No Vacation Nation

This must have hit a nerve - nearly four thousand comments on this post!

Reposted in full from CNN, 23 May 2011

'Let's be blunt: If you like to take lots of vacation, the United States is not the place to work.

Besides a handful of national holidays, the typical American worker bee gets two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world - much less than what people in many other countries receive.

And even that amount of vacation often comes with strings attached.

Some U.S. companies don't like employees taking off more than one week at a time. Others expect them to be on call or check their e-mail even when they're lounging on the beach or taking a hike in the mountains.

"I really would like to take a real, decent vacation and travel somewhere, but it's almost impossible to take a long vacation and to be out of contact," said Don Brock, a software engineer who lives in suburban Washington.

"I dream of taking a cruise or a trip to Europe, but I can't imagine getting away for so long."

The running joke at Brock's company is that a vacation just means you work from somewhere else. So he takes one or two days off at a time and loses some vacation each year. Only 57% of U.S. workers use up all of the days they're entitled to, compared with 89% of workers in France, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

Brock's last long holiday was more than 10 years ago, when he took a two-week drive across the country.

'Americans work like robots'

It's a totally different story in other parts of the world.

Nancy Schimkat, an American who lives in Weinheim, Germany, said her German husband, an engineer, gets six weeks of paid vacation a year, plus national holidays - the norm. His company makes sure he takes all of it.

It's typical for Germans to take off three consecutive weeks in August when "most of the country kind of closes down," Schimkat said. That's the time for big trips, perhaps to other parts of Europe, or to Australia or North America. Germans might also book a ski holiday in the winter and take a week off during Easter.

Schimkat's family back in the United States teases her that she's spoiled. But when she tells Germans that workers in the U.S. usually get two weeks of vacation a year, they cringe.

"They kind of have this idea that Americans work like robots and if that's the way they want to be, that's up to them. But they don't want to be like that," Schimkat said.

"[Germans] work very hard, but then they take their holiday and really relax...It's more than just making money for Germans, it's about having time for your family and it's about having time to wind down."

No legal obligation to offer vacation

So what's going on here?

A big reason for the difference is that paid time off is mandated by law in many parts of the world.

Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries - from Australia to Slovenia to Japan - that require employers to offer four weeks or more of paid vacation to their workers, according to a 2009 study by the human resources consulting company Mercer.

Finland, Brazil and France are the champs, guaranteeing six weeks of time off.

But employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don't have access to it, government figures show.

That makes the US the only advanced nation in the world that doesn't guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report titled "No-Vacation Nation" by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group.

Most US companies, of course, do provide vacation as a way to attract and retain workers.

But the fear of layoffs and the ever-faster pace of work mean many Americans are reluctant to be absent from the office - anxious that they might look like they're not committed to their job. Or they worry they won't be able to cope with the backlog of work waiting for them after a vacation.

Then, there's the way we work.

Working more makes Americans happier than Europeans, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Happiness Studies. That may be because Americans believe more than Europeans do that hard work is associated with success, wrote Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, the study's author and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

"Americans maximize their... [happiness] by working, and Europeans maximize their [happiness] through leisure," he found.

So despite research documenting the health and productivity benefits of taking time off, a long vacation can be undesirable, scary, unrealistic or just plain impossible for many U.S. workers.

Little appetite for regulation

Critics say it's time for a change.

"There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a competitive advantage," said John de Graaf, the national coordinator for Take Back Your Time, a group that researches the effects of overwork.

He noted that the United States came in fourth in the World Economic Forum's 2010-2011 rankings of the most competitive economies, but Sweden - a country that by law offers workers five weeks of paid vacation - came in second.

De Graaf drafted the first version of the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which would have required larger companies to provide at least one week of paid annual leave to employees. But the bill, introduced by then-Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, in May of 2009, got little traction.

Opponents said that it would have a negative impact on business and that the government shouldn't get involved in the workplace in this way.

"You would have had the idea that we were calling for the end of Western civilization. Comments like, 'Oh, they're going to make America a 21st-century France,' as if we were all going to have to eat snails," de Graaf said.

