Cut working week to 21 hours, urges think tank

[Mosaic]

...

Anna Coote, co-author of the 21 Hours report, said: "So many of us live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume, and our consumption habits are squandering the earth's natural resources.

"Spending less time in paid work could help us to break this pattern. We'd have more time to be better parents, better citizens, better carers and better neighbours.

"We could even become better employees - less stressed, more in control, happier in our jobs and more productive.

"It is time to break the power of the old industrial clock, take back our lives and work for a sustainable future."

Original article here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8513783.stm

[NYC_SKP]

1. Yes, we are too stressed and overworked. Our lives would be richer...

I like her plan, it may never come to be until there's a major cataclysmic society-killing event, but I like it.

Our species isn't designed for the kinds of lives we now live, and neither is our planet capable of handing our ways and our numbers.

Recommended.

[cliffordu]

10. What you said.

I'm doing my part.

Workers of the world RELAX!!!

[WillyT]

21. Back In The 80's, I Met A Teacher Fom Australia...

Told me his work schedule was every 5th year off with pay.

Don't know if he was blowin' smoke, but I sure liked the concept.

:shrug:

[Go2Peace]

37. Nope, he wasn't. Although last I heard Australian "sabbatical" was every 7 years

And your paycheck for those months off? HIGHER than normal. They also have an average of 28 days off a year for vacation.

[Violet_Crumble]

55. I just checked and where I work it's the fifth year off for sabbatical leave...

I'm a public servant here in Australia, so the working conditions are pretty good for me. We get four weeks annual leave per year and can also purchase extra leave if we need it. Anyway, about sabbatical leave. Here's the stodgy formal agency agreement stuff about it:

The Commissioner may approve an application from an ongoing employee to work for a four
year period followed by a one year sabbatical leave period.

An employee whose sabbatical leave application is approved receives one years’ sabbatical
leave by agreeing to forgo 20% of their eligible salary on each payday in each of the four
years immediately prior to going on one years’ sabbatical leave.

During the sabbatical year employees will be paid an amount equivalent to the amounts
forgone from salary for the previous four years, in equal fortnightly instalments.



forgot to mention that we also get long service leave after 10 years of working there. I've got three months full pay or six months half pay and by the time I'll be ready to retire it'll be up to around nine months full pay. Do Americans get long service leave?

[Crazy Dave]

2. Most people are doing that now but not by choice

My wife's hours were cut by 10 starting next week.

[gmoney]

3. Makes sense

21 hours of actual productive time, vs 50 hours at 30% productivity.

[Go2Peace]

4. 35 hour work week in France, 5 weeks vacation min. and universal health care

We should have the same. Our countrymen cheat us out of a new Renaissance we should be partaking in instead of this bullshit "life is working your ass off".

[Greyhound]

They're not "our countrymen", they're fucking parasites that need to be dealt

with before they kill us.

[Go2Peace]

30. The worst are (R)s and corps, but even our own brought this shit upon us

You see it on this board.

The world has seen wealth like never before. We should be living in a golden age. But instead people decided that they deserved a "good life" but their "lazy" neighbors didn't (lazy basically meant anyone who wasn't them), and they are only now, at least some of them, waking up.

Hell, we still have a ton of people here who seem to think the we just need to "tweak" back, add a pinch of health care, and do a better "greed on" without questioning the bancrupt fundamental ideologies that got us here.

[Greyhound]

38. That is exactly right.

We live in a world of plenty. There is no reason whatsoever for the rampant deprivation, other than all those that suffer do so in order for these parasites to wallow.

The consequences of this are inevitable, unfortunately.

[mitchum]

39. Absolutely! (n/t)

[ddeclue]

5. Umm how would anything ever get done?

We have 20% unemployment not 50% unemployment. Cutting the work week to half (or less for a lot of people) would result in labor shortages- 40 hours is fine..maybe cut it to 35 so more people can have jobs but the problem is that businesses don't want this because they want the fewest people possible to minimize their head count.

The only thing they would like about 21 hours is that nobody would be full time and have benefits anymore.

[Lorien]

20. 21 could become "full time with benefits"

and if you want three jobs who would stop you from getting them?

[ddeclue]

26. I assume the same police that decide the work week is now 21 hours...

[devilgrrl]

32. Easy. Hire the currently unemployed to fill in the hours not being used.

:shrug:

[TransitJohn]

6. But how then will 20% quarter over quarter profits be maintained??

Jeez, this lady is crazy. :sarcasm:

[dkf]

7. People on commission will starve

[Greyhound]

16. People that work for someone/something have a right to be paid

for their time. Commission-only and gratuity-only/mostly positions are both symptomatic of the sickness.

