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Signs on May Day represent a missed
media story.
Photo Credit: Sarah Seltzer
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The kind of attitude that is outlined in this article is what I would consider a sign-post on the landscape of a changing paradigm. The ideas posed here challenge, among other concepts, our preoccupation with the American work ethic, and why it isn't all it's cracked up to be. Reconsidering the collective value of "work above all else" , the author offers alternative objectives as part of the American Dream. -S.C.-
How Less Work for Everybody
Could Solve a Lot of Our Economic
Turbulence and Make Life More Pleasant
by Sarah Seltzer for alternet.org
July 20, 2012
"Job Creation" isn't the only answer.
"Get a job!" This jeer was
perhaps the most frequent directed at Occupy protesters last year, and it was
usually either met by "I can't! That's why I'm here" or "I'm
already working two." Embedded in this ever-common taunt of protesters or
other counterculture figures is the belief that if you just work hard enough in
America, you will succeed, that any time spent with nose away from grindstone
is time wasted. Of course, the truth that Occupy, We Are the 99% Tumblr and the
recession opened many (but not enough) eyes to is that it's not enough to work
hard, get a degree, sacrifice and slave anymore because the system in fact is
broken.
America has a broad cultural
emphasis on working hard as a goal in and of itself, and not on what working
hard means. Earlier this week I wrote about five common-sense policy changes
that would improve work-life balance for Americans. Mandating vacation time and
family leave, embracing unions and improving childcare and workshare options
would all make the major difference in our lives.
But what about an attitude
adjustment to accompany those policies, or perhaps usher them in? How could
workplaces and individuals reconfigure our mindset away from the most hours of
work necessarily being the best toward a new paradigm? Can there be a healthy
balance between productive, engaged and enthusiastic work for the most number
of people, and the all-important leisure that enables and informs that work for
all those people, too? I went on a search for the most recent progressive
thinking on the issue of balance because I had a feeling there were ideas
percolating beyond the basic need for family, medical and vacation time.
American culture is informed by
(forgive my ensuing broad generalizations about American religious history) an
embrace of strong individuality and the infamous Puritan work ethic the
earliest settlers brought over. In traditional Protestant thinking, hard work,
frugality and diligence were ways of indicating membership in the "elect,"
or the saved. They left England because they found it debauched and corrupt,
and established strict standards in the colonies. As a look back at Max Weber reminds us, this
ethic is strongly tied to the American strand of capitalism. Ben Franklin, that
pioneer of American thinking, wrote that "time is money," and urged
Americans to spend their time earning at the dawn of our nation's existence.
And as other countries have slowed down their hours in recent decades, we have sped up.
Fast-forward a few centuries, and
you have the working class juggling jobs and buried in debt, as well as what New
York Times guest columnist Tim Kreider calls "The Busy Trap," describing spot-on a
phenomenon that is mostly attached to the modus operandi of the wealthy and socially
elite (you know, the people who shape policy, mores and the financial
landscape) in places like New York and Washington, DC.
They’re busy because of their own
ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread
what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They
feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to
promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with
4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks
good on their college applications.
This faulty association of work with
virtue hits the nail on the head. Why should we prioritize work above spending
time with our families, or in the sunshine, or consuming art? With frequency,
we glibly declare that at the end of our lives we will remember the latter
group of activities more fondly than the former, but we seem reluctant to
embrace that ethos in the here and now.
On the other hand, Kreider's
proposed solution (spend more time idling, daydreaming and hanging out) while
indeed electable-seeming, is out of reach for most Americans. As Slate's J. Brian Lowder notes,
the pleasantly open schedule that he
advocates is almost never possible without a healthy stack of family money or
generous institutional grant. …Most of us need a stable income (hello,
student loans), and moreover, the ongoing nature of assignments in many jobs
means that as much as we might like to dedicate only morning hours to “the
work,” we do, in fact, need to be connected for much of the day.
