Removal of penalty rates sits comfortably with working fewer hours

The present push for the removal of penalty rates for workers sits comfortably with the Four-Hour Work Day.

Children understand and enoy social
 interaction more than adults.

People can be asked to work any time of the day or night, on any day, for the same pay rate with the over-riding and incontrovertible conditions that they only work four hour shifts, no overtime, no double shifts and an absolute maximum of 20 hours a week.

The idea of work, certainly in the 20^th century and the early years of the 21^st, has become has become decidedly disjointed so much so that in the developed world it has become our “reason” precluding, at the expense of our general wellbeing, a more humane way of living.

That “more humane way of living” would allow us to exploit our natural sociality without the seemingly inexorable mercenary pressure and competitiveness that is common in the modern commercial world.

The underlying intensity of the modern business world runs counter in our psyche to the paradigm to the health, happiness and enjoyment, and freedom, a person needs to experience genuine fulfilment.

Work, of course, is important for a host of reasons, among them the sense of reason and purpose it gives a person, it allows for the creation of many things that society needs and, although biased, it enriches our social interaction.

The argument that we should work fewer hours each day and by implication each week, is fraught with challenges and difficulties, but the reason we should has an implacable ally – our behaviour is changing earth’s climate and to adapt to that we need to slow dramatically our consumption of energy-hungry goods.

To slice through human consumption we need to be in a position to spend less and working fewer hours each day, and by implication each week, will make us fundamentally poorer and so less able to be the consumers that the existing commercial world so urgently needs.

A genuine adaptation to climate change will never be easy, and nor will it be easy to adapt to the Four-Hour Work Day.

The market-driven world has pilfered all that is good about community

Communities are rich in knowledge and resources.

Plato and Aristotle - it was Plato
 who said: "An unexamined life
is not worth living".

Our market driven world has, however, pilfered many of those riches, or at least has created a dynamic in which people are so pre-occupied and exhausted from a day in the market economy, that their community and neighbourhoods are wounded by that depletion of personal energy.

A day devoted to the sustenance of the capitalistic-driven market economy demands uninhibited access to an individual’s knowledge, their emotional energy and equally their physically energy.

Their neighbourhoods and the attendant lifestyles are maintained through the misplaced allegiance to corporate values that are about growth and profit, two things that, despite the manifest claims of most economists, are diametrically opposed to the creation of resilience in communities and the continuing health and wellbeing of people.

The idea that we work fewer hours is primarily about recovering a person’s life; enabling them to find fulfillment and happiness in a world that promotes an understanding that an ethos based on those values is counter to present culture that sees the accumulation of goods, and within that money, as being indicative of success.

The Four-Hour Work Day would allow people decided freedom from the daily drudgery of the eight-hour day and liberty from the constraints of a lifestyle that enriches a few and enslaves the rest.

Early thinkers and many since, have often advocated for time in our lives to be reflective; a reflection that would allow us to examine our lives and it was Plato who said - “an unexamined life is not worth living".

Present lifestyles are such that most of us offend Plato everyday for because of our addiction to the “corporate way” we are so busy that our lives are unexamined and so, according to Plato, not worth living.

We can make it worth living in that we can allow time for that “examination” by working fewer hours for the corporate mandate and embracing the Four-Hour Work Day.