Phil Hyde, the originator of Timesizing is a friend so I feel obliged to put in a word on behalf of his concept and the tradition it comes out of. Aristotle said "we are 'unleisurely' in order to have leisure." It's usually translated as "we work in order to have leisure," but I think the first translation is superior. It would be possible, alternatively, for us to work in a leisurely fashion and, as a consequence, have relatively little specifically reserved leisure time.
Industrial work is differentiated from work-in-general by the way in which "labor-saving" technology is implicated in the work/leisure complex. The purpose of labor-saving technology is not the economizing of labor per se (and its conversion into free time). It is, rather, the reduction of labor *costs*. Any discussion of the future of work must acknowledge at least three possible permutations of the set containing work, leisure and technology: 1. technology is transformed to make work more leisurely or "playful". 2. the time released by labor-saving technology is reserved to leisure. 3. time released by technology is not reserved to leisure and instead consumption is expanded to create additional demand for labor. Actually, there is a fourth permutation. It is the condition we are in in which none of the other three are achieved. It is a failure, not an option. It turns out that the three positive options are not mutually exclusive, except in the minds and rhetoric of the most rabid partisans of one or the other strategy. We know for a fact that exclusive reliance on option number 3 leads inexorably to number 4 instead. As a non-dogmatic advocate of option #2, tempered by a bit of #1 and even some #3, I am dismayed by the hostility and disparagement often directed at #2 by #3 zealots and even the occasional #1 Utopian. Phil's design for a kind of "automatic stabilizer" for working hours has precedents in John R. Commons's "Industrial Goodwill", John Maurice Clark's "Economics of Overhead Costs" and in a proposal put forward during the Great Depression of the 1930s by Sigmund Odenheimer, a New Orleans cotton merchant. Keynes and Stephen Leacock endorsed the general idea of work time reduction as the appropriate response to unemployment resulting from labor-saving technology. A great deal of confusion is thrown into this issue by the misunderstood distinction between short term and long term effects of technology. It is an article of faith for economists that the long term effect of faster gains in productivity is to create employment. They also concede that in the short term there often is dislocation. This gets vulgarized into "short term pain for long term gain" as if the pain itself induced the gain. This is simply not the case. In fact the opposite is true: the less pain there is in the short term, the greater will be the long term gain. Timesizing is a design for alleviating the pain of transition. So what does it mean, I have to ask, when Keith says "Timesizing is not the answer to job sharing because..." and then sets off on a digression about the "globalized meta class"? No, Timesizing doesn't solve THAT problem, nor was it intended to. But what about the problem it was designed to ameliorate? And, by the way, what IS the answer to the globalized meta class? A new invention like the computer, the world wide web or DNA sequencing? How so? -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
