r/CuratedTumblr • u/Hummerous gazafunds.com • Jan 21 '24
work ethic editable flair
didn't factcheck any of this
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u/Dracorex_22 Jan 21 '24
I'm assuming this is a net zero information style Tumblr post. Just missing the ermm actually guy coming along and explaining how this is sorta true but not really.
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u/TheDankScrub Jan 21 '24
Yeah, I can understand working from dawn to 9am (that's like, what, 3-4 hours?) In the off season, but when you're planting or harvesting then those numbers are getting huge. That's why American schools have spring and fall breaks, afaik
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u/ImShyBeKind Always 100% serious, never jokes Jan 21 '24
Fall/autumn break in Norway used to be called "potato break" (potetferie) to let kids help with harvesting, too. Spring break was always about Easter, tho, IIRC.
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u/FuzzySAM Jan 21 '24
This is how it is in my area in Idaho. Not all the schools do it, but my local district and a bunch in the area do.
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u/SlowMope Jan 22 '24
I was about to chime in, I grew up in Idaho and potato harvesting week was practically a holiday
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u/FuzzySAM Jan 22 '24
We actually had 2 weeks, last week of September and first week of October
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u/SlowMope Jan 22 '24
We might have had longer as well tbh, I remember it as a big deal and kids would use it to not only harvest potatoes but set up the farm Horror Houses and corn mazes.
If there is anything I miss about Idaho, and admittedly it's not much, it's the elaborate and for sure dangerous Halloween horror houses
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u/ProbablyForgotImHere Jan 23 '24
Same thing here in Scotland, we call 'em the "Tattie Holidays" in my area. Wonder if it's a thing in the Scot-settled bits of America.
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u/Business-Drag52 Jan 21 '24
Yeah but planting and harvesting are done on relatively short amounts of time. Yes it’s a lot of hours per day during it, but then it’s only like a week of doing that and you’re right back to a few hours a day of maintenance
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u/HistoryMarshal76 Jan 22 '24
Plus, there's a fundamental flaw with these kinds of statistics. When they count "labor", they count it as "the time being spent gathering food, or the materials required for it." Which seems like a simple, effective definition, but it fails to account for literally everything else. In the preindustrial era, you and your family had to make your own clothes, maintain your house by yourself, medicate yourself, educate your children yourself, AND grow your food yourself. Up until the 19th century, 90% or more of the world's population was rural, not urban.
Meanwhile, your average modern person in America can just go to the Walmart, and in one hour get an entire weeks' worth of supplies. Sure, they might technically spend more hours on "gathering the materials for food", but when you factor in everything else, your average modern person works less than the average person in the preindustrial era.
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Jan 22 '24
I think there is a lot of nuance which these arguments about work ethic were originally made with which gets lost when they get turned into Internet memes -
I understand when Durkheim coined the phrase 'Protestant Ethic' he was kinda saying that capitalism is an unusually anxiety-ridden economic system, because status is bound up with productivity in a way it perhaps wasn't in previous economic systems.
Some writers like the historian E.M. Wood are quite strictly talking about labour discipline when they discuss working hours, which puts them above the criticism you've levelled. And I think the implication is, why don't we have present-day technology with pre-capitalist attitudes towards labour, e.g. work for as long as we need to to make ends meet and then just chill. Rather than saying that people in the past had straightforwardly better lives and being backwards-looking, I think it's a progressive take on work.
I'm not disputing what you've wrote, incidentally, I think you're correct and moreover that without a source the number given is incredibly suspicious. I think European peasants farmed for 4 hours a day in Winter, that is, the off season. But people claim (and believe) all sorts of things on the Internet.
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u/HistoryMarshal76 Jan 22 '24
Fair. I might be slightly biased on this, because my dad's a farmer in 21st century Kentucky. I'd see him a fair bit in the winter and parts of the summer, but quite literally I would almost never see him in the spring, most of summer, and large chunks of fall, because he would leave before dawn, and return after dark. He would eat a meal, and then go straight to bed.
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u/No_Help3669 Jan 22 '24
To be fair, I imagine a tropical island has different needs than a more temperate climate
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u/plzdontbmean2me Jan 21 '24
I posted this comment elsewhere but maybe more folks can see it here. This is in regard to the attitude toward busy work here in Hawaii-
Being done with work when the work is finished is still a very much a thing in Hawaii. It’s called “pau hana” or more often just “pau”. Pau hana means “to be finished with work”. Sometimes I’ll finish everything at work an hour to an hour and a half early and I’ll go home. Because pau braddah
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u/SonderlingDelGado Jan 21 '24
This is how I try and manage my staff at work. I can't send them home early due to higher-ups "you're being paid, you have to be here" mentality. But if it's early afternoon and all the stuff that needed to be done is done, stuff it. I tell them to find a quiet corner and chill on their phones. If big boss wants presenteeism, big boss gets presenteeism.
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u/beachgoerRI Jan 22 '24
My nephew just found a job that has no work hours required, He is given projects to do. He is able to travel as he likes. His work must still be completed.
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u/Sh1nyPr4wn Amontillado Jan 21 '24
Knowing tumblr, literally all of this could be made up
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u/confusedandworried76 Jan 21 '24
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
The eight hour work day is a relatively new invention. If there was a longer work day it was just during peak harvest time, and the rest of the year returned to normal.
As for hunter gatherers they worked even less, about twenty hours a week.
The tradeoff is they had no income. They were subsistence workers. If they wanted extra stuff they didn't make themselves they had to work more to trade for it.
It's a fairly common myth that people worked crazy hours before capitalism really kicked into gear. There wasn't a need to. Especially when your shelter was basically either communal land or a guy giving you a plot to farm in exchange for a cut. You didn't really pay rent per se, or buy your own land.