[guitar man]

8. I'm down with that

Double my hourly wage and I'm there :D

[SheilaT]

9. That's rather drastic.

But cutting to a 35 hour week, maybe even a 32 hour week would make a lot of sense.

Many people don't realize that the typical work week went from 60 hours to 40 hours during the Great Depression precisely so as to increase employment.

It's been my observation that in many office jobs people are productive a lot less than the eight hours per day they're at the workplace. Maybe with a shorter workweek people would be working more of the time they're actually at work, but by spending less time there, would be much happier.

Even the cut to a 35 hour week would require a lot of restructuring of a lot of jobs.

[immoderate]

11. Right. Because of automation, work must be rationed.

Here's one better...

Everybody gets a living stipend. They don't have to work to live. For everything above basic subsistence, they need to work. It's the old Nixon era negative income tax.


--imm

[Greyhound]

12. Great idea but counter the "Work-Camp; America" mentality that currently rules. K&R.

[glinda]

13. I think it a good idea for those who can afford it. 30 hours/wk.

[kentuck]

14. I could agree with that if they passed a law to make anything over 20 hours...

overtime.

[WCGreen]

15. It's a great idea but greed will surely kill this idea...

[kentuck]

19. This is the perfect solution to the present unemployment problem.

Think about it.

If they decreased the work week to 35 hours per week, companies and corporations would have to hire more people to get the same amount of production, or they would have to increase present production with their present employees. Since this would not require a 60-vote majority, but a simple majority, they could also legislate that anything above 30-hours per week would be considered over-time. If they wish to look at that as a tax increase, then let them...

[WCGreen]

25. That's a real good idea...

couple that with a tax credit for new hires....

A winner!

[Mind_your_head]

17. Great idea.....but we probably only really truly *work* 21 hours when

we *say* we are working 40.

How many hours would we really work when we are only *supposed* to work 21?

Ah, well, hell...it's a moot point when so many of us can't find any work at all, right? :shrug:

[Greyhound]

18. And double the minimum wage. Bring the economic activity back toward the people

that create it in the first place.
:kick: & R

[Throd]

22. No thanks. I enjoy my job.

[Go2Peace]

33. well lucky you. To hell with others eh?

Just in my lifetime productivity has increased dramatically. You aren't the only one who has worked hard. Well, I would like to have some of that productivity back in the form of time for family, pursuit of other things, just time to learn and enjoy new things.

Are you really so narrow that you would continue to push everyone into the mold that you have become familiar with? Even when productivity gains are so dramatic that many are left without sustainance?

[Hello_Kitty]

23. The Gospel of Consumption

The Gospel of Consumption
And the better future we left behind

BY JEFFREY KAPLAN

PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.


more

[marzipanni]

29. That was very interesting, and pertinent for the present, too

this 'more' part really tells it like it is-

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

I really like Kellogg's ideas.Why try to 'make work' instead of spreading it around more evenly.

[SoCalDem]

24. at double the pay, perhaps, but......

at the same pay people now get, we would have a nation of poor people working 2-3 substandard jobs with no benefits,, y'know...kind like it is NOW for millions of people..

the problem we have to solve, as a nation, is this..

what do we do with/for the "throwaway people"?

these are the people who have always been with us.. they are the high school only people or the ones who dropped out.. they still live on, and they have children, and they have not had "decent" wages since the work-with-your-hands jobs of manufacturing left..

our magnificent:eyes: "service economy" is almost entirely based on all of us selling each other imported cheap stuff, and the bulk of the profit goes to the upper 1%..

there is no "there" there anymore..

plastic cards & E-Z-Low cost credit replaced wage increases so of course people bought "stuff"..and needed bigger places to store all the stuff..but now the gravy train has ended, and people have low paying jobs (or no jobs) or part-time jobs and can no longer afford to live the way they have been living..and people are waking up to the fact that their lifestyle up until now has been built on borrowed money they can no longer pay off..or even get anymore.

the ride is over, but all these marginal people are still with us.. they need food, shelter and all the rest that goes with living a life...but there is nothing for them anymore.

demand is going away, as people come to grips with their own family financial troubles, and as demand leaves, there is no reason for businesses to hire or re-hire, or to even "make stuff"..