"I'm in no way anti-capitalist, I think the market does a lot of good things, but the Europeans understand that the market also has its failings and that when simply left completely to its own devices, it doesn't produce these perfect results."

But is more government regulation the answer? The debate rages on.

Back in suburban Washington, Brock - the software engineer who hasn't had a long vacation for more than 10 years - is finally planning a real getaway. His 60th birthday is coming up in December, and he'd like to do something special, maybe go on a cruise to the Bahamas.

Will he be able to pull it off and get away from work? He's still not entirely sure, he said.'

Masters in Economics for Transition

Sourced from the new economics foundation, May 2011

'From September 2011, Schumacher College, Dartington will be offer a new MA degree course in "The Economics for Transition: Achieving low carbon, high well-being, resilient economies". This pioneering postgraduate programme has been developed by nef, Schumacher College and the Transition Network, and is offered through the Business School at the University of Plymouth.

The programme is designed to support a new generation of leaders and activists to create an economy fit for the challenges of the 21st century. It will be attractive to people at different stages in their life seeking to make a positive contribution to the economics of transition through enhancing their knowledge; acquiring practical skills for sustainable living, working and ecological citizenship; and sharing experiences with people from all over the world.

Who is the programme for?

The programme is designed to support a new generation of leaders and activists to create an economy fit for the challenges of the 21st century. Schumacher College attracts people from all walks of life from across the globe – from business leaders and entrepreneurs to policy makers and social and environmental activists.

This programme will be attractive to people at different stages in their life seeking to make a positive contribution to the economics of transition through enhancing their knowledge; acquiring practical skills for sustainable living, working and ecological citizenship; and sharing experiences with people from all over the world.

Why a new masters in economics?

As the world struggles to recover from the most severe and synchronized downturn since the Great Depression, the reputation of economists has rarely been lower. For many, economics was a big part of the problem and so cannot be part of any solution.

Never has there been a more important time for a new approach to economics. Over the past two decades, key thinkers and practitioners have been developing alternative ways forward that once were dismissed as radical and marginal, but now are fast moving centre stage.

E.F. Schumacher was one of these foresighted pioneers who in 1973 laid out a new approach to economics that put values and compassion, people and planet at the centre of our economic system. To this day, Schumacher is known as the grandfather of new economics and his work has inspired a whole generation of leading thinkers, practising economists and environmental and social activists who have been growing the shoots of the new economy ever since. As we enter the decade of climate change, now is the time to make visible these achievements, learn from what works and in practice and co-create the great transition towards low carbon, high well-being, resilient economies

Challenges facing society that this Masters programme will address are:

• The triple crunch of climate change, financial crises and peak oil

• The crises in ecosystem health and social well-being across the globe

• The inter-connected nature of these crises and how they are systemically linked with the global economic model

• Growing disillusionment with current economic approaches and solutions

• How to transform these challenges into opportunities for change

Studying with leading thinkers, activists and practitioners

The MA in Economics for Transition is a collaboration between Schumacher College, the nef (the new economics foundation), the Transition Network and the Business School at the University of Plymouth. This provides a unique opportunity to study with leading thinkers, activists and practitioners in the new economy from a range of different perspectives.

Teachers include faculty from Schumacher College (Julie Richardson, Stephan Harding, Satish Kumar, and Philip Frances); nef (the new economics foundation) (including Andrew Simms, David Boyle and nef staff and associates), the Transition Network (including Naresh Giogrande, Sophy Banks and Rob Hopkins) and the University of Plymouth (including David Wheeler, Derek Shepherd, Atul Mishra and Lynda Rodwell).

Visiting teachers will be drawn from Schumacher College associates. In recent years, this has included Tim Jackson, Gunter Pauli, Wolfgang Sachs, Jonathon Porritt, Ed Mayo, Nic Marks, Vandana Shiva, Catherine Cameron, Janine Benyus, Ken Webster, Richard Douthwaite, Bunker Roy and many other key thinkers and activists. We will also be inviting new influential teachers such as Eve Mitleton Kelly who is Head of the Complexity Programme at the London School of Economics.

