I came up with what I thought was a great plan. Here it is in a nutshell without all the minute details that (hopefully) make it work:
Create a new calander. It is divided into 60 6 day weeks, and 5 “other” days that corrispond to the solstics (and midpoints between them), plus “New Year”.
Industry has 2 shifts. An “A” shift, working the first 3 days, and “B” working the last 3. The 5 other days, everyone has off. Work 3, off 3. Hell, I could do that!
The idea behind this is increased productivity and increased leisure time for the masses. Basicly, work is being done all the time, but the individual is working half the time.
The “details” have to do with the redistribution of income and expenses involved. People earn less, and prices would need to adjust as needed. However, since time is essentially traded for money, it sould “sort of” work all out in the end. Take rent, for example. Its paid on a monthly basis. Each month, the rent would have to be less, but it is being paid for more months each year.
Yes, I know the idea is “crack-pot”, and its still in the wobbly phase and the religious nuts have issues with no “Seventh Day” crap, but I am a firm believer. I fully expect to win a Nobel Prize someday.
Lazy fuck-ups get promoted over hard workers every day of the week–family members and friends always get cushy promotions over worker bees.
And what reward did employees of Enron or Worldcom get for their years of hard work? Just the pleasure of having their jobs and 401Ks get sucked dry by lazy, dishonest management. And what about IT professionals whose jobs have been outplaced to India? Factory employees who have seen their jobs exported to Mexico? Where is their reward?
The fact is that we are living in a society in which the middle class and poor work for no job security, lowered pay, and no health insurance in many cases while the government hands out corporate benefits to the increasingly greedy rich.
There’s no chance of climbing the ladder anymore by dint of hard work and study, no job training, no chance of advancement, no reward for initiative. All an American worker can do nowadays is either starve or take the pittance he is offered and wait to see his job exported to Shenzhen, Bangalore, or a colonia on the US-Mexican border.
Well gee whiz gobear. Sorry that they stopped handing out million dollar salaries with lifetime contracts before you graduated high school. Why…corporations and businesses must have only recently become heartless and greedy. And I certainly find this whole concept of management being petty, stupid, arrogant, incompetant, nepotists fairly new and shocking. Next you’ll tell me that you are undercompensated and overworked.
Maybe what Americans need is a reality check:
-You are not going to retire a millionare at 40 unless you do something extraordinary.
-There are not enough upper management slots for every hard worker to eventually work their way up the ladder to become the boss.
-You are not indespensible. There are a thousand people just like you who can be trained for your job in a month or less.
-There are people in the world with nothing who are willing to work twice as hard as you and you’re bitching about not being able to buy a new car or an addition for your home
-You are not entitled to keep your job when either your position or the entire industry is no longer profitable
-Only a sap works the same job for 40 years expecting to be handed promotions, training, or significant raises. That’s what job searches and graduate school applications are for.
-A company is not a family, church, fraternity or whatever social structure you are searching for. Families do not discard members who don’t produce. ‘Alumni’ affilication is largely limited to severance, a COBRA health plan and a few lines on your resume.
-You are in an environment that rewards tolerance of monotony and tedium, anal-compulsiveness, and unhealthy obsession with a single-minded purpose and you wonder why you hate your boss and coworkers?
-If you were really as smart and as talented as you think you are, you would start your own company instead of working for someone you regard as your intellectual inferior.
-EVERYTHING that a company says is bullshit designed to do two things - keep you doing your job and keep people buying their product. There’s no sense feeling hurt when you were foolish enough to believe something that defied common sense or sounded too good to be true.