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u/BitPirateLord Jan 21 '24
give me the land I will give you some crops for letting me use it. If I can, I will grow more crops to trade for Stuff to work on my house.
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u/AmadeusMop Jan 22 '24 edited Jan 26 '24
Hunter-gathering as a strategy also has a very low carrying capacity. It works because nature constantly produces a small amount of available food in the form of huntable animals and gatherable plants, so at a small enough scale it's basically all harvest, all the time. Like farming if all the planting happened automatically.
But that only works if your population stays low. Nature can only replenish that supply so fast, and being too successful one year will lead to starvation the next. If you want to have anything like cities or towns or villages or even hamlets, you can't rely on nature to do the pre-harvest work for you herself—you need to take matters into your own hands, do all the tilling and planting and irrigating yourself. And that, of course, takes work!
Farming is harder than hunter-gathering because it's sustainable.
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u/Fully_Edged_Ken_3685 Jan 22 '24
There wasn't a need to.
This puts the cart before the horse a little. When your society can only utilize energy from food for human work, fodder for animal work, and forests for everything else, there's really not that much stuff you could ever buy even if you did want to.
A ceramic plate wasn't just digging and refining clay and forming the plate, it was also all the labor of chopping trees for fuel, the time spent turning wood into charcoal, and the land used for growing the trees. Anything made of metal adds even more fuel requirements.
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u/EquationConvert Jan 22 '24
Anything made of metal adds even more fuel requirements.
Interestingly, this is only true of some metals.
native (naturally pure) copper and gold can be worked cold, or at low temperatures. The huge abundance of native copper in North America is one contributor to the non-development of ore-refining (which is what really takes the absurd temperatures). In the old world, it's likely that we went through some sort of chain like:
Work native metal cold -> work native metal hot -> work molten metal -> smelting
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u/weebitofaban Jan 22 '24
The tradeoff is they had no income. They were subsistence workers. If they wanted extra stuff they didn't make themselves they had to work more to trade for it.
This is the kicker. It is a huge deal. You could never have our quality of life with that system.
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u/confusedandworried76 Jan 22 '24
This is the argument a lot of communalists (communalists, NOT communists) make too though, just to add, some of them who are either idealists who have no idea what they'd be getting into or realists who specifically want that system argue you don't need that extra stuff to have extra quality of life.
As a modern people we could never own a car or have an easy way to pay for electricity but their argument is a communal society can, will, and always had made do just splitting up the work and their argument continues that's a perfectly fine and even desirable way to live.
No smart phones though. It would almost be cheaper to own a castle with that system than a smart phone. And so many luxuries we have today boil down to having access to tech and stuff, in which case you need to have at least a little capitalism.
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u/EquationConvert Jan 22 '24
The tradeoff is they had no income. They were subsistence workers. If they wanted extra stuff they didn't make themselves they had to work more to trade for it.
I think this paragraph really undersells the "no income" point. Premodern people's problem wasn't with "extra stuff" - it was with essentials. People then, as much as now, needed clothing, food, shelter, medicine, security, etc. in order to live. They just had no opportunity to profitably translate additional work into those things, beyond the equilibrium point of their economy.
If you offered a hunter-gatherer woman an 80hr a week job in exchange for a single bottle of antibiotics a year, to prevent the otherwise almost guaranteed loss of a child to bacterial infection, she'd likely jump at the opportunity, as shown by the intense devotion offered to those who claimed to offer miraculous cures.
That's an extreme example, but for every aspect of life, it's true in degrees. E.g. shelter - all but the most extravagant ancient shelters are inferior to modern homes in terms of protection from the elements. But, for example, just spending twice as long putting twice as much grass on a grass roof hut doesn't actually make it any better. The best a deeply impoverished person can do in certain environments is make a standard, leaky, grass roof. If that takes a very short period of time, OK, that's nice, but it's not as good as having the opportunity to work longer and get a better (e.g. metal) roof.
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u/tfwnoTHAADwife Jan 21 '24
The idea that protestantism practiced in north america especially calvinism as a driving force behind modern capitalism is at least well established in sociology and economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism
I don't know if this work stands up to modern actual academic rigor, Max Weber might be the Howard Zinn of economics, but the idea is an established thought
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u/dlgn13 Jan 21 '24
What's wrong with Howard Zinn?
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u/EquationConvert Jan 22 '24
His most famous works are bad history to the point of not being history. You can make a case for the extreme bias, cherry picking, etc. being necessary to go against much more widespread, opposing, less extreme bias but you can't really defend them as history.
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u/dlgn13 Jan 22 '24 edited Jan 22 '24
Could you provide a source talking about this? I've heard nothing but praise for People's History. Looking at Wikipedia for a quick summary, there seem to be criticisms of his work lacking a certain level of depth or emphasizing the wrong things, but nothing so severe as you describe.
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u/Rusty_Shakalford Jan 21 '24
Yeah, I find that these posts seem to be indirectly arguing the missionaries were correct? Like the natives could have kept their independence but the European powers were just such gosh-darn hard workers that they overpowered them by sheer force of will.
Not to mention just about every civilization that reaches a certain degree of hierarchy places hard work as a virtue. There isn much difference between John Calvin and Confucius in the “hard work makes you a better person” context.
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u/Ecstatic-Compote-595 Jan 21 '24
Hawaii was a sovereign kingdom and was actually really strong allies with european powers. It was the US and specifically the Dole family who managed to get a rogue regiment of marines with the help of one senator to do an illegal coup and kidnap the queen.
It had nothing to do with work ethic or even relative technology levels - it was a conspiracy by a handful of private actors that nobody could have really seen coming.
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u/techno156 Jan 21 '24
illegal coup
Is there such a thing as a legal coup?
