The second session of the Work Less Institute of Technology will convene this evening, Wednesday, September 29, at 8:00 p.m. at LUGZ coffee lounge, 2525 Main St., one-half block south of Broadway.
Somebody posted this essay by Juliet Schor (not Schorling!) from Technology Review on the web. Possibly a copyright violation but I doubt linking to it constitutes one, so I did. Here's a brief (fair use) excerpt:
The leisure crunch didn't have to happen. Whenever productivity grows, we are presented with the possibility of receiving either more free time or more money-and since 1948, the productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in marketed good services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We could have chosen a four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or each worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work, with pay. Some economists in the 1950s even predicted that today's standard retirement age would be 38.
But between 1948 and the present, we did not use any of the "productivity dividend" to reduce hours. Although productivity grew rapidIy-at about 3 percent a year-in the first two decades after 1948, work hours have held steady. Since 1969, productivity growth has been slower, averaging just over 1 percent a year. Yet hours have risen markedly.
What went wrong? Why has leisure been such a conspicuous casuality of prosperity? Much of the anwer lies in our insidious cycle of "work-and-spend."
In its starkest terms, the cycle operates like this: Employers ask for long hours from employees. They do so in part because long-hour jobs pay more and thus are more desirable to workers, who will labor more productively to keep them. Also, the fewer workers a firm needs to hire, the less it has to spend on fringe benefits. The high pay, in turn, creates a high level of consumption. People buy houses and go into debt; luxuries become necessities; Smiths keep up with Joneses-and workers accept, or even ask for, longer hours so they can go on spending. Work-and-spend has become a powerful dynamic keeping us from a more relaxed and leisured way of life.
This is part of what Robert Gilman has to say in the essay "The Importance of Time," published in In Context magazine in 1983:
I can't help but feel that one of the major blockages in our culture is that we are trying to apply the attitudes and institutions that grew out of a goods-limited era to a time when (at least within our society) people are increasingly time-limited. It is not that goods are in absolute surplus, but they are no longer the primary limiting factor, and they would be even less so if we had better modes for distributing both work and wealth. If we understood this shift, we would not be trying to "get the economy moving again" and create more jobs, we would be working towards more job- sharing. We would welcome the gradual decline in the amount of time spent in the market economy as a sign of our economic progress.
This essay by Cecile Andrews outlines the process that we'll use in our study circles. In the passage excerpted below, Cecile offers a suggested format.
First Meeting
1. Begin the first meeting with personal stories: people go around the circle talking about their own experiences with time. Beginning with the personal involves people at a deeper level.
2. At the first meeting, present people with some questions for them to explore in the following weeks. Have them clarify the questions and suggest some of their own. Some possible questions include:
* How does lack of time hurt people, the community, and the planet?
* Why do we put up with our time famine? Is there something in our national character that has lead to this?
* What do you think people will do with extra time? Is there a danger they will just use the time to shop more? What can we do to keep that from happening?
* What arguments against shorter work time do you anticipate? How would you respond?
These questions can be addressed one per week over a period of five weeks -- long enough to build a sense of community, but not so long that people feel they can't commit the time. (After five weeks, study circles often go on indefinitely.)
3. Present the idea of "research." During the week, people discuss the questions with friends and coworkers. The focus is on listening, not on arguing. (You'll not only be gathering information, but listening to others -- a form of social change in itself!) Each week people return to report on their "research." They also report on newspaper and magazine articles they've seen.
A question from the "Your Money or Your Life":
How much are you trading your life energy for?
Establish the actual cost in time and money required to maintain your job, and compute your /real/ hourly wage.
How:
* Deduct from your weekly income the costs of getting to and from work; the cost of the clothes you buy to wear at work; the extra cost of at-work meals; the amount spent to relax and wind down after the stress of a work day; job-related illness; and all other expenses associated with maintaining you on the job.
* Add to your work week the hours spent in preparing yourself for work, travel to and from work, the time taken to wind down at home after work, recreation need after work as a means of winding down, shopping to make you feel better since your job feels lousy, and all other hours linked with maintaining your job.
* Divide the new, reduced weekly dollar figure by the new, increased weekly hour figure*; *this is your real hourly wage.
"It has been computed by some political arithmetician, that, if every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and happiness." Benjamin Franklin, 1784.
"No one in his right mind would argue with the current social momentum for more and faster consumption. We've apparently made our collective decision, and that's that... Neither you nor your neighbor is ready for the four-hour day, and I have no intention of persuading you to do anything uncomfortable. You should continue to do whatever it is you think your doing, and I wish you godspeed." -- Gabe Sinclair, 2000, The Four Hour Day. (Download the book!)
The Work Less Institute of Technology had its first meeting on Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004.
"The thing to do was just find a place, move in and start, and let it grow."-- Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking.
We actually found one place then decided to move on to another place and then moved in started and let it grow.
What is the Work Less Institute of Technology? It is the umbrella title for the Work Less Party's study circles (& seminars, workshops and teach-ins). The provisional mission of the WLIT is two-fold:
* to explore and develop policy proposals and positions for the Work Less Party that are based on the wisdom, experience, reflection and research of our members and friends
* to explore and develop personal and business solutions to the problems of overwork, wasteful consumption, captive leisure and unemployment
Why the "Work Less Institue of Technology"? Because working less IS a technology, based on modern scientific understanding of the physiological and psychological dimensions of human effort and productivity. Just because "it would be nice" doesn't mean "it isn't practical"!