Capitalism and productivity had significant impact on giving us more leisure time, not demanding it. This pattern has been repeated in many places with or without strong labor. Making more with less lets people work less over time.
Making more with less, let's you make more. If you're not making more, you're losing money. The only thing that reduces working hours is reducing workers, as a cost cutting move. The workers eliminated have more "leisure" time because they're not working at all.
Working hours are longer [0].
Capitalism did not give you a weekend. Capitalism did not give you a workday that ends after 8 hours. These are things that people literally died for. Business owners hired Pinkerton thugs to murder workers, to try to get them to fall in line. Never say that capitalists gave people leisure time and benefits. My grandfather stood in a field in Southern Illinois when he was boy and watched men gunned down during a strike. These things were demanded and taken.
>Capitalism did not give you a weekend. Capitalism did not give you a workday that ends after 8 hours.
Both of those things were offered by Ford (and others) without federal law forcing it as a way to attract the best workers away from his competitors, and as companies saw it worked, many followed suit. They've been obtained in many countries without using labor unions to force the govt to legislate them. Unions in the US fought for them, but those things were likely coming anyways as people got richer through producing more goods. And there are enough cases of those things being offered in non-union places long before federal law that it's not honest to say they are here solely because unions.
The point is unions did not solely give us those things, or they would not also appear in places without such a labor movement. Many factors contributed to these things, unions, more production, i.e., more wealth for everyone, which are results of lot of pieces of progress.
>Working hours are longer [0].
Americans working more then other OECD countries is not the result of unions or capitalism. It's culture. Hours worked has fallen as wages rose over the past few hundred years, wages rose because people became more productive. [1]
China is a perfect example of how capitalism, not labor laws, release people from work and given them leisure and money. Under communism, there is ample labor law, which is the point of communism - all men are equal and all share. China got a two day weekend without needing unions to fight it through, they got more vacation, etc. [2] This is a result of the people making more, giving them more power, which is a result of people being more productive. It was not labor union there obtaining these things.
As they've opened to capitalism, allowing growth by more efficient allocation of capital, the everyday person has vastly improved quality of life. The same pattern played out in USSR->Russia for a while, which then went back some on the capitalism part. India did the same. Other countries followed suit.
>Americans working more then other OECD countries is not the result of unions or capitalism. It's culture.
Ironically, this is one of the topics which Marx (wearing his sociologist hat) tried to get at, as well as his descendants (Weber and the Frankfurt School etc.)
>Under communism, there is ample labor law
Under Communism there wouldn't be labour law because there is no such thing as "labour" requiring a law - labour law literally only exists due to its position in relation to capital.
>China got a two day weekend without needing unions to fight it through
This is due to a combination of China being founded by Socialists (and despite not being a Socialist state, needing to keep up appearances of being one) and importing already established Western ideas (in a very similar way to what Japan did).
>more efficient allocation of capital, the everyday person has vastly improved quality of life.
This is not contrary to the Marian thesis that capitalism requires free workers, free in the first sense of being able to sell their labour how they wish, and free in his more ironic sense of freedom from the means and produce of production.
I think power and politics matter more than you believe. The two graphs on page 12 here (sorry, giant PDF), suggest that things have worked out very differently for the US and Western Europe, two similarly wealthy areas:
Share of income can hide much more important items, like absolute income. Most people care less about what share of national income they make and care more about what total income they make.
It's easier to have low inequality when everyone is poor. It's harder to keep inequality low when people as a whole, including median, get richer. It's also harder to keep inequality (say, by Gini) for larger populations. (As neat evidence of this last fact, 45 US States last I checked had Gini below the aggregate US Gini - it's how the math works, hiding nuances).
For example, from your graphs: US median wage is higher than Western Europe (very few countries higher, most decently lower) - so they have lower inequality, but the people have less income.
