Clip adds to our understanding of the Four-Hour Work Day

Four-Hour work day enthusiast, Eric Fortune, alerted us to this YouTube clip explaining the dynamic.

In arguing that such an eventuality with the life of all, the attached promotional material says:

To end with this demented state of things once and for all, we must reduce working shifts in proportion to increases of productivity, establishing, to start, a worldwide work shift of four hours. This will end the world economic crisis, and give us full employment, a stable economy and a better quality of life for all human beings.

 

The YouTube clip is simply entitled: “The four-hour workday”.

Keynes was right about most things, but wrong about this

The idea of the Four-Hour Work Day is nothing new.

John Maynard Keynes - he imagined a
 steadily rising income would see us
 working 15-hours a week.

Something like that, but even more adventurous, was predicted in 1930 by iconic economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes then believed that, within a century, per-capita income steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week.

Clearly Keynes was wrong: as he predicted per-capita income has steadily risen, easily accommodating basic needs in the developed world, but he misunderstood human psyche in that our wants vastly exceed what we actually need resulting in a society in a society that sates that addiction by working longer and longer hours.

Subsequently we have become financially rich, time destitute and striding seemingly unawares toward the abyss of a rapidly changing climate being brought upon us by the heedless consumption of energy using finite carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels, and the equally wasteful accumulation that depend on that same finite resource.

Both dynamics are driven by the fact that we are simply too rich and so should we be serious about climate change adaptation we will all happily work fewer hours, earn less money and so consume less and so use far less energy.

Queensland urban design expert, Juris Greste, once said we don’t live in an economy we live in a society.Show More

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Considering The Four-Hour Work Day

The Four-Hour Work Day

What is it? – Exactly that; four hours at work, no overtime and no double shifts.

Why? – The world’s finite resources are being plundered at an alarming rate and exhaustion is within site. Our consumption of “stuff” not only capitalizes the world’s energy supplies, but the refuse from burning our fossil fuels has our environment sinks filled to capacity.

Beyond that, filling our oceans and the atmosphere are becoming so polluted that the acidification of those oceans brings life threatening implications and the carbon dioxide build up in our atmosphere is changing earth’s weather patterns at a rate vastly quicker than human’s can evolve to adapt and so threatening the entire human project.

What for?  - The  Four-Hour work day would make as all fundamentally poorer and if implemented with a sense of fairness and generousity those now living on the financial fringes of society would be embraced and invited in – in other words allowed their helping of the world’s wealth.

How would it work? – It demands a wholesale change to the philosophical understanding of work and the abandonment of the growth paradigm to which corporate world is addicted and through the threat of compounding difficulties to any society that abandons the ideal of growth, people, generally have joined this rush to the abyss.

What would be the benefit? – Work as it is understood in the contemporary world would no longer by our “reason”. Finally we would have time to reflect, consider, enrich our neighbourhoods simply by being their more often; as we would be working fewer hours, long commutes would be pointless and so we would be inclined to encourage the creation of the “five-minute” life – that is where everything important on a day-to-day basis (work, shopping, leisure, services, education, friend and family) would be within a five minute walk or cycle. Neighbourhoods would subsequently by stronger, more resilient and more able to cope with slings and arrows of life.

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.