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Is it common for Americans to have flexible hours, not the 40 hours a week schedule?

In my understanding, yes. Many office jobs, especially “creative” rather than administrative ones (like in software, finance, etc.) don’t have defined hours, you just work some amount of time that lets you be productive enough for your boss to be happy with you. (And in some places the culture is to work as much as possible – I’ve seen lots of articles about how absurdly workaholic the culture in big financial firms is, for instance.) Also e.g. doctors and lawyers have absolutely absurd working hours. Basically anyone who’s on a salary rather than an hourly wage is likely to have undefined and ever-expandable working hours.

On the lower-wage end of the scale, it’s often the other way around: hours are “flexible” because they often don’t add up to a full 40 hours (because then the employer would be on the hook for healthcare and such) and they can also be unpredictable as companies do complicated things to determine when they’ll need more people working, but they can’t do that very far in advance.

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But we know that’s not the case, because there have been plenty of times and places like that in history – and while slavery always sucks, it’s nowhere near as awful in societies where it’s not racialized. Greek and Roman slaves were frequently paid salaries as motivation, allowed to purchase their own freedom, manumitted at much higher rates than American slaves, and educated to perform skilled professions like medicine. The Greeks and Romans could do those things because their cultural justification for slavery was not “these people are biologically inferior and must be treated like animals for everyone’s good.” In the absence of that justification, slaveholders have an incentive to treat slaves more like the Greeks and Romans did. In the presence of it, slaveholders have a strong incentive to treat slaves as if they were animals and never allow them any chance to prove that they weren’t.

I suppose the statement that hypothetically, if slavery in 19th century America wasn’t racialized but was still exactly as awful as it was in our world, that would be no improvement on what happened in our world. But we can be pretty confident from looking at history that situation wouldn’t have happened. Racial disparity makes institutions like slavery worse, which is a pretty good reason to treat racial disparity as a bad thing in and of itself.

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