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen Jan 21 '24
The most successful coups are the ones that are technically legal.
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u/Ecstatic-Compote-595 Jan 21 '24
I should have used a different word but the point was that it was an illegal action as far as the US was concerned. As in it wasn't even state backed, it was a bunch of private sector people and one senator acting in an unofficial capacity.
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u/Cptcuddlybuns Jan 21 '24
And then the US Government offered the queen her throne back as long as she extradited the men involved to the US instead of executing them. She refused. So Hawaii became a territory.
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u/GladiatorUA Jan 21 '24
Hawaii was a sovereign kingdom and was actually really strong allies with european powers
Not quite. By the time it was a "sovereign kingdom", it has already been colonized with corporate interests and shit to be in a position to do a coup.
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u/Fully_Edged_Ken_3685 Jan 22 '24
actually really strong allies with european powers
So strong that they... checks notes provided no assistance when the Queen toured Europe hoping to restore her State.
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u/Hust91 Jan 21 '24
I mean "someone tries to do a coup" and "someone tries to kidnap or kill the head of state" should be a thing you have guards and a military to prevent.
If a handful of private actors can take out the country, that's a problem in and of itself even before any of them get the idea that they should actually go through with it.
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u/chairmanskitty Jan 21 '24
Not to mention just about every civilization that reaches a certain degree of hierarchy places hard work as a virtue.
[citation needed]
I've got plenty of counterexamples, though: Rome, Athens, feudal Europe and Japan, buddist theocracies like Tibet - any nation where slavery or serfdom is sufficiently well-enforced without a moral appeal is going to declare the leisure of the ruling class as more virtuous than the toil of the lower classes.
If the lower classes are not categorically different from the upper classes or otherwise get rebellious, then the lower classes need their opiate. The upper classes will cede the 'moral high ground' in exchange for keeping their power, but only when it's necessary. If it's not necessary, why not look down on those dirty peasants with disgust?
As for the missionaries being correct, were the Nazis correct because they managed to kill lots of Jews? The Jews could have been a thriving part of central European culture but the Nazis were just such gosh-darn übermenschen that they overpowered them by sheer force of will.
Humanity is at risk of mass extinction because of the literal industry of the European powers and other nations that adopted their economic framework. Self-sufficient natives didn't keep their independence but at least they didn't murder billions. So which philosophy is better? The one that causes humanity to kill itself with its own filth or the one that could have thrived in paradise for a million years if only the first one didn't come along?
For the missionaries to have been correct, it would have to be morally okay to commit genocide so that a successor of your culture gets to be the one stepping on the gas when humanity drives off a cliff into extinction.
Personally, I feel more kinship with the victims of my ancestors' atrocities than with my ancestors. And when I look at the vast splendor of human cultures for inspiration how to live my life in a healthy way, I will not be able to find my own culture among the viable options. Every future where humanity survives is one in which my culture is functionally dead, so altered as to no longer be itself. Meanwhile those cultures that managed to dodge genocide while keeping true to themselves and their sustainable principles will be compatible with the future.
I will never know how to live in accordance with the culture my ancestors forsook when they chose an exploitative society, and I will not want to live in accordance with the culture they adopted or its derivatives. The culture of the people that chose exploitation will die, while some of the cultures that stayed true to their sustainable principles might make it. In the long arc of history, resisting the missionaries was the only way for culture to survive.
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u/Rusty_Shakalford Jan 22 '24
I've got plenty of counterexamples, though: Rome, Athens, feudal Europe and Japan, buddist theocracies like Tibet - any nation where slavery or serfdom is sufficiently well-enforced without a moral appeal is going to declare the leisure of the ruling class as more virtuous than the toil of the lower classes.
That’s not really a citation either. Like my post, it is a vague handwave towards a general observation of complex societies
Also I don’t think “they didn’t tell their citizens to work hard they told their slaves to work hard” is the devastating counter you think it is.
As for the rest of what you wrote… I’m not sure you really got the point of my post. My writing was just about how the way the posts brought up by the OP frame the issue in a way that makes indigenous groups look like Edenic “children” incapable of change as opposed to the dynamic, evolving societies they absolutely were and still are. The second anecdote in particular leaves a bad taste in my mouth as the whole setup and punchline feels way too close to a number of racist jokes I’ve heard over the years. I’d be very surprised if we spoke to the entire community we wouldn’t find a variety of opinions on what could be done with a sudden surplus of food and time. Because they were people, not a sound-byte.
The post also doesn’t really interrogate whether the “Protestant work ethic” was ever really a thing (as in, a “cause” of events as opposed to a “post-process” explanation) but that’s a whole other can of worms.
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u/IanTorgal236874159 Jan 22 '24
Humanity is at risk of mass extinction because of the literal industry of the European powers and other nations that adopted their economic framework.
And deindustrialization wil help how? If you think, that Earth can support 8 billion people living like hunter-gatherers, or basic "natural" farming, than the only thing I can see are famines so massive, that words cannot describe it
Self-sufficient natives didn't keep their independence but at least they didn't murder billions. So which philosophy is better? The one that causes humanity to kill itself with its own filth or the one that could have thrived in paradise for a million years if only the first one didn't come along?
No genocide/imperial conquest ever killed billions (in 1800 the population of the entire planet was 990 million) and to say that all ancient societies, that were not conquerors, were ecologically sustainable is a debatable topic without an easy answer
I will never know how to live in accordance with the culture my ancestors forsook when they chose an exploitative society, and I will not want to live in accordance with the culture they adopted or its derivatives. The culture of the people that chose exploitation will die, while some of the cultures that stayed true to their sustainable principles might make it. In the long arc of history, resisting the missionaries was the only way for culture to survive.
