You know, there was that 'labor movement' and typical working hours decreased in 200 years from 16 hours a day, 7 days a week to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week + vacations. It is a good reason for the lack of mass unemployment, isn't it?
That's actually part one of the side effects of mechanization that I mentioned; not only does employment stay roughly the same, but we get better goods for less work. "The labor movement" had little to do with it; the amount of labor required for sustenance simply dropped to a remarkably small number of hours per day, thanks to technological advancement. The fact that we now have roughly 40 hour workweeks is simply how our culture responded to an exponential increase in productivity.
So I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Are you complaining that we get to work so little and have so much?
