2023-07-04 08:01:09
This text is taken from Courrier de l’économie. To subscribe, Click here.
Whatever our pale complexion and drawn features say when the holidays finally arrive, we have never worked so little. But there, as elsewhere, not everyone is equal, and not always for the reasons one might think.
The French sociologist Jean Viard has a striking way of presenting the combined effect of the improvement in working conditions, the time we now spend on school benches and, above all, the lengthening of life expectancy. of life. In the second half of the 19th century, when Émile Zola and Karl Marx denounced the living conditions of workers, the average length of the working day was 11 to 12 hours, and this effort was repeated for at least six days. per week. Most boys began to work in their teens and from then on had an additional 30 years of life expectancy ahead of them.
A century and a half later, this teenage life expectancy has doubled. At the same time, the average time spent studying is approaching 19 years, following which people generally work for around 40 years.
Converted to number of hours, these trends mean that, from 1900 to the present day, life spans have increased, on average, from 500,000 to 700,000 hours, and that the time a worker devotes to work has dropped, meanwhile, from 200,000 to just 67,000 hours.
Expressed differently, wage labor counted, a century ago, for 40% of the duration of existence and 70% of waking life. Today, for workers, it represents only 10% of their existence and 14% of their waking life.
Equivalent to 100,000 hours in 1900, the free time available “excluding sleep and work” has quadrupled, and it now totals 400,000 hours, says Jean Viard, including approximately 100,000 hours spent in front of the television!
In Quebec and elsewhere
Only since the turn of the 1960s, Canadians have seen their working hours decrease by almost 20%, from an average of 2,059 hours per year to 1,686 hours last year, according to the OECD. This number is lower than the average for the United States (1,811) and OECD countries (1,752), but higher than those for Japan (1,607), France (1,511), Sweden (1,440) and Germany (1341).
If we focus on the fate of full-time employees, this average was 1,794 hours last year in Quebec, once absences and vacations (-276 hours) as well as paid overtime or no (+75 hours), reports the Statistical Institute of Quebec. This is less than the Canadian (1848) and Ontario (1852) averages.
These averages hide variations between the different types of workers. In Quebec, the total number of hours spent at work in 2022 was not the same, for example, for men (1894) and women (1677), people without a high school diploma (1870) and graduates academics (1775), workers who are unionized (1711) and those who are not (1852), employees in the public sector (1654) and those in the private sector (1846), or even workers in goods-producing industries (1908) and those in the service sector (1757).
From silent to Netflix
The shortening of workweeks since 1900 has gone hand in hand with rising productivity and worker incomes, but also with falling real cost of leisure, a 2021 study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research reported. . It is logical, they said, to think that the higher the standard of living of households, the more they were willing to devote time to leisure, especially if the relative price of the latter fell.
Once the effect of inflation and the quality offered are taken into account, we find, for example, that the price of television sets is 1000 times lower today than it was in 1950, and that personal computers are 50 times cheaper than they were in the mid-1990s. The price of going to the cinema to see a silent film in 1919 was equivalent to what it costs today to listen for a month as much movies and TV shows you want on an online streaming platform.
To see in video
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