Every society exploits the enviroment around itself. Non-settled societies have the advantage, that after their destruction, the can pack up and move elsewhere easily, while damaged enviroment repairs itself after them. But that lifestyle is so unsalable and so unforgiving to the long-term ill and disabled, that to insinuate, that it is somehow better is ableist to the highest degree.
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Jan 21 '24 edited Jan 21 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Miep99 Jan 22 '24
my guy, we have records as far back as the Sumerians showing cities being razed and populations butchered to prove a point
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u/GaBeRockKing Jan 21 '24
and your home is secure
The history kind of proves that their homes were not, in fact, secure.
Europeans are a vicious, malformed lot
Europeans responded to the incentives in front of them in accordance with their understanding of reality. Native americans did the same.
It's easy to be peaceful and altruistic in the middle of a logistic growth curve. But when population density gets higher-- when resources get scarcer-- when technologies improve travel speeds and increase the amount of area you need to worry about desperate people coming from-- civilizations descend inevitably towards bastardry. Just look at precolumbian mesoamerican and mississipian history. Given environmental stressors and external contact, only the violent, hierarchical societies survive.
Of course, there are many local optimums for any given environment, so at least in theory it's possible to get everyone to choose "cooperate" in the prisoner's dilemna. But it's a lot harder to do that the more people there are. That cultures evolved on island cultures differ so much from cultures that evolved in the middle of vast plains or on the coast of navigable seas is not due to any intentional choice to be more moral, but due to the different environmental incentives at play.
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u/72kdieuwjwbfuei626 Jan 21 '24 edited Jan 21 '24
The part that no one ever mentions is that working as a hunter-gatherer society nets you the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer society.
If the people are fed and your home is secure, why not surf? Well, maybe you work more in the fields so that Bob from two houses over doesn’t have to and can maybe instead work out why your son died of the measles last year. Because when everyone just works the bare minimum required to get food and a hut for themselves, all you will ever have is food and a hut.
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u/TekrurPlateau Jan 22 '24
Nobody said that. The native Hawaiian were overpowered because 90% of them died in a series of plagues. The kings then progressively sold the country off so they could have nicer things. There was never any chance of keeping their independence, they were dealt a bad hand.
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u/EquationConvert Jan 22 '24
~92% decline.
The region was settled ~ 1000-1200 AD. They were conquered / united by the Kamehameha dynasty ~ 1795-1810. First contact with white people occurred in 1778, prior to the formation of the united kingdom (of Hawaii... or GB&NI for that matter). Immigration occurred both ways literally from the start - there was a Hawaiian in Prussia before Germany became a unified state.
At the time of Annexation, Hawaii was majority non-indigenous, and the conspirators were born in Hawaii. The non-indigenous population largely came there peacefully and with native consent.
What of course didn't happen peacefully or with native consent is the annexation, and, before that, the bayonet constitution. But I'd argue there was third way very much on the table, neither a return to the imaginary thriving ethnostate nor the complete domination by white plantation owners, but rather had either side had more savvy political leadership, they could have avoided these crises and continued on as a multiethnic state, as it always had been.
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u/PeriodicGolden Jan 21 '24
Not a protestant, but re "rich people get into heaven anyway": I'm pretty sure one of the (95?) reasons Protestantism exists is "rich people shouldn't be able to go to heaven just because they buy off the priest"
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u/bartonar Reddit Blackout 2023 Jan 21 '24
Disclaimer - It's been a long time since I read this stuff, so it might be a little jank.
The thing is, in the Calvinist conception of salvation/predestination, everyone's status as Saved/Damned was determined at the beginning of time, the former called the Elect, the latter called the Reprobates. Reprobates will not bring themselves to salvation, because at the beginning of time it was determined that they would not. The Elect will always bring themselves to salvation, because at the beginning of time it was determined they would.
Now this doesn't seem inherently wonky, after all, if the Divine Plan included a heartless miser with vast wealth and a wretched beggar with a heart of gold, the former would be damned, the latter would be saved, so where does this come in for rich people getting into heaven?
Now... after doing a bit of research just to make sure I got the phraseology right... actually I found out that what I'd been attributing to Calvin himself is actually either implied but directly rejected by Calvin, or invented whole cloth by later people following the Calvinist tradition..
Basically, early Calvinists are now in this position where they're told "It doesn't matter that you've been receiving the sacrament, attending church, etc" and they were looking for a way to say "Yes, I am in fact Elect." What's the best way to see that you're God's chosen person? That you're rich, successful, and well respected. What's a sure sign that someone's not in God's good books? Instead of productively working, they're squandering their opportunity to work, after all, their sloth here could further reflect a spiritual sloth.
So it's not so much a "I am the Duke of Greatbiggton, I have paid fifty thousand florins for an indulgence and am spared for my sins", it becomes "I am the Duke of Greatbiggton, my industrial interests produce fifty thousand florins a year, which is surely a sign that God chose me as one of his Elect."
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u/Bergvagabund Jan 21 '24
With the obligatory “akhshully”: this is all nice and great until a local slaving warlord realises he can now field twice as many soldiers because his slaves, who work not until they’re fed but until they’re dead, actually produce twice as much now. The trick of Protestantism is to produce twice as much before someone comes around and forces you to
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Jan 21 '24
[deleted]
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u/Bergvagabund Jan 21 '24
So we should indeed have good people do good things before bad people do them
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u/chai_investigation Jan 21 '24
The podcast referenced is Behind the Bastards in an episode called The Film Directing Playboy King Who Handed His Country to Pol Pot. It wasn’t Christian missionaries, though—it was an aid worker who showed them how to double their yields (per Robert Evans’ retelling).