[LostInAnomie]

27. You know what would actually happen with this.

It would be great for a short amount of time, until around xmas time. Then, a few people would a second job to have a little extra cash to throw around during the holidays. Some would quit after the season but quite a few would stay on since it would only be 42 hours a week. These people working two jobs would have a lot more money to spend than the one job folks, so to keep up the Joneses a few more people would get second jobs. Next thing you know, having two jobs becomes the norm. Unemployment will return to where it was before, the amount of time parenting, being better citizens, and just living will be like it was before. Only now, we're working 42 hours for a work week with twice the commuting time.

That's the problem with ideas like this. Americans have the idea that we have to constantly compete and consume hard wired into our brains. Even if we know it's bad for us, we have to keep up with the Joneses.

[Go2Peace]

35. They do this in some European countries already. Why is it we can't

do the same? maybe we need some education as well? Or we always doomed to push each other into disfunctional lifestyles for the unforseen future?

We can't maintain that paradigm forever, we'll have to make it change sooner or later. Better that we learn and do it sooner.

[W_J_Bryan]

28. New hereabouts, but here goes.

Well, to my mind this would give the anti-union crowd ammunition to claim that those of us that see a need to organize are just lazy. I live in Appalachia, coal country, and one thing the UMWA always stood for was a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Not hard to make that out to a fair week's work for a fair week's pay. 8 hours a day at work, 8 hours for family, 8 hours for sleep. One full day off a week for family and recreation, and another full day off for a Sabbath.

-The Great Commoner

[intheflow]

31. You're saying coal workers who labor organize are LAZY?

Coal mining is one of the ugliest, dirtiest, dangerous, stressful and low-paying jobs in the country. Anyone who actually mines is endangering himself and his family's health and welfare while putting in those 8 hours, working his ass off, while the CEOs and stockholders are making record profits. Workers deserve any time off they can get. It doesn't make them lazy, it makes them happier, healthier, more productive workers. Plus, more workers can be hired to fill the hours this man is not working which boosts the economy. Your argument is full of holes.

[Go2Peace]

36. Hard to believe isn't it

how heavily we have bought into the mantra that those who aren't dysfunctionally laborous are "Lazy". With the massive productivity gains that technology and better business management have brought we should all be living in a golden age. If people actually understood how heavily they have been manipulated and what they have really bought into, there would be riots in the street.

But we have mighty powerful advertising propaganda, and they have figured out how to make us jealous of each other. They tapped into something primal and competitive and in the interim they kept all the prosperity gains all to themselves.

Were fools is what we are...

[NNN0LHI]

40. The anti-union crowd tried that same hysteria when we went from a 6-day workweek to 5

Didn't work out that way.

Don

[Name removed]

43. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[OhioBlue]

54. Welcome to DU

If you're in Appalachia, coal country, then you and your neighbors are probably pretty resourceful people. My extended family in WV is comprised of miners and people that know how to kill a deer or a bear, how to raise a cow, pig or chicken, butcher it and can it or freeze it... they know how to build, how to sew, how to grow a garden, can, preserve, and pickle the food..

I think a 21 hour a week job would actually be beneficial for many - it would leave them time to create their own wealth with their skills and teach their children those skills. Just imagine it at as if now that extra 19 hours gets you the money to buy the crap food from Wal Mart that you could have grown, raised or hunted yourself in a more healthful way, pays the babysitter or daycare, when you could have spent that time with your kids, and the gas in your car for those extra 2 days of commute to the job. Now, if you could make close to the same paycheck in 21 hours combined with the extra 19 to create your own wealth.. you're better off, your kids are better off, the planet and community is better off.. it is a win win. I know it might be idealistic.. but just think about it in a different way.

The entire coal industry in Appalachia is set up backward - big coal corps suck the value and wealth out of the area. They have swindled and exploited the people for decades. What they should do is make coal like oil in Alaska - the extraction of that natural resource should profit the people. Everyone in the State should get a check at the end of the year and the local communities should get a lot money for education, medical facilities and infrastructure. -my 2 cents.

[Starbucks Anarchist]

34. Sure, as long as we get paid double.

[Pharlo]

41. I'm an hourly employee,

not a salaried employee. If my hours are cut in half, I will NOT get my wages doubled. I will need two jobs. Anyone now needing two jobs to exist will suddenly need four. You may have more jobs available, but you will suddenly find more people unable to make it on two jobs and unable to find an additional job or two.

For salaried individuals, this would work fine if their salaries weren't cut proportionately for reduced hours worked.

