“You are cogs in a machine,” I and my fellow junior lawyers were told on our first day of “induction” at a London based commercial law firm. “Thousands of people applied for your position. You have it, but you have it by a margin. If you’re not willing to work 80 hour weeks, we can easily replace you. The UK is not a party to the European Working Time Directive.”
This emphatic opening was followed by a discussion with the head of secretarial services. She delicately, but firmly, advised us to keep spare shirts, a stash of toothbrushes and (looking at the women) “feminine products” for our inevitable upcoming straight-36 hour shift in the office. Her advice proved invaluable.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, social critic and political activist, was not a fan of work. In his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness”, he thought that if our societies were better managed the average person would only need to work four hours a day. Such a working day would “entitle a man [or woman] to the necessities and elementary comforts of life.” The rest of the day could be devoted to the pursuit of science, painting and writing.
This sounds pretty good to me. Bertrand Russell correctly anticipated that technological advancement would increase productivity. However, he thought that this technological advancement would free people from long work hours. Similarly, John Maynard Keynes estimated that we would be working 15 hours per week by 2030.
However, while technological advancement has led to increases in productivity, since the 1970s, wages have stagnated and we are still working harder – much harder – than we need to. Ordinary people are not reaping the rewards of increased productivity and are instead needing credit loans to meet basic needs, while working long hours in uninspiring jobs.
The protestant work-ethic is celebrated as long hours of hard work are spiritualized. Workaholics Anonymous groups are taking off. Loneliness is increasing. In the Summer of 2013, Bank of America faced intense criticism after an intern died.
In “Essays in Sociology,” Max Weber argued that in the midst of a culture that is organized for long workdays, for most, there is hardly any room for forming social bonds with others. This is reserved for the top 1 percent of capitalists who are “economically carefree.” With society organized to spend so much time at work, pursuing real spirituality in the line of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis is condemned to failure.
An April 2014 paper, by John Pencavel of Stanford University, shows that reducing working hours can be good for economic productivity. While working shorter work weeks may be better for productivity, Naomi Klein, author of the new book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” goes further.
Klein says we must revolutionize our working lives if we are to combat climate change. Klein advocates a three day work week – a 21-hour working week – as the solution to the 21st Century’s most pressing problem. People are overworked and this overwork “is intimately tied” to a particularly wasteful model of consumption – “you have no time after work to do anything other than grab a takeaway, and less time for low-consumption activities like cooking.”
The largest corporations invest millions in “human resources management” each year. Research informs employer decisions to periodically praise employers for their efforts, so as to make them feel “empowered” and “appreciated” and reduce the likelihood that they will ask for a material raise in wages. With such a heavy emphasis on “human resources” and millions spent each year on researching people management, employers must know that longer work hours do nothing for productivity.
Work has another function. Work keeps us from organizing for a society that is better managed – for a more equitable redistribution of political power, and wealth – and also of time. Time to spend with loved ones, to build our communities, and on the real pursuit of happiness. A wholly different society pursuing equity rather than economic growth. A society which – as Bertrand Russell envisaged – would enable us to spend days in pursuit of science and the arts. After 12 hours at work – or 36 hours straight in the office – no one has the energy to attend a meeting or action, organizing or agitating for a revolutionary alternative management of society, and human and natural resources.
Individual decisions to move towards shorter working weeks may lead to healthier lifestyles for the few that are able to make such changes. However, individual changes are not sufficient to make the necessary impact on climate change, or for a more equitable distribution of political power and wealth. Today, many working class people have to work numerous jobs and overtime to help make ends meet. Moving towards a 21 working week is just not feasible. Bills would not be paid.
The need for collective organizing is clear. In his new book “Time on Our Side”, published by the radical think-tank, New Economics Foundation, economist Robert Skidelsky writes, “If we get off this treadmill to consume, we might reconsider what we mean by the good life. We could then work out how to structure our institutions to make it easier to live such a life… The political means of achieving this goal include job-sharing, a reduction in working hours, wealth distribution, changes in taxation and basic income.”
We could structure work differently. This would involve people coming together to understand each other’s realities, and acknowledging the ways in which the current management of society is not working for the majority of us. While this may seem a distant hope, forming social relationships in spite of our busy lifestyles, forming connections, re-discovering what we would do with our time – if it was in our hands (and not the hands of our employers) – is crucial. Such social relationships form the foundation upon which we can create stepping stones for a much needed new society. In an age of obsessive work, fuelling pain and loneliness, movements towards efficient, productive, healthy, balanced lifestyles are necessary to combat climate change and move towards a more egalitarian society.
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3 Comments
Understandably; since few are looking in this direction, the exponential growth in computing speed, expected to reach human brain levels in about seven years , and associated AI will take over most workplaces even legal firms where dumb programs are now doing law searches instead of banks of law clerks.
I believe IBM has plans for a 100 petaflop computer in about a year . The human brain operates around 1000 petaflops and this all fits with Moore’s Law (a doubling of computing speed every 18 months) to create a smarter-than-human capability in that seven year time frame .
Dumb machines are taking human jobs NOW .
When machines become super-human both mentally and physically , no job will be safe.
What, then becomes of a capitalism that depends on people as wage slaves and a paycheck to spend both on what they make and need AND what makes the money for the owners ?
The man behind much of THIS thinking is Ray Kurzweil who is now chief of engineering at Google .
They think he knows what he’s talking about.
Joseph, your comment is spot on!
Preeti, I appreciate your perspective, but saddened that some of us have had this realization about “work” and jobs before. It seems we couldn’t generate enough “bodies upon the gears . . . upon the wheels” to stop the onslaught that is killing us and our life support system still. ALL people who understand the death knell that capitalism is for humanity and the planet must STOP supporting the means and methods and diet by which the death machine lives. Corporations have no paradigm in which to fit sustainable ecosystems, human equality, health, and happiness, or even basic respect for individual needs. I don’t mean to condescend, but so many have already written on “work” and its economically contrived nuances for the sake of capitalism: Marx, Veblen, C. Wright Mills, Thoreau to name a few. Work, in its currently applicable vernacular, is preparation for death — and the human spirit must resist continuing down this path for all its collective heart is worth. Work must be indistinguishable from living, from loving, from peace, and from happiness. There’s no other way.
which is exactly why survival is based upon labour, ie work…no work, no money…jesus and buddha lived off of what others gave them; begging is a radical act of trust in people and life itself…the money system has entirely corrupted our conceptual capacity as well as our value-system: what is real–people, plants, animals, trees, life itself–have no intrinsic value of their own, only that which is added to them through human activity; that which is not real–money–has ultimate value…it’s no wonder that we can, and do, trash the planet everyday without so much as a moments reflection, and devote most of our lives to activities–‘jobs’–which would be meaningless except that they undermine the possibility of making different decisions, and doing different things, things which we enjoy and which enrich both our own lives and the lives of others…was it easy for buddha to give up his princely position and wealth? was it easy for jesus to defy the expectations of those around him?…money is a means of control; an act of compulsion…
kathi weeks’ “the problem with work” is an excellent read.