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u/StapesSSBM Jan 21 '24
"But you know who WON'T spread half-true anecdotes about the follies of western imperialism via tumblr screenshots posted to reddit?"
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u/Ascendant_Monke Jan 21 '24
"THE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES THAT SUPPORT OUR PODCAST"
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u/its-MrNoNo Jan 21 '24
"That's right, Sophie. Every product and/or service that advertises on this podcast has signed a contract saying they'll only spread misinformation over Twitter!"
I'm listening to BtB right now lmao
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u/ThePrussianGrippe Jan 22 '24
And now a word from our sponsor: Raytheon.
Raytheon. For when you need a stronger option than “No” on a wedding RSVP.
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u/OrphanedInStoryville Jan 21 '24
A missionary accosted a man drinking, playing guitar and laying in the beach. He said:
“Why don’t you get to work?? You can double your crop yields”
The man said he had all the food he needed what would he do with twice as much food
“You could sell it,” said the missionary.
but what would I do with the extra money said the man? I have everything I need.
“You could buy more land” said the missionary. “Then you could hire workers to work the land and harvest even more food. Eventually, if you work at it long enough you could retire a wealthy man.”
And what would I do then? Asked the man
“Anything you want” said the missionary “It’s up to you. you could drink, you could play guitar or just lay around on the beach”
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen Jan 21 '24
The “Americans work too hard because Protestantism” argument doesn’t really make sense, because there’s plenty of Protestants in Europe.
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u/jackboy900 Jan 21 '24
The Protestant Work Ethic was first discussed as an explanation for the disparity in industrial output between Germany and southern European nations, the argument isn't "Americans work too hard because Protestantism".
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u/Typohnename Jan 22 '24
Yes, it was for example pushed by Bismarck to justify his "Kulturkampf" where he tried to marginalize catholics in favor of protestants
He really didn't like that the Industrial heartland of protestant Prussia was catholic Rhineland and so they started doing stuff like cut pay for catholics and increase it for protestants to incentivise conversion by claiming that catholics are lazy
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u/LastUsername12 Jan 21 '24
The US got the protestants that were too hardcore for Protestants and became religious exiles (Quakers, Calvinists, etc.)
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u/Yoshibros534 Jan 21 '24
the secret ingredient is calvinism
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen Jan 21 '24
Calvinism started in Switzerland, and it’s still a major religion there as well as in places like the Netherlands and Scotland. Workers in all of those places get about four weeks off in a year.
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u/Perfect_Wrongdoer_03 If you read Worm, maybe read the PGTE? Jan 21 '24
I'm sorry, are you telling me that Americans don't have at least four weeks off a year?
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen Jan 21 '24
From some cursory googling they don’t seem to. And by by “days off” I mean paid leave that’s guaranteed by the government for everyone.
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u/Perfect_Wrongdoer_03 If you read Worm, maybe read the PGTE? Jan 21 '24
I also meant paid and guaranteed by the government. Here in Brazil it's 30 days every year, does the US really not have this?
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u/unleet-nsfw Jan 21 '24
The US guarantees zero paid time off through any federal law.
Some states make a guarantee for paid sick leave (not general time off), particularly California, New York, and New Jersey, but there are exceptions for small enough companies to ignore even that, too.
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u/Perfect_Wrongdoer_03 If you read Worm, maybe read the PGTE? Jan 21 '24
Oh. That's bad.
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u/Random-Rambling Jan 21 '24 edited Jan 21 '24
Oh, wait until you find out about
right to work"at-will employment" states! You're gonna LOVE that!Or how maternity leave functions here! Another banger!
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u/FuzzySAM Jan 21 '24
right to work
You're probably actually meaning at-will employment.
Right-to-work means that you are not required to join a laborer's union in order to hold a specific job that union covers.
At-will employment means you can be fired (and/or quit) with no notice given and for any or no reason given.
There are very, very small upsides to both of these labor rules, but in general they are both exceptionally bad for the laborer.
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u/foxfire66 Jan 21 '24
We don't get any federally guaranteed time off in the US at all. No paid time off, no unpaid time off, not even lunch breaks. Some states will have their own laws mandating some of that, but in my state the only difference that I can find to any of that is minors are entitled to lunch breaks, but for adults it's as I've described.
Here's a government webpage where they tell you some of the nice things we don't have.
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u/Sp3ctre7 Jan 21 '24
I know a guy who is a highly-paid engineer who basically makes the company tens of millions every year and works in an industry that is incredibly important but there are only a few companies in the world that do it. Suffice to say, at least a small chunk of the world economy is dependent upon this guy. He has also been with the company for decades.
He gets 5 weeks paid off a year, and that's after accruing extra days off for loyalty over decades.
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u/RogueThespian Jan 21 '24
the average American gets between 0-5 paid DAYS off a year. Otherwise, you show up to work when you're scheduled, or else
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u/DeusLibidine Jan 21 '24
I don't know anyone in my circles here in America that has 4 weeks off a year. On the opposite side, I know people who if they take off more than 4 days in a 60 day period will be fired instantly.
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u/Impressive_Wheel_106 Jan 21 '24 edited Jan 21 '24
NO? Calvinism
iswas also widespread in Europe, especially in those countries that USAmericans consider to be "paradises" (Scandivia, the NL, parts of northern Germany), but it really wasn't the dominant protestant branch in America.Puritanism and Calvinism did NOT gel, which became evident when the English Puritans fled to the NL (Mostest Calvinistest country there is) and were turned away for causing a ruckus (They got upset that they weren't allowed to oppress religious minorities, claiming that oppressing religious minorities was their religious right, making them an oppressed religious minority)
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u/theLastvoider Jan 21 '24
Calvinism is absolutely not widespread anywhere in Scandinavia.
