Wasteful abusive and focused on labor productivity.

North America being a notable exception working hours have been coming down.

I'm one of the most active volunteer translators at TED.

Nevertheless, there are ways to fix them without depending on public finance.

The workman, as a rule, works eight hours a day.

Workers have all productive processes, i.e. they plan, execute and contribute.

Right across much of the world

Those weren't the easiest of days

The workman, as a rule, works eight hours a day.

Laborers normally work 8 hours per day.

The workers union called off their 24 hour strike today.

But now it's turned around.

The tighter the government financing becomes, the more the citizens are burdened by increasing taxes.

Let me write that down on the side here.

They are demanding shorter working hours.

So let's say Dustin charges, so the function, I'll call it d for Dustin.

A little background when my grade five was learning about child rights, they were made to roll incense sticks, agarbattis, for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer.

Other than a massive bill for overtime.

Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German a thousand.

Instead of laying off these workers, why don't we just cut their hours?

She quit her job because of the low pay and long hours.

The workers were laid off for three weeks.

The laborer was layed off for 3 weeks.

The laborers were layed off for 3 weeks.

Avoid heavy labor It will be better in two weeks.

To cope with this problem, we had better quit working long hours, right?

Agricultural societies soon became the dominant way of life for people throughout the world.

The other point is that it is hard.

it's something that I couldn't do without.

Argument continues about the White collar exemption that exempts specific white collar workers from the 8 hours in 1 day, 40 hours a week, working hours fixed by the Labour Standards Act.

And eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House, invited industry, human rights NGOs, trade unions, the Department of Labor, got them all in a room and said, Look,

This would mean a harder life for most.

So, until then, basically people were living on top of their trades.

And he puts an exclamation mark, OK? This is an awful lot of work.

And when I started in with the eight hours and the 10 hours and the 12 hours and the 14 hours and the 15 hours and the 24 hour swims,

So, we tried to take this what was perceived as a negative their over competitiveness, their, you know, long working hours and turn it into a positive and not run from it.

For example, love might not be a scarce resource. You might have an infinite amount of love.

The totality of this project involves tens of thousands of hours of human labor 99 percent of it done by women.

Back in 1800, you'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour.

What that tells us, is that the price of

Most of them don't want to go back to the countryside, but they don't have the sense of belonging.

We should rehearse more often.

And if you go beyond sort of the country level, down at the micro company level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug to take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room, to switch off their Blackberrys and laptops you at the back mobile phones, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought.

Paid work in Germany in the year 2001

The Labor Party's vote increased at last year's election.