Honestly I’d be in favor of a 24 hour work week – Mon-Thurs, 9-3. I’m sure I could get just as much done.
Thank you to all who have responded. Great stuff. I really agree with this.
This is sort of what Andrew Yang was talking about when he was running in elections.
Data is the new oil. Data is worth more than oil. Yet the average person does not see a penny more from this new found wealth. It’s all going to the big tech companies and corporations etc. That’s why he proposed the freedom dividend/universal basic income…which has actually been around for a long time and Alaska uses a similar oil dividend.
The $1000 a month was not meant to replace your work or income, but it was meant to help you…whether it be transition to a new career, ease the burden or stresses, whatever it may be, it makes sense that we should be seeing more money in our bank accounts but we are not…most of us are not. We are working just as hard and long, if not even harder and longer than before despite being smarter, more efficient, more productive and with all the technologies, we are still not seeing much difference in the way things are for the average person.
That’s why I truly believe a 4 day work week or some sort of UBI (extra cash) each month for every adult/working person is in order. I believe it’s all lies that if we somehow worked a little less, the world would fall apart and everything would crumble. NOT TRUE. We can work less, study less, but work smarter, study smarter, and be healthier individually and have healthier families/communities.
forgot to add:
The past was about “human doings” as we were just conditioned and trained to be “slaves” / ie laborers…but the future will be focused more on “human beings” as automation and technologies can free humans up to focus and do other things that involve more of our being and less of doing. When you see people have more time and less stress, productivity and efficiency goes up and people’s creativity and innovative minds really come out. What we are seeing happen with e-commerce is just one example…the laptop life, the idea that you can live anywhere you want in this world because you can do all your work from your laptop or smartphone…the notion of being restricted by time and location is becoming less and less relevant.
Data being the new oil makes no sense. If what he was talking about was personal data it is almost worthless except in huge blocks. The average person’s data is worth a couple of dollars a year at most and a UBI of a thousand dollars a month would be bigger by several orders of magnitude.
Who ever said that the world would fall apart if people worked less? I’ve never heard anyone claim anything remotely like that. What would actually happen is that people would be less wealthy to the extent that they worked less. If that is something people want they can negotiate that with their employers.
I’ve got a few friends who’ve been working a 4-10 schedule for years now, and they love it.
The only problem I have with it is that a 10-hour day would really make long commutes worse. I’ve got an hour-long commute each way, and that would mean I’d be away from home 12 hours a day, four days a week. That’s a long time for my dog to be in the house alone, and- assuming I sleep 8 hours a night- I’d only have four hours of decompression time on those days. That’s three hours in the evening and one hour in the morning.
The long weekends would be nice, though.
When I worked on construction sites I loved the jobs where we worked 4-10. You would think that an extra 2 hours a day would be noticeably more taxing than the standard 8-hour day, but I didn’t find that to be the case. The extra day off in the week more than made up for it, and was a great thing for the guys who were from out-of-town; it made it easier to get back home for the weekend.
For trades like this, and for manufacturing jobs, I’ve always assumed that this was a more “efficient” schedule as well; namely that fewer hours of the total work week were spent in set-up and shut-down each day. If you lose, say, an hour of productive time every day while the crew gathers tools, gets a briefing from the foreman, sets up their welding gear, get’s the crane fired up, etc. than four instances of this each week as opposed to five mean that you’re getting a little more production out of the crew. I have to assume this has been studied - if anyone knows the results I’d be interested.
I assumed he was proposing 4 8s, since he talked about working less. We don’t need to do 4 10s, there’s no reason that 40 has to be the normal work week. It’s just a nice round number. But other countries have lowered the normal work week without collapsing.
If we tripled or quadroupled our productivity and were fantastically rich, would we still be working 40 hour weeks? Well, maybe, if we convinced ourselves via propaganda and the exploitable notion of the puritanical work ethic that work itself is somehow valuable and that we should dedicate our lives to it even when we don’t have to.
Why shouldn’t we respond to increased productivity per hour - the ability to create everything we want and need with fewer hours - by letting people have more time and control over their lives? We’ve been manipulated into thinking that we have to work the most and receive the least and this is just the nature of life while a few at the top are reaping all the benefits that technology, education, and modern economic benefits have brought us.
We should not pretend that cutting back on hours will not mean cutting back on lifestyle. I could work half as much as I do if I was satisfied with the lifestyle my parents had, crappy car, no computer, no cell phone, small tv with no cable, vacations at relatives houses, and eating out a couple times a year. For most people that is not an acceptable standard of living. No one needs to be manipulated into thinking having things is generally better than not having things.
I agree with everything you’ve said in this thread technology has never been so amazing but for a lot of people quality of life has never been so low. The common working stiff isn’t getting ahead or even breaking even. We will see the legacy of how little the lowly working man really has it coming soon I think as time goes on with the lost jobs from the Coronavirus. Thousands facing bankruptcies, evictions, repossessions, homelessness, standing in line at food banks. If things are so good why does it take two months of lost wages before people face these horrors, in the richest country on Earth it’s a shame.