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points by dotancohen 3 days ago | 0 comments

  > There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
Religious edict - most prominently the Sabbath in Western civilization - have mandated a day of rest every seventh day for at least 3000 years.
[–] Cyph0n 3 days ago
Did religious edict also eliminate child labor, give us more humane working hours, and establish labor laws? Or was that because of unions?
[–] graemep 3 days ago
Religious edict certainly helped a lot.

There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.

The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum

During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.

Just off the top of my head examples.

[–] Cyph0n 2 days ago
Only replying to you since everyone else is making the same points.

I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.

At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)

[–] dotancohen 3 days ago
Deuteronomy 24:14-15 says not to oppress a poor hired worker and requires his wages to be paid the same day, before sunset.
[–] BoxOfRain 3 days ago
Both, actually! Nonconformist Christianity was one of several key influences on the labour movement ideologically speaking. At least in the UK the Labour Party is often said to owe more to Methodism than Marx for its original ideological foundations. There's a long history of this, in the aftermath of the English Civil War a group called the Diggers more or less independently invented agrarian socialism out of the New Testament, and a great deal of calls for humane conditions for workers over the centuries were motivated explicitly by Christian teachings. The New Testament is pretty clear in its condemnation of repressing workers, James 5 for example:

> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.

[–] dotancohen 3 days ago
No.

I answered one incorrect statement. Why try to pile the world on a single statement.

[–] stuaxo 3 days ago
Sure but proper weekends are much much more recent.

But far away enough that we need to look at this again and get more time back to the workers.

[–] amanaplanacanal 3 days ago
That was one of the methods people used to fight for it, yes.