It's like the people who say "we need to cut down to a four day work week at ten hours per day". Well, that works fine if there aren't three shifts. Or, until they find out that because there are two shifts, first shift has to start two hours earlier and second needs to work two hours longer and child care to cover those extra two hours isn't available. The 10/4 model may work fine for first shift companies where you can come in an hour early, work an hour late and get the fifth day off, but toss in an additional shift and it creates challenges that need to be met BEFORE the changes go into effect.

This 21 hour proposal may work in a European type setting where there are more protections offered to the laborer, but in the US, cut work hours by 50%, the people who can LEAST afford it (hourly employees) will have their wages cut by 50%. In this country, wishing half of minimum wage on anyone borders on cruelty.

[malletgirl02]

44. Good Post

I had the same reaction, but your is way better than what I would have wrote. The OP and the responses are claiming most people work the hours they do because they are consumerist, but most work to survive. I don't think hourly workers were considered, because many times hourly workers are forgotten about.

[Odin2005]

42. We are technologically advanced enough that no one should have to work more than 20 hrs/week.

That we still do is because of the inherent contradictions of capitalism and how it treats workers as a commodity.

[eppur_se_muova]

45. Absolutely. It is contrived demand that keeps us working 40 hrs.

It is interesting to note that hunter-gatherers -- those whose societies survived long enough to be studied by modern scientists -- did not work themselves constantly to survive. Instead, they worked about ~~20 hrs a week to meet the basic needs of survival, and spent about an equal amount of time in social interaction and ceremony.

Consider the proportion of people who now have 'service' jobs, or work in the financial sector. These are jobs whose only real purpose is to support other jobs. The number of really essential, must-be-done jobs has steadily shrunk. Farmers are probably the most obvious example.

[Odin2005]

47. The whole purpose of Consumerism is to keep this Dog-n-Pony show going.

This was realized by leading industrialists in the 1920s, and those industrialists started using ideas emerging out of Psychology in their advertisements in order to make us a nation of consumption. This can't last forever. As technology improves and things keep getting more and more automated (which in an ideal society would lead to people needing to work less) Corporate Capitalism will continue to get more and more unstable.

[jobwithout]

49. Like it or not

When you work for someone they are buying your time therefore it is a commodity. If you don't like it then you have two options.

1. You can do contract work so that you are paid by the task or

2. You can become self-employed.


I chose #1. Ive been doing consulting work since about two years out of grad school and Ive never been unable to provide for my family.

[Throd]

46. Meanwhile, back in reality...

So Monday I should call all my clients and tell them "I'm cutting my hours in half but charging you double to make up the difference". After those calls I'd have nothing but time on my hands.

[jobwithout]

48. Dumb Idea

Its amazing to me how hard people will work to get out of working. There is nothing wrong with putting in an honest days work for an honest days pay. I guess its just generational but my grandparents and parents worked in a textile mill and they worked hard but they were proud of the work they did. They told me that there is no substitute for hard work and that there was nothing that would help your self image more that hard work.

I'm so glad they taught me this because it helped me when people told me I would never graduate high school. It helped me when I was the only black man in my graduate program and it helped me when I was completing my dissertation.

These asinine ideas give conservative ammunition to say that liberals are lazy.

[mike_c]

50. call me a "lazy liberal" then....

I really like my job, and frankly, I don't think reducing the work week would actually affect my workload much because it's defined by the nature of the work itself rather than by external factors, for the most part. However, it's 9:20 on a Saturday night as I write this response-- I've worked about 12 hours today and will work about the same tomorrow. That's my WEEKEND, during the academic semester. On all five weekdays I average 8-10 hours of work a day. Some semesters are a bit lighter than others, but there's always research, writing, and study to fill in with.

The point I'm making is that even though I LOVE my work, it's burning me out. The demands are pretty much seven days a week, as many hours as I can stand working. Year after year after year.

So yes, I would really like for Americans to take a long look at how we define work and workload. There's nothing "dishonest" about doing less work for someone else and spending more time working on pursuing our own interests-- in my case, those two pursuits largely blend together anyway.

[jobwithout]

51. You are obviously an educated man

So if you are really bothered by the workload then change jobs.

[Throd]

52. Sadly, many here will characterize your sentiments as archaic or naive.

Welcome to DU, by the way.

[jobwithout]

53. Archaic maybe....naive certainly not.

[Skittles]

56. trouble is

too many of us are working endlessly while our pay and benefits are being cut to the bone, and our employers rake in big profits.