[harryh]

You're getting downvoted to hell, but FWIW I basically agree with you. This isn't really about rights but about economics. China used to be quite poor. So, on average, the Chinese people had to work pretty hard to raise their standard of living.

But as China has gotten richer it's only natural that Chinese citizens will want to convert some of their hard earned wealth into more leisure time instead of more physical goods so average hours worked per week will tend to decline.

The same sort of thing happened in America and elsewhere.

[pdimitar]

Call me stupid but I cannot see how you are agreeing with your parent comment. It basically states "don't complain and get back to work", and you basically said it's normal for people to want their hard work to pay off and are thus pushing back against insane working schedules.

I don't see the connection, help me here.

[harryh]

I was agreeing with this part:

"There's no such things as "human rights standards" for how much you should work per week."

A 40 hour work week isn't (in my view) a "human right" in the way that life, liberty and property are rights. It's an exchange of time/work for money. People can choose to work a lot or work a little depending on how they value their time vs their leisure.

[pdimitar]

I believe the assertion about basic human rights is rooted more in research about maximum "productive" hours a day/week. Scientists have proven that hunter-gatherer tribes work anywhere between 10 to 20h a week and are doing just fine.

The 40h a week is pretty artificial default that has been imposed on most of the people by business interests. That's how I view it historically at least.

So we might not agree on slippery terms like "basic human rights" but modern phenomena as burnout and work depression are pretty widespread already and can thus serve as an example as to how the current workload standards might be broken.

[icebraining]

As far as I know, the 40h/week was pushed by unions, not business interests (those wanted more).

[pdimitar]

History is written by the victors, so we'll never truly know. Maybe the unions were bought out?

What's more likely however is that 40h a week seemed more reasonable than the baseline at the time.

Still doesn't make it good for the humans in general though. Time and again studies show humans have no flat productivity rate, and some studies are trying to prove that 40h a week is too much and the people don't have enough productive hours left outside of that to actually tend to family, house cleaning, cooking, leisure hobbies etc.