Course programme

• Module One: The Ecological Paradigm (20 credits)

• Module Two: The Emergence of the New Economy (20 credits)

• Module Three: The New Economy in Practice (20 credits)

• Elective Courses (20 credits each)
The short course options for 2011/12 will be finalised in the summer of 2011. Indicative titles for short courses include:
Creating a Transition Initiative (20 credits)
Sustainable Models of Enterprise (20 credits)
Ecological Leadership and Facilitation (20 credits)

Dissertation (80 credits)'

Enterprises Should Focus on Wellbeing Rather than Growth

Reposted in full from The Guardian

'When I run sessions with business executives on growth, wellbeing, and innovation, I say that people don't have to buy my analysis of the problem to buy my ideas on the solution. That's because I think we are now living in an era of "uneconomic growth" and we therefore have no choice but to redefine prosperity as being about wellbeing not growth.

But even if, despite all the evidence, growth is still possible or likely, surely it makes sense for our economy to move on to defining prosperity not as more "stuff" and money but more wellbeing? If you disagree with that idea, you won't like what follows, but I hope you will read on.

Why do I talk about "beyond-growth" economics? Here in a short video I give a précis of what I normally take an hour to explain. We're trashing our one and only planet. On many measures like the LPI and Rockstrom, it is clear we are in overshoot and living off the capital as well as the interest. You wouldn't run a company that way would you?

And, despite all the rapid growth causing all that destruction, since the 1970s, wellbeing has flatlined in the developed world. We know that, at a level beyond which most in the developed world have long passed, extra income brings little or no more wellbeing.

So what's the growth for? And how come the new economic foundation's happy planet index shows us that "underdeveloped" countries such as Costa Rica are far more ecologically efficient at delivering long, happy lives than places like the UK? Professor Tim Jackson summarises our growth obession and affluenza in his TED talk, saying "We spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to make impressions that don't last, on people we don't care about."

The increase in the scale of this consumerist economy is relentless. And this scale is just as important as the intensity of resource use. While some evidence can be found for relative decoupling, absolute decoupling remains fatally elusive.

The numbers are scary. If we want to reach the (far too high) 450 parts per million CO2 level by 2050, we need every global dollar of economic output to drop from its current 768gCO2/dollar to 6gCO2/dollar. That's an 11% per annum reduction every year on every global dollar output. The best we have done in the last 17 years is 0.7%.

So lets get real: either we discover the perpetual-motion machine or the myth of absolute decoupling is just dangerous denial. What's more, if the developing world is to have any chance of continuing to develop, a moral response to these facts would suggest the rich world needs to find a reverse gear very quickly.

That's why there is a rising debate about the need to move beyond growth, with numerous Nobel prizewinners, politicians and business leaders such as Adair Turner, Ian Cheshire, Bernie Bulkin and 77% of the members of Prince Charles's Cambridge programme for sustainability leadership agreeing on the need to question and dethrone growth.

And you don't have to be anti-growth to buy this. For many, including Heinberg and Gilding, it is clear that 2008 was in any case the end of growth at the macro level. You don't need to look too closely at the concatenation of peak – everything from oil, water, food and metals combined with snowballing environmental meltdown and a bust financial system – to see that growth is over once and for all. Yes there may be blips of growth going up, but only at the expense of other countries and sectors. Absolute growth may well be over.

But in any case, macro-economic modelling by people like Professor Tim Jackson and Professor Peter Victor shows that we can deliver everything we expect from a developing world: growth economy, fiscal balance, high employment, high levels of wellbeing and environmental sustainability, with zero growth.

My vision of flourishing enterprise is based on the kinds of changes Victor and Jackson build into these zero-growth models. And it's based on leadership from companies calling for radical changes in the way the market is set up, leadership in the necessary shift for a Citizen Renaissance from extrinsic to intrinsic values, and leadership in integrating wellbeing in business innovation and strategy.

