The unspoken goal is to maintain life as it is

Every time people gather to discuss an adaptation, or response to climate change, the unspoken goal seems to be the maintenance of the world as we know it.

The Four-Hour Work Day is the
 among the first steps in
 responding to climate change.

That is honourable and warrants applause, but it seems to avoid the reality that if the causations of climate change are not attended to then circumstances will become so difficult that life as we know it will erode.

That is not what I want and what I certainly do not want is more discussion, more imaginary strategies or more research for we haven’t the time. The time to contemplate our response, and act, was ideally 30 years ago.

However, understanding then little about what damage we were doing to our atmosphere, we did nothing and continued with business as usual and so actually worsened the situation.

The time for talk and the seemingly endless oscillation as to whether or not humans are responsible and beyond that how we respond is past.

We now need a decision; we need courageous and bold leaders willing to put their careers at risk as they guide Australia through the tribulations that will evolve from a changing climate.

We need invasive social surgery; surgery that will slow down our carbon dioxide emissions and such surgery can only be orchestrated from the “top-down”.

We need an innovative process that will slow down society; lift its foot off the throttle; ease back, consider, contemplate life and pull over into the rest area.

Sounds easy, but doing that will be both complex and difficult, but a first step will be to embrace the Four-Hour Work Day.   

Impractical? Maybe, but it ignites the conversation

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day might quickly be shown to have little practicality and so be absolutely unworkable.

A cartoonist's image of A.C. Grayling.

Whatever its failings, if it has any, the idea will, if nothing else, ignite a conversation about the reasons we work, the value it has for the broader wellbeing of society and of course individuals, and whether or not in its contemporary understanding, it is integral to the health of communities.

The challenge of course is to reposition ourselves to avoid having our gaze limited by viewing what it is and how we live through the modern prism of a corporate controlled world in which profits and therefor mercenary aims are put ahead of the welfare of people.

Even small businesses in small towns that employ local people and answer local needs are, by default, controlled by the corporate ideology in that their viability can be, and is, directly influenced by the behaviour of corporations.

Just recently, the humanist philosopher, A.C. Grayling, talked about the importance of acting decidedly and intent to ensure you built a worthy life through which you made a laudable contribution to your community and so society generally.

Grayling emphasized the limited time we each have (300 months for those who live to 80 – meaning 960 months, less time spent sleeping, eating and in ablutions, and general wasting of time – leaves just 300 months) and so that available time to enrich our lives would be near doubled if we were involved in traditional work for only four-hours a day.

Arrival at the point of four-hour work days is not easy (nothing of any value is easy, or course), but it is not until we ignite the discussion can we even begin to understand what we would need in the way of changes to live more fulfilling and complete lives.

Trying to understand equity in income

Equity in income has troubled the world for centuries.

A shift to a Four-Hour Work Day will not in itself change that, but it will be an important ingredient in the recipe of events that will eventually bring about altered behaviour.

We have tried this,but now we
 need something differrent.

The inequity of incomes is embedded in what exists and a switch to Four-Hour Work Day, without overtime or double shifts, will not engender the necessary change.

This time, however, things will be different.

The mix of corporatism, labour and consumption that has sustained capitalism for centuries, particularly those of late, now has something else to consider; something that has always been an ingredient, but until now mostly ignored and been treated as a free asset - that is nature.

Services provided by nature have always been costed in at nil value, that however, is changing (albeit reluctantly in the minds of many) and as nature cannot be told what to do, it is emerging as the most significant cost facing businesses.

Businesses have ignored nature, profited handsomely from its largesse, but now it has to pay, as do all of us and that is not just directly in cash as the costs are coming in the form of disruptive changes to our climate manifested in unpredictable storms, floods and cyclones that are wreaking havoc around the globe.

The shift to a Four-hour Work Day will need to be a legislative change, meaning that businesses can only operate four-hours a day – an idea that collides head-on with the present agenda calling for changes to work arrangements allowing businesses to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution a couple of centuries ago, the ideology of profit and growth has been indelible etched onto our lives that we now grow believing consumption equates with happiness – it doesn’t and a Four-Hour Work Day will make all of us make all of us, from the orchestrators of our money-based society down to the oppressed soul, financially poorer and yet hugely time rich.