In Small is Beautiful, Schumacher makes several points about work and leisure that I think are pertinent. It is important to read them with the qualification that Schumacher himself affirms that this is "a romantic, a utopian vision." I would embrace both the vision and the critique of it as romantic and utopian. Practically, how you get there incrementally is a puzzle. My solution to the puzzle is that you have to take the impetus of industrial technology, which is labor saving, and deflect it in the direction of the utopian vision. Industrial work will NEVER be "one-sixth as productive" as present day work (let alone 1/6th of 1973 productivity). The way to move toward work that gives people the chance to develop their faculties and overcome their ego-centeredness by joining in a common task is to take as much as possible of the productivity gains of industrial work as leisure. "As much as possible" at this point would be more than the annual increment because there is a huge backlog.
1. "The primary task of technology, it would seem, is to lighten the burden of work man has to carry in order to stay alive and develop his potential. It is easy enough to see that technology fulfils this purpose when we watch any particular piece of machinery at work. A computer, for instance, can do in seconds what it would take clerks or even mathematicians a very long time, if they can do it at all. It is more difficult to convince oneself of the truth of this simple proposition when one looks at whole societies. When I first began to travel the world, visiting rich and poor countries alike, I was tempted to formulate the first law of economics as follows: 'The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.'" -- page 157 ... 2. "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure." -- page 58 ... 3. "As I have shown, directly productive time in our society has already been reduced to about 3½ per cent of total social time, and the whole drift of modern technological development is to reduce it further, asymptotically to zero. Imagine we set ourselves a goal in the opposite direction to increase it six fold, to about twenty per cent, so that twenty per cent of total social time would be used for actually producing things, employing hands and brains and, naturally, excellent tools. An incredible thought. Even children would be allowed to make themselves useful, even old people. At one sixth of present-day productivity, we should be producing as much as at present. There would he six times as much time for any piece of work we chose to undertake enough to make a really good job of it, to enjoy oneself, to produce real quality, even to make things beautiful. Think of the therapeutic value of real work; think of its educational value No one would then want to raise the school-leaving age or to lower the retirement age, so as to keep people off the labour market. Everybody would be welcome to lend a hand. Everybody would be admitted to what is now the rarest privilege, the opportunity of working usefully, creatively, with his own hands and brains, in his own time, at his own pace and with excellent tools. Would this mean an enormous extension of working hours? No, people who work in this way do not know the difference between work and leisure. Unless they sleep or eat or occasionally choose to do nothing at all, they are always agreeably, productively engaged. " -- page 161 ... -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