A flourishing enterprise will be one that aims to maximise the wellbeing it delivers to society and minimises the units of planet it uses to deliver that wellbeing. It will shift its focus from seeing products as benefits to seeing production as a cost of maintenance of delivery to societal wellbeing-needs (not created "wants").

And don't just take my word for it. The (hot-bed of anti-capitalism) World Economic Forum looked forward in its 2010 Redesigning Business Value report to a rapid shift to business in which "we are no longer selling 'stuff'; we are enhancing people's wellbeing overall."

And there is support from politicians around the world. In the UK the prime minister acted on a recommendation from the Quality Of Life Commission by calling on the Office for National Statistics to measure and act on wellbeing measures. He has also said that his Every Business Commits initiative "calls for business to work on improving quality of life and wellbeing." As Ian Cheshire, chief executive of B&Q Kingfisher, has said "We need to radically redesign our business models with less emphasis on growth and more on wellbeing." Or as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has put it "The relevant metric of sustainability is the production of human wellbeing per unit of extraction from or imposition upon nature" and the Stiglitz Commission, looking into way to stop a repeat of the last international financial collapse, has said "measures of wellbeing should be put in a context of sustainability".

In the necessary updating of capitalism that this will entail, business needs to get comfortable with the shift to more porous, collaborative and hybrid value forms. As Botsman and Rogers say in What's Mine Is Yours: "We believe collaborative consumption is part of an even bigger shift from a production-orientated measurement system that just gauges the amount we sell to a multi-dimensional notion of value that also takes into consideration the wellbeing of current and future generations. With the consideration of a more holistic understanding of wellbeing, we see this epoch as a time when we take a leap and recreate a sustainable system built to serve basic human needs for community, individual identity, recognition and meaningful activity."

As well as a radical updating of capitalism, this journey calls for a deep dive into the dynamics of wellbeing and flourishing. It calls for business to think about the real wellbeing-needs that sit behind products and services. And it calls for supporting not undermining "capabilities for flourishing".

These are not concepts that business is overly familiar with, but I'm excited by the interest I am getting from the corporate world in this new approach to business. In a series of blogs to follow, I will be examining what flourishing enterprise might mean for a selection of companies and sectors.

Above all, flourishing enterprise seems to be applealing to the companies I work with because its a 'yes we can' story. For too long sustainability and 'CSR' have been firmly a NO story about stopping doing things. Whats new here is that a focus on maximising the wellbeing of customers and society is a positive vision. That makes it very empowering for companies and more likely to succeed in helping to create the kinds of change we need.

Jules Peck is a partner at Abundancy Partners and chair of Edelman's Sustainability Group. He is also a trustee at the new economics foundation and a fellow of ResPublica'

The Three-Day Weekend - A Dream Deferred

Reposted in full from The Globe and Mail, 20 May 2011

'Is there anything nicer than a weekend in spring?

Actually, there is – a three-day weekend in spring.

Seventy-two precious hours of freedom. Finish that book on the bedside table. Stroll the park, scour the barbecue, plant the garden. Or, if you're really ambitious, tackle the clutter in the basement.

Canadians enjoy five or six of these brief furloughs a year. In fact, they savour them – tonics for the spirit – like bottles of vintage wine.

The regular weekend is like a speed bump. It slows you down, but doesn't last long enough to change your basic habits. Three days, on the other hand, is a legitimate rest. It allows you to reset the psychic thermostat.

So here's the real question du jour: Why aren't there more of them? What's so sacred about the five-day workweek, a regimen set in place in North America seven decades ago that has been virtually immoveable since (unlike in many European countries)? In an age of high-tech efficiency and higher productivity, why isn't the working world organized to provide us with more leisure time?

The benefits – social, economic, ecological – would be legion.

Certainly, we were promised it. For more than a century, a loud chorus of visionaries has lauded the fruits of science and technology, and the personal liberties they would confer.