The fact that leisure is often only
accessible to the privileged is exactly why policy changes are needed. Because
if society's powerful continue to perpetuate the idea of being occupied with
work as somehow being valuable, then they will do nothing to help shift the
situation for the rest of the workforce, for those who have no choice but to be
busy. Just this week David Brooks self-parodically declared that taking conference
calls at Junior's piano lesson was working longer hours than are worked by
those down the income scale who do real backbreaking work. Brooks is
perpetuating the busyness-as-virtue myth and erroneously applying his bourgeois
experience universally. If he thinks taking calls during Junior's piano lessons
is worthy of bragging rights, why should he care that his kids' nanny or the
nurse at the nearby hospital is working two jobs and has no time off in the
summer?
That's why it's ultimately a
positive that some among the privileged (like Kreider and Anne-Marie Slaughter, unlike Brooks) are
responding to the call for more balance.
And certainly, there are other ways
to improve work-life balance that go beyond everyone having a cabin in the
woods. One is ending the policy of fixed or earned vacation days and going to
an "honor system" with unlimited time off, a policy favored by a few
startups. The idea is the system fosters loyalty, spreads vacation throughout
the year, schedules "strategically" based on the ebb and flow of
work, and hopefully staves off burnout, guilt and resentment that plagues
American workers--who now more and more plan to skip vacations or call into the
office while gone.
Is it any wonder then, that plenty
of businesses like Accessibility Partners, IBM, and Netflix have sent their
vacation policies packing? The concept unlimited time off hasn't reduced
workplaces to chaotic anarchies. Instead, it's created more efficiency, at least
according to Dharmesh Shah, cofounder and CTO of Hubspot.
...Rather than hoard days for times
when they really need it, then scramble to take days at the end of the year (or
fight for extra pay for time not taken), Shah says Hubspot's open, unlimited
vacation policy makes all of these problems go away. “Employees take the
vacation when they need it and we don't have a spike of vacations at specific
points of time,” he explains.
This kind of attitude could be
applied more broadly. At the Guardian, Dean Baker argues that in
addition to spending on public works, the government can also encourage
companies to divide work instead of laying off employees. He notes that
austerity aside, these kinds of policies have truly helped Germany:
There is nothing natural about the
length of the average work week or work year and there are, in fact, large
variations across countries. The average worker in Germany
and the Netherlands puts in 20% fewer hours in a year than the average worker in
the United States. This means that if the US adopted Germany's work
patterns tomorrow, it would immediately eliminate unemployment.
Of course, it is unrealistic to
imagine such large changes occurring overnight, but governments can certainly
attempt to encourage employers to shorten workweeks and increase vacation and
other paid time-off. In fact, this is the real secret of Germany's post-crisis
recovery. Germany's growth has been no better than growth in the United States
since the start of the downturn, yet its unemployment rate has fallen by 2.0
percentage points – while unemployment in the United States has risen by almost
4.0 percentage points. The difference is that Germany encourages firms to
reduce work hours rather than lay off workers.
These stories show that it's indeed
hard to really separate policy from culture, but perhaps shifting the latter is
part of the work radicals and reformers alike have failed to do. In Dissent Magazine, Mark
Engler argues that by pushing for more jobs over a
better balance between work and life, progressives have "ceded" the
tempting ground of leisure and personal happiness to the very corporations that
exploit workers. Citing ad campaigns that urge workers to take back their lunch
hours, he asks, shouldn't this be the job of the left?
In past decades, and certainly since
the most recent economic downturn, the demand from liberals—and even from those
further to the left—has been for jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Rarely have
progressives focused on demands like reducing work hours, lowering the
retirement age, protecting and expanding vacation, and implementing job-sharing schemes—all of which might be better
paths to full employment. The reason is simple: if everyone wasn’t forced to
work so hard, there would be more work to go around.
Engler cites the work of Juliet Schor and the concept of a "plenitude"
economy over a profit-driven one. It's the idea of a great slowdown
to counter the Great-American speedup. But it can't happen without our help. We
need a willingness to let go of the idea that every hour working is somehow
more valuable than an hour of our own time. Work should not be the only
conferrer of dignity and status. Essentially she posits that if we all worked
four days a week, and spent the rest of our time nourishing ourselves, the
environment and each other, we'd be "better equipped to weather the
economic and climate storms that will be more likely in coming decades."
She tells us we have no other choice:
"Ultimately a progressive
economic vision is one in which our economic arrangements yield a sustaining
planet, creative work and fair distribution. The business-as-usual economy is
failing miserably on all those fronts."
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