Part-time jobs as we call them are essentially the real progress we have made thanks to technology.
Reference:
“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’s promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the sixties—never materialize? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the twenties, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.”
As we can see it's the free market competition that keeps us in the 40h+ work week a century after the prediction was made and after an increase of hundreds of times in productivity.
Yet if you look at any job dashboard you will barely notice any part-time jobs. At best they are some 1% of the total volume of postings. And we are not talking about precarious contract or freelance work but rather a steady long-term part-time position.
Part-time jobs are especially useful in times of crisis and high unemployment rates as they bring it down by 50% based on a 20 hour work week alone.
Now why are companies so uneasy with part-time jobs. Simply because they lower competition among workers, double head count and consequently increase complexity in the organization. So you would need more management in order to maintain the same structure as full-time jobs.
As we know businesses are ruthlessly efficient and strive for optimizations at any time given. In fact they would even prefer to halve the workers and put them on a 80 hour work week if possible.
So we have a contradiction here between progress and well-being. One which is a social dilemma and a class struggle.
Do you prefer part-time jobs?
Source:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs