At last week's study circle, we discussed (among many other things) the notorious "protestant work ethic. " To follow-up, I'm posting links to excerpts from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; excerpts from Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age and to an reply I wrote a couple of years ago, The Work Ethic and its Discontents in response to an essay by Anis Shivani, The Life of a Bum: Against the Work Ethic.
From the October 18th report (PDF file) to the French Minister of Finance from Michel Camdessus, former head of the International Monetary Fund:
La logique de partage repose sur l’hypothèse qu’il existe, dans l’économie, une quantité d’emplois déterminée et fixe. Cette logique se vérifie, à un instant donné du temps, pour une activité, un secteur, une région particulière. Mais elle est fausse pour l’économie dans son ensemble, surtout quand on considère les évolutions dans le temps.
In plain English, Monsieur Camdessus is saying that advocates of reduced working time believe that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done. That is to say, we commit the infamous "lump-of-labor fallacy," the bogus claims of which your Sandwichman disposed of (another PDF file) four years ago.
The logic of work sharing IS NOT based on the erroneous assumption that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done. It is based on several factors, including the improved productivity enabled by reducing working time and the improved standard of living that greater leisure affords to the workers. Meanwhile, the almighty croissance of the GDP IS NOT, as the Camdessus report explicitly assumes, an unalloyed blessing to mother earth and all mankind. Bobby Kennedy knew that 36 years ago. The good folks at Redefining Progress can give you the details.
O.K. Monsieurs Camdessus and Sarkozy. Tom Walker's $5,000 (Canadian) says you can't verify the authenticity of the lump of labour fallacy claim. Anyone is eligible to try for that prize.
The Detroit Free Press has been running a five-part series this week on "Anger in America." I've only read the first article so far but browsing through today's letters to the editor responding to the series is astounding. So many of the letters attribute the high level of polarization and hostility that is evident in the U.S. to the conditions of overwork and time pressure in daily life. Below are a few of the most salient examples:
Moving too fast
The rapid pace of our daily lives is what's making us angry. We have created a culture in which we think we have to "own" everything. We try to get rich instead of just making a living and enjoying our relationships.
It takes more and more time to make a living because employers expect more and more hours from workers -- without respect for families, time for relationships, relaxation, sleep, etc.
Beverly J. Matthews New Castle, Ind.
Find time
America is frustrated, which seems to lead to all this pent-up anger that spills out in the morning commute in the form of road rage.
Today, life in America demands so much time from all of us that we're frustrated by the lack of time to do the things we really want to do. When we're 85 years old reflecting on our lives, what's going to stick out, all the hours spent commuting to and from work, or the days we made time to spend on the important things?
Amanda Wampler Rochester
Wrong lessons taught
People are just plain tired of not being able to do what they want to do. You have to excel -- win, win, win -- or you face the big "L" on your forehead. Look at how hard we push our kids in school.
We need to go back to a much simpler lifestyle, where one income was enough to survive. Where we taught the value of, "It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game." We need to teach our children the meaning of "please" and "thank you" before we teach them the square root of 100.
Gerald J. Robbins Rochester Hills
Interact with others
People are angry today because communication and relationships are deteriorating. We live in a world in which people can bank, shop, pay bills, communicate with coworkers, even take classes online, without human interaction. We, as humans, need that interaction, and that is leaving a hole in our lives, which leaves us feeling empty, alone and angry. We need to remember the importance of being involved with others, whether it is in our homes, families or workplace.
Susan Formento Chesterfield Township
Slow down
People in America are angry because they accept mediocrity in too many areas of their lives. We've forgotten how to dream and strive to be our best. Everyone is so busy because they are terrified to stop, look inward, and make a brutally honest assessment of who and where they are.
Matthew Cote' Dearborn
Create peace
I think people are angry because we are always in a hurry now, with e-mail, instant messaging and cell-phone calls. Your time is not your own, so you hurry everywhere, and others whose paths you cross are seen as intruders in your space.
Susan Scharfenkamp Troy
Is there a Detroit Take Back Your Time committee???? Read all of today’s letters to the editor of the Detroit Free Press here and here.
Erik Rauch, who was the first to leave a comment on WLIT, engaged in an extended exchange of views on workweek reduction on the Paul Krugman Archive message board in March 2003.
What I'm really trying to do is understand why economists like Krugman seem to be doubtful that workweek reduction would be effective.
Thanks to Edgar Ayala for his reply. He wrote:
> Reducing the workweek doesn't really reduce unemploymet...
> it is more like taking unemployment and spreading it around.
In a manner of speaking, yes. But by unemployment I mean 'the number of people out of work' rather than the total number of hours worked...
I've edited the wikipedia entry on Lump of labour fallacy to bring it up to date with the published findings of my research into the fallacy hoax.
With the price of oil hovering around $53 a barrel, I'm posting a presentation I gave at the Take Back Your Time conference in June -- back when oil was around 20% cheaper, at $40 a barrel. My presentation touched on the analyses of Marion King Hubbert, the geophysicist most famous for his predictions of an impending peak (and subsequent decline) in world oil production. Less well known is Hubbert's analysis of the hours of work and what he saw in the 1930s as a climax in the demand for man-hours of productive work.
PROMISING ALTERNATIVES AT HOME AND ABROAD
June 2004
Tom Walker
Presumably, a promising alternatives is one that is “hopeful, full of promise, likely to turn out well.” The topic for this plenary presents a challenge to me because I am — intellectually at least – a pessimist: “Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will,” as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci put it.(il pessimismo della ragione e l’ottimismo della volontà)
But there’s another meaning of ‘promise’ that I might take advantage of – which is simply “to afford expectation of” or “seem likely.” Whether the future event I wish to address turn out to be auspicious or not depends on what we make of it – that is to say on the optimism of our will.
That “promising alternative” is not my original idea. It must be credited to Marion King Hubbert, the geophysicist who in 1956 told an audience of Shell Oil Company executives that U.S. domestic oil production would peak sometime around 1970, after which it would decline.
He was right.
As some of you may know, King Hubbert also predicted that world oil production would peak sometime around the year 2000, after which it too would decline. We don’t know yet whether this second prediction will turn out to have been right. Indications are, though, that strange rumblings are going on in the oil patch. As Fortune Magazine intimated in its May 20, 2004 issue, “This is the summer the American public is going to discover that Hubbert's Peak is not a mountain in Oregon.”
So what does running out of oil have to do with Taking Back Our Time? I’ll let King Hubbert’s words frame my answer to that question. In the 1930s, Hubbert was associated with the group called Technocracy when he wrote an article on “Man-hours and Distribution.” Here is how he began:
The period since 1929 has been one of the most unique and one of the most disturbing in the history of North America. The events that have occurred since the stock market crash of that year have provoked more competent social thinking on the part of the American people, and have demolished more fixed tenets of our American social and economic faith than those of any preceding half century.
Up until the year 1929 the American public had been brought up in the belief that any child with ambition and a willingness to work would automatically be rewarded with material gain in direct proportion to the effort and ingenuity displayed; that any office boy might become the president of his corporation in due time provided he displayed the proper virtues of industriousness, honesty, respectfulness and thrift; that every boy had an equal chance of becoming President some day; that the pathway to success was to be found in part through proper education, and that educational facilities were equally available to all; that work could be had by all who were willing; and, conversely, that unemployment and lack of material success were themselves indicative of the lack of those cardinal virtues of industriousness, thrift, honesty, and the like.
In 1929 and the years that have followed, these tenets of our American folk-lore have been rudely shattered…”
Mainstream economists looking back on Hubbert’s intuitively appealing explanation of the relationship between industrial output, the hours of work and total employment would be amused by his assertions that the continuation of “compound-interest type” of economic growth was limited by the physical resources of the earth and the capacity of the public to consume. “Contrary to all the textbooks of economics, which state that human wants are insatiable,” Hubbert asserted, “the fact is that human beings, regardless of income, can only consume a limited amount of food per day, can only wear one outfit of clothing at a time, and so with all other forms of consumption.”
Hubbert was of course writing in the days before television and credit cards. He was also writing before the uncanny resurrection of that American and folk-lore that he supposed had been so rudely shattered by the events of 1929 and after.
The central argument of his essay was that the number of hours needed to produce each unit of industrial output had historically declined to the point where it could no longer be offset by increasing production. The result was either massive unemployment—as seen in the Depression—or adoption of a policy to reduce the hours of work.
The decline in the hours of work needed for each unit of production can also be expressed as an increase in productivity. Productivity has continued to increase to this day although the annual hours of work performed by individual workers have not appreciably diminished since the 1950s. Instead, there has been in the U.S. over the past half century an enormous, unprecedented expansion of administrative and commercial functions, which has absorbed the bulk of the U.S. labour force not required by industry.
In the mid 1990s, Jeremy Rifkin and others argued that the expansion of service sector jobs was itself coming to an end. Then along came the new economy boom of the late nineties to show that “yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus” (or should that be “yes, Goldilocks, there is Greenspan”) and that was the end of the “End of Work.” Or so we were told.
But I believe that once again we are going though a myth-shattering time. The collapse of the NASDAQ dot com boom didn’t do it. The unravelling of the racketeers at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, Global Crossing, Adelphia and their ilk didn’t do it. But the “fixed tenets of American social and economic faith” are looking a little less tenable each day. It remains to be seen how widespread will be the competent social thinking provoked by shattering of the growth mythology. That’s where the “optimism of the will” part comes in. If this is the summer the American public is going to discover Hubbert's Peak, let’s also make it the summer they discover there is a “promising alternative” to $2, $3, $4 or $5 dollar a gallon gas: driving less, consuming less, spending less, working less, commuting less, warring less… and living more.
Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock put it nicely back in 1920 in an essay titled “the unsolved riddle of social justice”: “The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest.”
East group notes from Bill:
As a group we thought there were a lot of important questions that we as The Work Less Party should think about. Here are some of them:
- What do different people mean by 'work'?
- Why do we need to keep growing the economy?
- Who controls the economy?
- Does the economy have to depend on material resources?
- Why do we need property and ownership?
The East Group: Conrad, Bill, Amy, Jennifer, Evan, Paul.
We started with the customary introductions - we had some new people, Jennifer, Amy and Evan. As is always the case these little life stories became too interesting to curtail.
Conrad told us about the situation in South Africa under apartheid and how the black communtiies were subjugated to create a cheap labour force to work in the mines. But he asked "what has changed today?" The powers that be know that their main goal is population control. This is something Noam Chomsky talked about. Today, maybe in a much more subtle way than in those times of apartheid, the population is kept busy - working or consuming. That's the main objective of our government.
We began to discuss how our society is obsessed by power. We think it promotes competition, winners and losers, power over others, and inequality. We tried to think where all this type of behaviour came from? Was it companies competing with each other to make better and better products? Or was it Households trying to buy more and more status symbols to 'keep up with the Jones's'?
Then Amy started to talk about her thoughts on education. At the moment education is designed to produce workers. We learn about things which society wants us to. We are bred to think in a certain way and believe in the same things. We have technical colleges for the masses where they are taught hair-dressing, car mechanics, book-keeping etc.
Education should be holistic. Education should be a process of facilitation. The wisdom is inside of all of us, and education is a way for us to learn and share and develop our own thoughts, our own ways of thinking and our own goals in life. This is what happens with community education. We think this is something the Work Less Party should support, it is so important. So we decided that we should develop a policy on eduation.
Then we came to look at the paper Tom had given us and guess what! It was all about community education. It was really nice to see that we had demonstrated the very principles we were talking about. By having our dialogue together we had developed our own wisdom without the need for the teachings that were available.
Once again, a really rewarding get-together. Thanks for making it happen Tom. [Thanks, Bill, for taking the notes & writing them up.]
The October Common Ground has this article by Anders Hayden from the Take Back Your Time handbook in it.
While Western Europe is not a worker’s paradise, its various shorter work-time policies are valuable examples of ways that public policies can foster “time affluence” alongside material affluence.
by Carmen
All I wanna do is have some fun, I got a feeling I'm not the only one...
Having fun for free is a very good deal.
Think, for a moment, about all the fun money can buy.
