The focus of conventional employment policy is on creating “more work”.
People without work and in receipt of benefits are viewed as a drain on
the state and in need of assistance or direct coercion to get them into
employment. There is the belief that work is the best form of welfare
and that those who are able to work ought to work.
This particular focus on work has come at the expense of another, far
more radical policy goal, that of creating “less work”. Yet the pursuit
of less work could provide a route to a better standard of life,
including a better quality of work life.
The idea that society might work less in order to enjoy life more
goes against standard thinking that celebrates the virtue and discipline
of hard work. Dedication to work, so the argument goes, is the best
route to prosperity. There is also the idea that work offers the
opportunity for self-realisation, adding to any material benefits from
work. “Do what you love” in work, we are told, and success will follow.
But this ideology is based on a myth that work can always set us free
and provide us with the basis for a good life. As I have written previously,
this fails to confront – indeed it conceals – the acute hardships of
much work performed in modern society. For many, work is about doing
“what you hate”.
Here I want to address another issue that is overlooked in
conventional policy debates. This is the need to diminish work. Working
less presents several advantages. One is the opportunity to overcome the
anomaly of overwork for some and unemployment for others. Sharing out
work more evenly across the available population by reducing average
working time would enable those who work too much to work less and those
who do not work at all to partake in some work.
Another advantage is the opportunity to enhance the quality of work
by reducing drudgery and extending opportunities for creative activity.
Reducing work time, in this sense, can be as much about realising the
intrinsic rewards of work as reducing its burdensome qualities.
Economists may cry foul that a reduction in working time will add to
firm costs and lead to job losses (mainstream economics accuses
advocates of shorter work hours of succumbing to the “lump of labour fallacy”
and of failing to see the extra costs of hiring additional workers on
short-hour contracts). One retort to this is that longer work hours are
not that productive. Shorter work hours may actually be more productive
if they increase the morale and motivation of workers. In practice, we
could achieve the same standard of living with fewer hours of work.
But the more profound question is whether we should be asking society
to tolerate long work hours for some and zero hours for others. Surely
we can achieve a more equitable allocation that offers everyone enough
time to work and enough time to do what they want? A reduction in work
time would offer a route to such an allocation.
There is also the deeper issue of whether we should be measuring the value of our lives by what we produce. The cult of productivity
crowds out other more “leisurely” ways of living that can add to human
well-being. Challenging this cult and seeking ways to lighten the burden
of work could allow us all to live better lives inside and outside of
work.
Arguments for shorter work time have a long history. Keynes, for
example, gave support to a reduction in working time as a way of
achieving full employment. In a letter to the poet TS Eliot in 1945,
Keynes suggested that “less work” represented the “ultimate solution”
to unemployment. He also saw merit in using productivity gains to reduce
work time and famously looked forward to a point (around 2030) when
people would be required to work 15 hours a week. Working less was a part of Keynes’s vision of a “good society”.
Marx, from a radically different perspective, saw a reduction in
working time as an essential ingredient of a future communist society.
Work was part of the “realm of necessity” and via the use of technology it could be curtailed as a way to expand the “realm of freedom”
in which people could realise their creative capacities in activities
of their own choosing. Marx importantly thought that under communism
work in the “realm of necessity” could be fulfilling as it would elicit
and harness the creativity of workers. Whatever irksome work remained in
the realm of necessity under communism again could be lessened by the
harnessing of technology.
Yet another advocate of shorter work time was John Stuart Mill.
He dismissed the “gospel of work” in part because it drew a veil over
the real costs of work, including slave work that its advocates sought
to defend. Instead, Mill proposed a “gospel of leisure”, arguing that
technology should be used to curtail work time as far as possible. This
stress on technology as a means to shorten work time was later to
feature in Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay, In Praise of Idleness.
The essential ideas of the above writers resonate still today. They
cut through romantic views of work and show how human progress depends
on society performing less work, not more. Although developed in
radically different ways, their ideas point to a future where the burden
of work is lighter and more time is available for free creative
activity. At least in the case of Marx, there is still the prospect of
turning work into a fulfilling activity, but the latter objective is
seen as achievable only within the context of a situation in which work
time is reduced. Less work is seen as a necessary foundation for better
work.
Ultimately, the reduction in working time is about creating more
opportunities for people to realise their potential in all manner of
activities including within the work sphere. Working less, in short, is
about allowing us to live more. Let’s work to achieve it.
By David Spencer
See original here, with links
SOYMB would add one small post script: let's go the whole hog and abolish wage slavery and with it the capitalist system. Let's work to achieve socialism!
JS
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