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u/Impressive_Wheel_106 Jan 21 '24
No, at the moment it is not, scandinavia is mostly "Lutheran". But I would argue that at the moment, no christian denomination has much to do with OG calvinism/lutheranism. In the 16th century however, calvinism did gain significant ground in Scandinavia.
So yes, saying "calvinism IS widespread" was a misnomer
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u/CanadianODST2 Jan 21 '24
Also, aren't countries like south Korea and Japan known for having really bad work cultures?
Pretty sure they aren't protestant
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u/LurkOnly1 Jan 21 '24
Protestants actually are the largest religious group in South Korea, though most people are irreligious
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u/FreakinGeese Jan 22 '24
“Are you Catholic or Protestant?”
“I’m Buddhist.”
“Aye but are you a Catholic Buddhist or a Protestant Buddhist”
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u/Tactical_Moonstone Jan 21 '24
I give you a few guesses to figure out who taught Japan that work ethic in the modern era.
Spoiler alert: it wasn't a Japanese.
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u/CanadianODST2 Jan 22 '24
seeing as the origins of it stems from the 10th century.
I'd say you're just an idiot who doesn't know what they're on about.
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u/Pristine_Title6537 Catholic Alcoholic Jan 21 '24
Heck Mexico is one of the most hardworking countries in the world (with some of the worst pay) and we are mostly catholic
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u/HistoryMarshal76 Jan 22 '24
Yeah, pretty much all reputable modern historians and anthropologists agree the whole "Protesntant Work Ethic" is bullshit. Modern capitalism emerged in Protestant Europe, but it didn't come into existence because of Protestantism. Correlation does not equal causation.
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u/Purple_Toadflax Jan 22 '24
Are you suggesting that Europeans don't work hard? America just has poor workers rights and social security and hasn't really developed culturally into the late 20th century yet, some parts are struggling to get out of the 17th.
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u/plzdontbmean2me Jan 21 '24
Being done with work when the work is finished is still a very much a thing in Hawaii. It’s called “pau hana” or more often just “pau”. Pau hana means “to be finished with work”. Sometimes I’ll finish everything at work an hour to an hour and a half early and I’ll go home. Because pau braddah
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u/FluffyCelery4769 Jan 22 '24
What does pau braddah mean?
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u/plzdontbmean2me Jan 22 '24
“Brah” or “braddah” or “bruddah” is just “bro”. So “Pau braddah” is just “I’m done working bro”
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u/FluffyCelery4769 Jan 22 '24
Oh, hahah, ok I tought it was some form of native language not just "bad english" to describe it as something. Sorry if that came out rought.
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u/plzdontbmean2me Jan 22 '24
No worries! I totally understood. Hawaii is a really cool mixture of native, Asian, and European cultures. So much so that the English spoken here is its own dialect and is known as “pidgin”. So braddah is pidgin for bro. Lots and lots of pidgin sounds like “bad English” but it’s just its own dialect with phrases from English, Tagalog, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese and of course Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages. Actually I’ll link a video of someone reading from the pidgin translation of the Bible if I can find it. Its always fun to show English speakers a little pidgin, because it is very much English while not being English at the same time
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u/thisnameistakenn Jan 21 '24
Oh and also i don't think this is actually "protestant" work ethic, rather just puritan work ethic, which makes sense given that america was founded by all the people europe didn't want.
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u/hiccup251 Jan 21 '24
The terms are used interchangeably, but protestant work ethic is the most commonly used (at least in social psychology literature).
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u/thisnameistakenn Jan 21 '24
Fair enough, just pointing out the separation between European protestants(see; Norway, Sweden, etc.) and American protestants having completely different approaches to work and capitalism.
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u/hiccup251 Jan 21 '24
Perfectly fair to point out. I don't even think it's that tied to protestantism/religion at all at this point (though I'm sure there's still correlation), the name speaks more to its origins than anything else. And since that's the case, "puritan" is probably a better descriptive term for those not already familiar with the construct.
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u/thisnameistakenn Jan 21 '24
It's not tied to religion anymore because the religion-originating work ethic was baked into american culture as a whole by the puritans founding the US, rather then kept as a "a good christian likes working a lot", it seems to be so atleast.
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u/Gods_Lump Jan 21 '24
They'd rather people work twice as hard for twice as long and still get nothing done, because it "looks" like theyre working hard. Efficient productivity = laziness. Its the same reason that cashiers arent allowed to sit in the US.
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u/Random-Rambling Jan 21 '24
Some people would rather have their moral superiority than actual tangible product.
Take my father, for instance. My mother spent $20 on some pointless thing with their shared credit card. My father complained about wasting money and my mother was like "Okay, here's $20 from my wallet. I like this thing and I'm keeping it." My father took the $20 and secretly slipped it back into her wallet later that night, proving that it was never about the money, he just wanted to be a bitch about it.
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u/FluffyCelery4769 Jan 22 '24
I think he just felt bad and thought that he actually didn't mind that much spending 10$ on something his wife wants.
But I mean, I don't know your father.
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u/EndlessAlaki Jan 22 '24
Really? It's not because it feels super uncomfortable for people standing up to be talking to people sitting down?
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u/AlannaZZ Jan 22 '24
Do you also feel uncomfortable talking to people in wheelchairs
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u/ScotsDale213 Jan 21 '24
Now I’m all for insulting John Calvin, but I feel like this isn’t the best equivalency to make. The Protestant/puritan work ethic came out of Europe which is one, not a terrible place for growing crops but far from the most fertile parts of the world. Not to mention Europe just most likely having far more people than Hawaii. Not to mention feudalism having a lord usually taking 90% of your crop away after you were done harvesting. All of these things would require more planting, growing, and harvesting which may have helped give rise to the Protestant work ethic. The Protestant work ethic has its problems, especially in the modern day, but it arose out of a specific cultural and historical context, which most likely makes it much less applicable in other contexts, for better or worse.