For example, for $2 a pop, you can buy a pile of Scratch'n'Win lotto cards -- for loads of instant gratification. You can drop $90 for really good seats at a Canucks game, or a ticket to Cirque de Soleil -- plus parking! You can throw down $25 for a case of beer, or hundreds of bucks for a really fine pair of shoes. For $50, you and your kid can spend all day at Playland eating tiny donuts and trying to win a stuffed dog. IT'S TRUE -- for a bunch of money, you can indeed buy yourself a shitload of fun.
But check this out. At this very moment, you are in fact reading this little essay, and presumably, having fun doing so -- for free. You could choose to have a whole lot more fun for free. Other people would see you having fun for free, and wanna have some too. Before we know it, the entire world could shift to a global fun-based economy.
Think about this. If you have fun for free, you can work HALF TIME, and spend the rest of your time having fun. Because, if you no longer need to spend half your income on fun, you can maintain your current standard of living -- and in fact, have TWICE as much fun (since you now have twice as much free time) -- for HALF of what you spent when you were working full time. Sound economics, isn't it?
There is another useful side benefit to this strategy. Since you will no longer need to consume so much stuff in order to have fun -- gasoline, Nikes, styrofoam jiffy-mugs, McFlurries -- less of the world's stuff will be required to produce and dispose of that stuff. Furthermore, the people who used to be wholly dependent on producing all that fun stuff now only have to produce and sell HALF as much stuff in order to maintain a healthy standard of living -- thereby leaving them half of their working hours, free -- to have fun!
Result being: FUN FOR FREE SAVES THE PLANET! High five.
All of these tricks will prove very useful in a short number of years, when the entire global monetary system collapses.
Conclusion being: don't wait until you're racing shopping carts full of rubles through the streets. Make a sound investment in mutual fun. Start now.
We had a great turnout Wednesday evening at LUGZ -- fourteen people, so many that we decided to break into two smaller groups for discussion. I'll post notes from both groups in the extension to this message, as I receive them.
For identification purposes, I'll designate the two group "East" and "West," indicating their relative compass position within the coffee shop.
West group began by sharing stories of the personal experiences that brought us to an interest in the issue of working less. Then we moved on to respond to two of the questions mentioned in the study circle outline. Here is a summary of the points raised in the discussion (thanks to Katie for writing these up!):
1) How does lack of time hurt people, the community, and the planet?
People:
· causes on-the-job stress and related injuries due to fatigue
· separates workers from loved ones causing depression and isolation
· leaves lack of energy for more individual interests
· over-work causes people to identify with their jobs, excluding all else
· leads to low self-esteem when job satisfaction is less than 100%
Community:
· robs the community of a robust & broad exchange of ideas and labour from individuals who don’t have time to participate in volunteer work or create
· undermines the idea of government of and for the people because it prevents people from participating in local affairs and the political state
Planet:
· causes excessive non-recyclable garbage and industrial pollution because much of the items that are used to "save time" are the ones with the most packaging and processing
· adverse affects the planet by fostering reliance on faster transport and the convenience of owning a car
2) Why do we put up with our time famine? Is there something in our national character that has lead us to this?
· lack of easy to use and viable options to the current model.
· with a public whose time is consumed by work there is none left available to consider that alternate models might work and could even be more efficient.
· people are deeply affected by advertising and because most advertising is used to influence us to purchase goods no matter what our needs, it is possible that this is causing over-reliance of identity on consumer durables.
· Individuals rely more and more on their pecuniary status as a source of self-esteem and as a "second prize" for the time that they've spent working instead of doing the things that they really want to do. e.g. If you can't be happy at work, think of what your going to do with the money that you're making while at work and all the great things that you are going to spend it on.
· we may have been cultured into our current need to spend most of our time working
· Canada, as a country based on the British/Protestant model has inherited the famous work-ethic of "first toil, then the grave"
· That traditional work ethic is impractical and unnecessary in a post-modern climate, in fact, it is harmful.
· there is a strong negative social stigma attached to being out of work, or even looking for work.
· we blame individuals themselves for their situation in relation to work whether deserved or not. Our society calls anyone who is not working to full capacity lazy, and accuses them of not reaching their full potential.
· you are not free to not strive for the top, as anything less than financial excess is seen as failure.