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Abolish The Week

- Adam Clare

People who aren’t slaves to the 9-5 world (or worse the 8-8 crowd) may not understand the tyranny of the week. Those poor folks who are forced by their managers and bosses to slave away at set hours and times. Sometimes the best time to do something may not be during the working window.

There are many benefits to having varying work schedules. For one, rush hour wouldn’t be so bad for those suffering from commuterism. There are plenty of other reasons too, which are addressed in a recent article from Slate:

But there’s nothing inevitable about the ceaseless repetition of six days of work, one day of rest. As labor has become both more productive and more organized, the week has evolved. The writer Witold Rybczynski traces the emergence of the weekend to 19th century England, when the British agricultural revolution made land and labor more productive. At first, Rybczynski relates, this allowed workers extra leisure, which they enjoyed spontaneously—not according to any ironclad schedule. As the Industrial Revolution became a driving force in trans-Atlantic civilization, the push for greater efficiency demanded standardization of this extra leisure. In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting his factories on Saturdays in a bid to crystallize an American convention of a two-day weekend full of recreation (that he hoped would involve driving). It worked.

Read more here.

Economists: Reduce Time Spent Working

- Adam Clare

Since roughly the end of the 70s productivity at workplaces has increased yet wages have stagnated (except for the top 1%) meaning that we are relatively worse off than before. All one has to do is look at the graph below to get the basic idea of this global issue.

Great-Prosperity-vs-Great-Recession

With this in mind, it’s great to see economists calling for a reduced work week. In North America, a standard full-time week is 40 hours, and the economists are calling for a 30 hour work week.

The benefits of working less are huge for individuals as well as society as a whole. Some may think that fewer working hours would mean lost productivity and GDP, but they’d be wrong. There’s no evidence that the reduction will have larger negative economic impacts.

Anna Coote, head of social policy at the NEF, an independent think-tank, said: “It’s time to make ‘part-time’ the new ‘full-time’.
“We must rethink the way we divide up our hours between paid and unpaid activities, and make sure everyone has a fair share of free time.”
Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany have shown it is possible to make changes like these without weakening their economies, the books claims.
It adds: “Time spent providing unpaid care constitutes an important civic contribution that is often unrecognised.
“A shorter working week would both ease the pressure on carers, most of whom are women, and enable their responsibilities to be more widely shared with men. It could therefore help tackle the entrenched domestic bases of gender inequalities.”

Read more here.

Get Help Choosing an Ethical Career

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

80,000 Hours is a student run organization at Oxford University that helps people find a job or career in something that makes the world better. This is great for so many obvious reasons – but the one I love the most is that it shows how philosophy can be applied in your life everyday.

Do you want to spend 8 (or more) hours a day just earning a couple dollars when you can get paid to make the planet, people, and the world better?

According to the organization’s view of ethics-as-impact, a do-gooder job only “does good” insofar as you are better at it than the person who would have filled the job otherwise. “This is the replaceability factor,” says MacAskill. “The difference between you and the person who would have been in your shoes.” If you’re fully replaceable, you are, quite literally, not making a difference.

Read more at Co.Exist.

A Sense of Purpose is More Important Than Money for Workplaces

- Adam Clare

In this TED Talk Dan Ariely presents his research into what motivates people to do work and how they feel about their workplace. The findings are interesting because it’s not necessarily what people do but the reactions to what has been done that provides motivation.

The Ideal 25 Hour Work Week

- Adam Clare

The currently popular 40 hour work week is a fairly modern notion and it’s thanks to unions that we don’t have something like an 80 hour work week. Times have changed and now scientists in the field of biodemography have suggested that a 25 hour work week is optimal. It allows people to spend more time living life than working in exchange for working later than the currently popular age of retirement.

“In socio-economic terms it makes a lot of sense. The important thing is that we all put in a certain amount of work – not at what point in our lives we do it. In the 20th century we had a redistribution of wealth. I believe that in this century, the great redistribution will be in terms of working hours.”
…
”We know that elderly people are prepared to continue working if they’re capable of doing so. And I’m guessing that young people would prefer to work less while they’re young if they have the option of working more when they get older.

Read more at ScienceNordic.

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