Keith Hudson wrote,
> Some time ago, Lawry wondered just how the immense productivity gains of > the last 100 years have been squandered. By now, a 15-hour (or even 10- or > 5-hour) week should surely be adequate for all of us to have much the same > standard of living as now. Nobody took up Lawry's question at the time. I would say about 15 hours. However that figure doesn't take into account the extra work that would have to be done to get there. We couldn't go from 40 or 45 to 15 seemlessly. > The problem with such a theoretical situation is that some individuals, for > reasons of creativity or, in other (most?) cases, sheer greed, want to work > for far more hours than necessary and, inter alia, create innovations for > sale. I don't see any problem with creative people working more than standard hours. I don't see a huge problem with "greedy" people trying to get an edge -- let's just call them eager. Likewise, I have no objection to credit, social drinking, the occasional bet on a game of chance or flirting. When these things get out of hand and begin to rule people's lives, it is a different matter. Where I see the problem is when the expansion of work hours becomes habitual and compulsive. Non-creative people work longer hours trying to create the impression that they are being creative; Bored people stay late at the office to keep up the appearance that they are eager. Harried folks put in extra time just to show they've got everything under control. As Thomas Carlyle put it, "We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance of things, and opened them to the Shews and Shams of things." And, of course, employers enforce creativity, eagerness and composure by imposing mandatory overtime. They call it flexibility. There's also nothing wrong with using action verbs in your resume, but there's something manipulative about the advice to use lots of action verbs. I think the distinction between naive and sentimental art is useful here. What we have today is not simple, virtuous yeomanlike hard work -- instead we have a theatre of working hard. Much of this hard work goes into things that don't contribute to anyone's quality of life. Although there will always be haggling, obstruction and self-promotion, an inordinate amount of work done today flows down those drains. In the time it takes to go through all the turnstiles, one could be there already. Again, I think it is instructive to look back at the late middle ages and the relationship between codes of chivalry and court intrigue. The modern so-called work ethic is our code of chivalry in the name of which unfolds an orgy of back-stabbing. Downsizing was management's way of saying, "See, we're working so hard we don't all those drones." > Thus, unfortunately, the working week will always tend to expand well above > the necessary minimum -- the hours demanded being pulled and pushed from > both employers and employees. This is a recent phenomenon since the 1980s for the U.S., the 1960s for manufacturing. Until then, the trend since the mid-nineteenth century was reduction of the work week. > And, to add to all this in the course of the last century, bureaucrats > within large businesses and senior government civil servants have learned > that that they can so easily create immense pyramids of power and privilege > for themselves just as the church and royalty did before them -- > particularly in times of inflation when prices and taxation rise making the > process almost effortless (and imperceptible to the rest of us). And the > more that they can make their processes (and the welfare state) > increasingly complex (and apparently necessary) the more that they they > justify their existence. Immense pyramids, to be sure. Whether these translate into power and privilege is another matter. Rather there appears to be what Linda McQuaig referred to as a "cult of impotence". Rogue C.E.O.s, I suspect, are the exception. They simply take advantage of the vast virgin possibilities left bare and vulnerable by the generalized impotency cult. Benjamin Franklin said time is money. With more precision, George Eliot said, "time, like money is measured by our needs." Whatever that may mean, it at least implies a variable, not a fixed exchange rate. Wage labour imposes a fixed rate, which may well be a convenient arrangement for a while. Convenient arrangements have a habit of becoming immutable laws at which point immense intellectual resources must be called upon to explain the naturalness and Godly construction of those laws. Among our convenient arrangements, I hasten to add, are narrative genres that resolve social dilemmas as if by magic. Universal progress is one such genre, the idyllic return to the golden age is another. It's almost a cliche that if one doubts the progress fable, one must be a golden age Luddite. For example, it's easy to take the Heilbroner quote, forwarded by Arthur, in such a vein. I would propose that there may be myriad ways to construct an historical consciousness and that surely a few of them might be at least as coherent as the progress fable or the legend of the golden age. In principle, learning to think historically (narratively) in a different way should be no more difficult than learning to ride a recumbent bicycle -- it's a lot easier if you don't insist on retaining all your old habits. In practice, the difficulty is that the picture one forms becomes almost incommunicable. Other people will do you the kindness of cramming your eccentric view into their own more coherent framework (the one you just rejected as sterile and formulaic). As one alternative, I'll just mention the Walter Benjaminian practice of illuminating moments in past and present by juxtaposing them in a constellation -- a kind of research into lost time. Such research lacks the tidy closure of a fable of progress or one of decline. And, damn it, that's just the point. Alongside, or perhaps *inside*, such mold breaking in historical consciousness, I would propose at least an experiment in relaxing the vice-like grip of the clock on our quotidian experience of time. Clocktime -- what Henri Bergson describes as the spatial symbolization of time -- has an unspeakably intimate relationship with industrialism, both in terms of the regularization of the working day (discussed by E.P Thompson in "Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism") and with regard to the clock itself as an important prototype of automatic machinery. When we refer to productivity in terms of units per hour, we are of course referring mainly to industrial processes and not creative ones. Brad tells the story of someone who is paid to sit in his office with his feet on the desk because that's what he was doing when he had an idea that made the company a lot of money. I wonder how much output is inadvertently destroyed by people who are too busy trying to look busy to notice the consequences of what they are doing. Time. I'm not for shorter work time because I think there's anything inherently better about working 35 hours a week than 40 hour (although I do think 15 is better than 35). Nor would I claim that *by itself* a reduction in the hours of work will solve all social and economic problems. If I was dictator and could reduce the hours of work by edict, it probably wouldn't do much good. I'm for shorter hours because, as a consequence of research over more than 20 years I have become convinced that the expansion of working hours has come from our society's refusal to confront its social, economic and spiritual problems -- that is to say that the longer hours, like alcoholism, are as much a symptom of malaise as a source.
