NOTHING in life that is “free” – either in the days of old – or now.
The natural state of the world is decay. Build a car – and it will rust away without maintenance (I.E. work). The roof on your house will decay and need replacement (more work). Roads fall apart and need to be repaired (more work).
Leftists however seem to have a very persistent trait in that they assume that there ARE all sorts of things in the world that are free.
If you really get into it with a progressive leftist I have found this trait to be present in ALL of them to some extent. This seems to be why they consistently think that their due has been “stolen” from them by “rich people”.
Want to see a leftist squirm and reveal themselves? Ask them a simple question: How is wealth created?
In my experience many of them will simply try to walk away. It’s a good question to ask when you just want to make them go away.
I haven’t met a single one that can correctly answer the question.
Their underlying belief in the free shit corrupts their entire understanding of the world and reality.