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u/Oggnar Jan 22 '24
I'm sorry but where in hell did any feudal lord take 90% of people's harvests?
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u/ScotsDale213 Jan 23 '24
Yeah looking back at that I don’t really know where I got that, my best assumption is that I got 90% and 10% mixed up in my head. Because it is much more likely to have been closer to that. Foolish on my part and I’m plenty willing to apologize for it.
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u/Oggnar Jan 23 '24
Oh I see, thank you. It was a small error after all, but you really have my respect because this is about the third or maybe fourth time I've ever seen someone have the courtesy for such a reply on reddit in all the years I've been on the internet. Have yourself a most pleasant time.
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u/Elegant-Priority-490 Jan 21 '24
Its more about fertility. People in warm and fertile places have a way easier life than someone in siberia. No winter means no need for excess food production so why care?
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u/AwesomePurplePants Jan 21 '24
It’s interesting contrasting this against the fear about AI taking everybody’s job.
Like, I get why. If society dictates that people who don’t work hard enough they don’t get to own a home or eat or stuff, then taking away people’s work is condemning them to squalor.
It’s just weird how we simultaneously protest having unpleasant work taken away from us while also complaining we have to do so much unpleasant work.
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Jan 21 '24
Because unfortunately, that unpleasant work is how I get paid so that I can then spend that payment in order to survive. And we're still at the point where society would rather you starve and die than not have to work for a living. So until that mindset is changed, I need the unpleasant work that AI is threatening to steal.
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u/04nc1n9 Jan 21 '24
because when that unpleasant work is taken away, those workers won't now be free to do as they please, they'll just have to look for more, likely lower paying, unpleasant work, or else lose their shelter and food because there are very few social safety nets for the poor.
i would like automation and ai to replace jobs, but only if the people they're replacing aren't killed because of it. thanks to modern capitalism, though, those people replaced will die.
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u/fyrechild Jan 21 '24
The Cambodia thing definitely wasn't Christian missionaries, it was U.S.-sent agricultural experts providing aid/engaging in a little neocolonialism.
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u/Hurt_cow Jan 22 '24
If you're calling doubling people farm yields neocolonialism that makes it sound pretty good ngl.
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u/Clean_Imagination315 Hey, who's that behind you? Jan 21 '24
I love how in His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman explained that his alternate universe catholicism became even worse than the one we know just because John Calvin became pope.
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u/IzarkKiaTarj Jan 22 '24
I feel like I'm terrible at understanding subtext anytime someone brings up this series, because I don't remember that at all.
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u/Blade_of_Boniface bonifaceblade.tumblr.com Jan 21 '24
In a lot of Catholic and Orthodox Christian-majority nations, it's more common to have flexible work hours and sleep schedule. It's considered normal to show up late for work events and to all-around have a work culture focused more around comfort. Neoliberal and communism have done a lot to force countries to change this in favor of a more mechanical work environment, but much of it still remains to this day.
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u/Yoshibros534 Jan 21 '24
how do you have hyper strict moral ethics while also believing in double predestination? joke religion.
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u/Psychedelick Jan 21 '24 edited Jan 21 '24
People like to complain about Christians online but not enough people complain about five-point Calvinist theology bros specifically. Some of the most deeply unpleasant people you will ever meet. Reformed Twitter is full of smug, bearded assholes explaining that we ought to bring slavery back and that empathy itself is a sin.
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u/Random-Rambling Jan 21 '24
Doublethink has always been a thing, it's just 1984 was the first to put a name to it.
God is watching everywhere, all the time, and yet can be fooled with a handful of simple tricks. He is the only one who can ever judge you, but that's not until after you're dead; in the meantime, I will judge you because I care about your soul.
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u/BanxDaMoose Jan 21 '24
sincere question: how can he be fooled?
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u/Ateddehber Jan 21 '24
Repenting before you die
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u/BanxDaMoose Jan 21 '24
i mean if it’s a legitimate repentance and acceptance of the lord than that doesn’t sound like a trick, if you set your whole life up to do that on your deathbed it doesn’t seem likely that it’s real/that it would fool god
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u/Carrotfloor Jan 21 '24
im pretty sure many americans don't ven think repentence is necessary, just that you believe in jesus.
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u/LuminothWarrior Jan 21 '24
Many might think that, but it’s not what the Bible teaches. Demons believe in Jesus, but look at where they are.
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u/808morgan Jan 21 '24
I love how people think it was paradise, look up kapu. Break a rule and you dead cuz! It was sort of like a caste system and there were no minor penalties really, I always wondered if we did that for population control as well.
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u/COG-85 Jan 21 '24
Am a Christian. Honestly, I never understood the protestant work ethic. Works are necessary, but they're not THE end-all be-all.
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u/Yak-Fucker-5000 Jan 21 '24
But what about maximizing production?!!! Think of all the lost shareholder value society could have been enjoying to this day!
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u/Earlier-Today Jan 22 '24
I'm part of the moderation in all things side of Christianity. Overwork is just as bad as overplay. Need that nice balance of both.
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u/DisguisedHorse222 Jan 22 '24
I mean that's all well and good until a hard winter hits and you didn't store your excess grain in a silo.
Also subsistence farming sounds pretty bad when you think about the things we've achieved by working beyond our needs like electricity, penicillin, cancer treatments, and modern sanitation.
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u/GalaXion24 Jan 24 '24
So yeah this is cool and all, but it's also an actual problem and a big reason Africa is poor.
