This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/antiwork by /u/byf_43 on 2025-05-30 05:38:26+00:00.
From what I’ve read, the 8 hour shift was established as early as 1594. There is a lot of history between that year and modern day, but I’ll just say this as an modern day office worker (engineer) in the USA:
The eight hour workday is an ancient idea that has no place today. Let’s just talk about the “modern office” insofar as post WWII. How much productivity was achieved per hour when drafting was done with pencil and paper, or ink and mylar. Office memorandums were physically copied by presses and distributed and responded to by hand. Typewriters didn’t have easy delete and documents had to be proofread before messages were sent out. Messages sent to clients were done by local carrier or USPS. Data requests for land parcel information had to be done at the court house, standing in line. Design manuals were printed in books, designs in projects were checked by hand, and project documents were manually printed by dedicated reprographics departments.
Cut to today: computers take care of every aspect of this. CAD programs allow plansheets to be created and edited with mouse and keyboard presses and are saved on a central server; anyone can edit in real time. Meetings are done via Teams and Webex and etc. Entire projects are documented on servers with boiler plate created folders and saved files can be placed wherever. My local office doesn’t even have a reprographics department anymore, files are sent and saved via PDF. Field reviews still happen but most of the pre-field review meetings are done with Google Earth and Google Street Views. Last week I drove an hour and a half to meet with third parties in the field and that took ten minutes.
Long story short, our productivity compared to the 1950s/1960s/1970s before computers were common is through the roof!
So why are we, as workers, still working 8 hour shifts when the modern technology provides incredible increases in productivity? We should be working 4 hour days now, not 8 hours. Hell, we should be working 3 days a week, not 5.
So what the fuck happened? Why are we still stuck in a work day plan that was a good idea 6 centuries ago?
It drives me absolutely crazy when I watch old videos of pre-computer era videos showing office work on Youtube and realize productivity is through the roof compared, but our overlords just thought “Ok, better productivity, workers stay here the same hours though”.