It hasn't worked out that way. Indeed, as they embark on their annual Victoria Day weekend – National Patriots Day in Quebec – Canadians (tethered to BlackBerries, laptops and iPads) are more likely to be struck by a grimmer calculus. Our so-called work-life balance has lost its equilibrium. Increasingly, we are logging longer hours. Increasingly, we have less time for recreational pursuits.

The statistics confirm what, in our weary bones, we already know. According to one recent American study, the amount of leisure time per capita hasn't changed significantly in 105 years. To the extent that is has changed, it's for the worse. Although the time Canadians spent on leisure pursuits increased from 5.5 to 5.8 hours per day between 1986 and 1998, by 2005 it had reverted to the 1986 level, a decrease of 18 minutes per day.

In her 1993 book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Harvard professor Juliet Schor documents the steady annual rise of work hours after 1970. The uptick – about nine hours per year – applies to both men and woman, white- and blue-collar workers. The surprise factor derives from the productivity numbers, which doubled between 1948 and 1990. By then, Americans produced enough goods and services to have adopted a four-hour workday or a six-month work year. “Or,” writes Prof. Schor, “every U.S. worker could be taking every other year off from work – with pay.”

It never happened, of course. The productivity dividend was squandered. Leisure time became a casualty of prosperity.

Reclaiming the Utopians

None of this was expected. On the contrary, for more than a century, the West's reigning mythology of infinite progress promised a cornucopia of leisure.

In 1888, the third best-selling book in America – after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur – was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887. The central character in this utopian novel, Julian West, falls asleep in the 1880s and wakes up in the year 2000. The world he apprehends has been transformed into a kind of paradise. Working hours have been reduced dramatically. People retire at age 45, with full benefits. And, via technology, goods and services are delivered almost instantaneously.

In the 1920s, biologist Julian Huxley said a two-day workweek was inevitable, because “we can only consume so much.” If only he could see us now.

Endorsing Huxley, economist John Maynard Keynes observed in the 1930s that society would eventually face a pressing social issue: “The great problem of what to do with our leisure.”

Their fears were unfounded. Industrial society's ability to function with reduced work capacity was clearly demonstrated during the Second World War, when millions of men went off to the front. Had the same methodologies been preserved after 1945, argued philosopher Bertrand Russell, and “the workweek cut to four days, all would have been well. Instead, the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed.” For Dr. Russell, “the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

The post-war decades yielded a harvest of new labour-saving devices. By 1970, American writer Alvin (Future Shock) Toffler envisaged an irreversible exodus from the workplace, precipitating a boom in leisure-time activities. These roseate forecasts achieved consensus as the computer era dawned and gathered pace, spurred by the development of the integrated circuit in 1958.

“From the ashes of the work ethic will rise the phoenix of leisure,” trumpeted electronic engineers Alan Burkitt and Elaine Williams, in 1980. “People will have the opportunity of using more free time to pursue their leisure interests, and more money to spend on them.” And computer scientist Christopher Evans maintained that the microprocessor would “at long last make the humanistic dream of universal affluence and freedom from drudgery a reality.”

The cult of hard labour

So what went wrong? Ben Hunnicutt thinks he knows. “The problem is that work has taken the place of religion in our lives,” says the American sociologist, who teaches at the University of Iowa.

“All the mythologies associated with work are the same ones associated with God. Except work is a false God. The notion that we can grow our economies forever, reach full employment – it's easier to believe in the resurrection of the body. ”

The research of Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild verifies Prof. Hunnicutt's theory. For her 1997 book, The Time Bind, When Work becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, Prof. Hochschild interviewed employees for an American corporation that had put enlightened, family-friendly policies for work-sharing, flex-time, parental leave and sabbaticals in place. Yet the usage rate proved shockingly low – not because management subtly discouraged their adoption, or because employees were unaware of the programs, or because they could not afford them. Higher-paid workers were even less likely to use flex-time than lower-paid workers.

“What I realized,” says Prof. Hochschild, “is that the village well has gone to work. If you asked these people where they felt good about themselves, where they felt supported, where they felt safe – it was always work. One man said, ‘I've worked for the company 30 years. I get pink slips at home.'”

