We need a Four-Hour Work Day, not a laissez-faire approach to hours

A

ny understanding of what troubles the world appears to escape Australia’s neo-liberal Federal Government.

Ian Harper - An economist who obviously
 doesn't understand, or is not allowed to
 address the troubles the world really faces.
 

Rather than be the solution to all our social problems, our prevailing market system is actually the cause.

The Harper Competition Review, driven by the Abbott Government, orchestrated by economists and obviously oblivious to what is really happening in the world, or has chosen to ignore them, and yet makes recommendations that takes us deeper into the difficulties that actually threaten humanity.

A story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Harper review: Plan to lift market restrictions to put consumer interests first” – tells of a plan to put consumers’ interests first, but actually ignores them completely.

The story says, “The plan is to put consumers' interests ahead of commercial interests, firing new market opportunities.”

Contraction rather than expansion is what needed and essential, if the world is, and by implication Australia, is to avoid a conflation of circumstances, ranging from resource depletion and catastrophic climate disruption.

Consumers actually need an outbreak of sanity combined with an equally generous helping of good sense to help them understand that in a world facing energy, resource and climate constraints, they need to be building a world in which they live with less rather than more.

The implication there of course, is that rather than extending retail trading hours, we should be structuring our communities so lifestyles can be similar, although different, and trading hours significantly shorter.

The ills of the world can be attributed to many things, but it is difficult to argue that the market system, so lionized by so many, is not the root cause.

Our developed nations are simply too wealthy and our consumption of energy and resource-rich goods and services is extreme already pushing the world into serious ecological debt.

Rather than adopting the Harper Review plan of extending trading hours and effectively allowing a laissez-faire approach, we should be discussing and moving toward reducing and limiting times for traditional business.

Instead of a 24/7 arrangement for retail businesses, our communities should be looking to move in exactly the opposite direction, that is a four-hour trading day, no overtime and no double shifts, but not including public services and primary producers.

Such a change would shift the emphasis away from simply making money and gathering “stuff” and allow people time in their communities to bond with those around them and build resilience in their neighbourhoods.

With just four hours on the job, people would live closer to their work and so would be able to walk or cycle, eliminating the need for road transport, making a significant difference to personal costs and easing the worsening of human damage to earth’s ecological systems, along with being far more resource efficient.

Our hunger for growth has human and ecological costs

The Grangemouth oil refinery -
belching gas by day
and 'Bladerunner' at night.

Capitalism and its inherent hunger for endless growth and the embedded dangers it has for earth’s atmosphere is epitomized in this 10-miniute video.

“The shutdown” by Adam Stafford tells us about the Grangemouth oil refinery where two men were killed in an explosion.

He says Grangemouth belches gas by day and is Bladerunner by night.

The urgency of the need for profit comes at huge human and ecological cost.

Such a refinery would not be possible if we were to adopt a Four-Hour Work Day as our lifestyle would be dramatically different: it would be kinder to people and, of course, kinder to the environment upon which we all depend.

Mantaining an energy-rich lifestyle is self-deception

George Monbiot.

The idea that we might maintain present lifestyles while mitigating climate change is simply self-deception.

Our present energy-intense ways of living is a fallacy and can even be extended to the frequent national and international gatherings of those who call and argue for societal changes.

All these gatherings are of themselves energy-intensive and their very existence contradicts the values they espouse.

Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, writes about this contradiction and apparent lack of action in his latest piece: “ApplaudingThemselves to Death”.

He writes: “If you visit the website of the UN body that oversees the world’s climate negotiations, you will find dozens of pictures, taken across 20 years, of people clapping. These photos should be of interest to anthropologists and psychologists. For they show hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives.”

Breaking all the rules of a '10-minute city'

City planning in a carbon-rich world is strikingly different from what will be needed, and essential, if we are to endure in a carbon-constrained world.

A new book released just this week by Melbourne’s Grattan Institute examines the planning that it claims is “broken”, particularly Melbourne and Sydney.

The book: “City Limits: Why Australia's Cities are Brokenand How We Can Fix Them” had been published by Melbourne University Press.

A story in today’s Melbourne Age headed: “Melbourne's planning disaster: jobs boom in CBD while affordable housing grows ever outwards in suburbs” discusses the disconnect between where the jobs are and where people can afford to live.

What wasn’t alluded to, but is a clear implication, is the wider cost to society in the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the constant commuting forced upon people when jobs are in one place and their homes are in another, frequently an hour or more way.

Any reasonable response to climate change demands that we live with easy walking or cycling distance of where it is we work – some people have advocated that we live in a “10-minute world”, meaning that most everything needed for day-to-day survival is within 10 minutes of where we live.

Traditional commuting would fade away if we worked just four-hours each day

“Commuting”, as it is traditionally understood, would fade away if the Four-Hour Work Day became a reality.

With workers needing only to be at their respective workplaces for four hours each day, they would live quite close and so to get to and from their work in just minutes, either by foot or on a bicycle.

The idea of commuting is considered by The Book of Life in a piece entitled “On Commuting” in a section called The Sorrows of Work.

“Entering the carriage feels like interrupting a congregation. The cold air cuts into daydreams which must have begun far up the line.

“The settled passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of taking notice, but they betray their awareness of any new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to allow them to struggle past them to one of the remaining unoccupied seats.

“The train moves off, resuming its rhythmical clicking along tracks laid down a century and a half ago, when the capital first began plucking workers from their beds in faraway villages,” the piece says in talking about commuting by train.