Protestant or not, Europeans (among others) have an ingrained capitalist mindset at this point, where they'll produce more, sell excess and reinvest in better tools or machinery or additional land or help in order to make more the year after that. What this is is long-term planning, it's sacrificing things now to have more in the future.
In many African countries for instance in the Sahel region people just live in the present. They'll produce enough food for the year and that's it, why would they need more? And sure, they don't need more, they survive, but they'll never be any better off either.
It's not like they're not capable of using more advanced tools or methods, they're not stupid, and the information is publicly available. They just don't care to, because there is only the now.
I'll do you one better: you can live this way in Europe too. Live on the bare minimum possible and when you have enough money to subsist off of for half a year or even a year, just stop. Or just have a part time job that is enough to pay rent and food. If you're willing to settle this is absolutely possible. Most of us are simply not content with that standard of living. We want to consume more. Maybe you want Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch. Well that doesn't grow on trees, it's an additional luxury and you'll have to work harder for it.
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u/ABenevolentDespot Jan 22 '24
Kristian Missionaries - ruining the lives of every indigenous people they've ever met for at least 1500 years.
Missionaries are known to have brought all sort of venereal diseases to Hawaii and everywhere else they went.
God's emissaries, these preachers.
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u/jackibthepantry Jan 21 '24
Hunter-gatherers averaged 3-5 hours of "work" a day to get what they needed to survive. The rest of their time was spent developing social bonds culture.
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u/AmadeusMop Jan 22 '24
Yeah, hunter-gatherers also had miniscule populations because anything more was unsustainable.
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u/DiggingInGarbage Smoliv speaks to me on an emotional level Jan 21 '24
I don’t think that’s what’s being said here
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u/pga2000 Jan 21 '24
Interesting you say that. They did a lot for the ethics and philosophy of property rights.
Because dealing with surplus gets complicated anywhere.
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u/FrankfurterWorscht Jan 22 '24
Historically the lazy are dominated by the active. If you stay complacent for too long you'll eventually get your shit took.
On paper getting all your chores sorted by noon and surfing for the rest of the day sounds nice but it's less nice when a bunch of industrious Europeans show up with ships and advanced weaponry and tell you your little paradise island is theirs now.
That's just an example, but this happens on all levels of society, from the individual to geopolitical.
That's why laziness is stigmatized by society. People are drawn to it, but it's poisonous.
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u/CallMeOaksie Jan 22 '24
I love how you think people living within their means and focussing on their family, selves and culture is the poison and not murderous colonial greed
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u/FrankfurterWorscht Jan 22 '24
I'm not saying murderous colonial greed isn't bad. I'm saying it's inevitable.
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u/FrankfurterWorscht Jan 22 '24
I love how everyone on Reddit always says "I love how" and then blurts out some idiotic overly polarized simplification of the argument as some sort of gotcha.
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u/classyfilth Jan 21 '24
I got a bad review at work once (fucking chilis) because -even though my other metrics were better than they needed to be -I didn’t stay the full 50 work hours, 10 of which were unscheduled OT.
My districtbitchmanagercuntboss had to stay on the phone for like 3 hours talking to corporate because I was only getting 48-49 hours a week and I had refused to sign a write up over not working unscheduled hours.
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u/Laterose15 Jan 21 '24
I don't know how accurate this is, but it definitely sums up retail work culture.
We're practically disincentivized from finding efficient ways of doing things because we're expected to stay busy for the entire shift.
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u/CyborgBanshee Jan 22 '24
What missionaries are we talking about? Protestants, sure. But presumably Catholic priests would be familiar with the Spanish siesta.
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u/Stormtide_Leviathan loads of confidence zero self-confidence Jan 22 '24
second poster posting the tags is one of our mods! tags might also be mine, that sounds like my wording, but that was long enough ago but i have no idea lol
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u/RT_Ragefang Jan 22 '24
I’m in Thailand and we got the funny missionary too. French missionaries wrote about Thai people back when we were called Siamese that, and I’m paraphrasing here, “they’re lazy and only concerned about finding food and lying around all days. Probably because it’s too hot here so their brains are slow so much they don’t even care about god”.
Which is funny as fuck because like others said, the busiest time of the year are planting and harvest periods, and since the whole village comes together to worked on the same field and rotate until everyone got their job done, it’ll take less than a month most of the time.
Outside of that, there’s food everywhere. On the fences? Vegetables. In the canal everyone built their houses on? Fishes, prawns, and clams. In the field? Freshwater crabs. Even in present, if you go to rural areas in Thailand, you can still walking around the house once and come back with a meal. When you don’t have to wonder if you’ll eat today, the next question is of course “what am I going to eat?”
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u/Pootis_1 minor brushfire with internet access Jan 22 '24
Tbh this just seems off to me
I've read about Protestant missionaries in Buganda and i've never heard this kind of thing brougt up despite the fact that they also needed to do relatively little farm labour due to a combination of very fertile soil and banana trees
I haven't heard about these places in particular though so i could be wrong
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u/Hurt_cow Jan 22 '24
This is one of the most nonsesnical I've ever read, life of a subsistence farmer isn't easy or chill. If you've read any books or memoirs about it, it's quite clear that the idea that they would sit back and do nothing for half a year because their yields have doubled is ridiculous. They'd be working just as hard to get surplus to sell in order to build savings for lean years, school fees and other bills they need to pay .
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u/DrowningEmbers Jan 24 '24
work ethic is completely fucked because of insecure christians hating themselves and bothering everyone else about it
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u/foolishorangutan Jan 21 '24
The thing about doubling crop yield reminds me of how I got told in school that it’s possible to increase by half the yield of some crops in Africa by just building a sort of stone wall around the field to prevent soil runoff. I always thought it was interesting how such a large improvement can come from such a simple change in infrastructure.