And for all its mega-pixelated marvels, technology itself now degrades the quality of our leisure. As French philosopher Jacques Ellul noted, our leisure time, “instead of ... representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. ... Leisure time is mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man's ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free time than labour itself.”

It's time for a change – time to move, incrementally, toward a four-day workweek.

Utah implemented exactly that plan – four, 10-hour days, with no cuts to pay or benefit, for its non-essential public employees – in 2008. Half a dozen other U.S. jurisdictions are said to be studying it. The European community has gone much further. In Scandinavia, working parents have the right to insist on a four-day week, without salary cuts. In the Netherlands, that right applies to all employees.

The 72-hour gospel

So, how rich are the potential dividends of a four-day week? Let us count the ways.

Fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions: Let's assume there'd be about 20-per-cent fewer cars on the road for morning and afternoon rush hours. That would constitute a major reduction in crude oil usage. The same percentage decline would apply to chemical compounds spewed by cars and trucks – carbon monoxide and dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, ozone, lead and chloro-fluorocarbons. Global warming might even be reduced.

Disposable income: The 20-per-cent savings on gas, car maintenance and insurance would accrue to personal pocketbooks. The family sedan would last longer. Money otherwise allocated to these budget categories could be spent consuming other goods and services – so that overall levels of demand and consumption would not be affected.

Corporate incentives: Far from seeing the four-day week as a threat to productivity, the business world should welcome it. There would be significantly less absenteeism. With less stress on employees, companies would also be able to cut budgets for workplace stress-reduction and physiotherapy programs. Their own costs for heat, lights, security and building or office maintenance would also decline.

The well-being app: And finally, the three-day weekend's Killer App – call it the Well-Being App.

There'd be more time. Time for the family, a demonstrable, arguably urgent, need. And more time for the self. You could start that cottage industry you've been planning for years. Finish the screenplay. Take your kids on long hikes.

With more time, you would be able to cook more and eat out less (additional savings). You would watch less television. The habit is actually a reflex of exhaustion – European studies show that four-day workers are less inclined to park in front of the tube.

Instead of dropping your toddler at the day-care centre, you'd have one more day a week with him or her. Instead of missing the ballet class or the hockey game because of a corporate meeting, you would be there for it, video-camera in hand.

As a practical matter, “we need not adopt a one-size-fits-all template,” says John De Graaf, who runs the Seattle-based movement Take Back Your Time. “We have to recognize that people have different needs.”

But in dozens of ways, large and small, the three-day weekend would begin to repair the breach that has formed at the heart of Western culture – a breach in the quality of our lives.

Perhaps we need to become like Bartleby the scrivener in Herman Melville's short story. His boss repeatedly gives him assignments, to which the inscrutable legal assistant repeatedly says, “I'd prefer not to.”

If Facebook and Twitter postings can inspire a revolution that topples a dictator in Egypt, a campaign for a four-day workweek should be a piece of cake.

You have the next three days – at least – to think about it.'

Stepping Back to Civilize Ourselves

Excerpt from the New Internationalist, 29 April 2011

Spring is in the air. But that’s not why everyone’s so happy in Sunny England this week!The weather is more mid-summer than spring, really, with blazing sun and not a cloud in sight. The weather cheers people up enormously, no doubt. But the thing that seems to make everyone smile is the fact that they’ve all had four days off, a three-day working week for heaven’s sake with Easter Week and the Bank Holidays. Folks have gone back to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, then have Friday off for the Royal Wedding. I’ve honestly never seen everyone look so perky in this country before...

Someone said, ‘Everyone really should have a three-day week. It’s perfect.’ And looking at the happy faces around I wondered, why ever not? The artificial work cycle as we know it came with the Industrial Revolution. Till then, most people followed the natural agricultural cycle. They worked hard when it was ploughing, sowing, reaping or harvest time and then they relaxed when it was all over. There was a natural rhythm to life...

