Help, please!

Thanks! I too am interested in the questions you raise. Readers, ideas?

I know there are systematic things we could do to alter the standard work week. For instance, employers must provide overtime for more than a certain amount of work per week (unless salaried, but I believe there are laws similar to this there as well – does anyone know this?). We could change our work laws to indicate that overtime must be paid for more than X hours per week, or Y hours per day. I would say we start with X = 32 hours, and Y = 8 hours. Then we could reduce this eventually to X = 15 or 21 hours, Y = 6 hours.

Governmental action on this would be key, but nothing is stopping any employer from enacting this without the government. And keep in mind, that “working less hard” and working less hours would be different. Most of us are only truly productive for 4-6 hours at a time, so the final 2-4 hours of the typical 8 hour day are less productive. Decreasing work hours will increase productivity, actually.

Cheers,
Joshua

Really cool you had a chance to meet Juliet Schor. I wish I’d tagged along! Thanks for posting the video; it’s long, but I’m looking forward to popping a beer and watching.

This bit is really key: “There are too many jobs that need to be created in order for us to get back on that path of recovery without reducing work hours. By reducing work hours we would also make large gains in reducing the ecological crisis…with increasing productivity, fixed working hours directly correlates to rising output and consumption.”

I like that there’s a job proposition here — that relieving the enormous pain of unemployment could come through vacation time for the rest of us. Sounds like a win/win, doesn’t it?

The two sticking points I see are: 1) What’s the mechanism that’ll encourage employers to reduce employee hours, and 2) would people with jobs even take the time off if it was offered? Or would they be worried some other guy — willing to put in even more hours — would steal his job? I know anecdotally that many people *with* jobs are worried there’s not much separating them from the 10% *without* jobs. Those folks, for the most part, figure working less hard would be the worst thing they could do at the moment.

So, I guess taken together, those two related questions are part of a collective action problem: In a competitive economy, who’ll actually make the first commitment to reduced working hours? What Schor suggests — and what clearly is the sane way to operate an economy and live a life — is what works ecologically. But how do we make the leap? What’s the policy prescription? What’s the business case? The cultural rallying point?

Interested to hear thoughts from readers…