As we sail through the 21st century, I watch with dismay as hard-won labour laws stop being effective. I see unions lose control completely and people go back to working long exploitative hours for fear of losing their jobs in a man-made recession which allows corrupt city sharks to swallow up pensioners’ hard-earned money, while the bankers responsible walk away with million dollar bonuses. I see young people fritter away their youth and their lives for a few dollars more, with little time to stop and stare, enjoy the spring, smell the flowers or just be young and silly. Their companies don’t allow them to. They seem to own their souls.

I’m not just talking about the factory worker who is exploited. I’m looking at the young, up and coming ‘professional’, young bankers, Wall Street yuppies, IT professionals. They are as owned by the company as the miners in the 1950s song ‘I owe my soul to the company store’. Its velvet gloved but the principle is the same. They don’t own their souls anymore.

In some circles, people are trying to reclaim the lost art of living by opting for a three day week. This allows other people to have jobs, while it gives them time to breathe again. They will be dismissed as lacking in ambition, not getting to the top of the ladder, etc. etc. But they’ve chosen to opt out of the rat race. They are actually getting a life.

May their tribe increase. If by some miracle they manage to make their point of view mainstream, we’d be taking a step back to becoming civilized again!'

Tasks vs Work - Why Work Doesn't Happen At Work

This all sounds horribly familiar! Anyone who has ever worked in an office will appreciate this - and laugh out loud in a number of places!

Sourced/excerpt from TED, November 2010

'So I'm going to talk about work, specifically why people can't seem to get work done at work, which is a problem we all kind of have...we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort...

And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work...And so these companies, they build offices. They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill the space with stuff. They fill it with with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that.

However, if you actually talk to people and even question yourself, and you ask yourself, where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done? you'll find out that people don't say what businesses think they would say. If you ask people the question: where do you really need to go when you need to get something done? Typically you get three different kinds of answers. One is kind of a place or a location or a room. Another one is a moving object. And a third is a time.

So here's some examples. When I ask people - and I've been asking people this question for about 10 years - I ask them, "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?" I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck, the kitchen. I'll hear things like like an extra room in the house, the basement, the coffee shop, the library. And then you'll hear things like the train, a plane, a car - so the commute. And then you'll hear people say, "Well, it doesn't really matter where I am, as long as it's really early in the morning or really late at night or on the weekends." You almost never hear someone say the office. But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office, and they're making people go to it all the time, yet people don't do work in the office.

What is that about? Why is that? Why is that happening? And what you find out is that, if you dig a little bit deeper, you find out that people - this is what happens - people go to work, and they're basically trading in their work day for a series of work moments. That's what happens at the office. You don't have a work day anymore; you have work moments. It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there, and then something else happens and you're pulled off your work, and you've got to do something else, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch. Then you have something else to do, then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you this question. And before you know it, it's 5:00 pm, and you look back on day, and you realize that you didn't get anything done. I mean, we've all been through this. We probably went through it yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. You look back on your day, and you're like, I got nothing done today. I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer. I used the software they told my to use. I went to these meetings I was asked to go to. I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff. But I didn't actually do anything. I just did tasks. I didn't actually get meaningful work done.

And what you find is that, especially with creative people - designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers - that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time. And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office? How about seven hours? Six? Five? Four? When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office? Two hours? One, maybe. Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office. And this is why people chose to do work at home, or they might go to the office, but they might go to the office really early in the day, or late at night when no one's around, or they stick around after everyone's left, or they go in on the weekends, or they get work done on the plane, or they get work done in the car or in the train because there are no distractions.

Now there are different kinds of distractions, but there aren't the really bad kinds of distractions that I'll talk about in just a minute. And this sort of whole phenomenon of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn't work when you're interrupted, and that is sleep. I think sleep and work are very closely related. And it's not just that you can work while you're sleeping and you can sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phased based, or stage based events. So sleep is about sleep phases, or stages - some people call them different things. There's five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the really meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones. And if you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones - if someone bumps you in bed, or if there's a sound, or whatever happens - you don't just pick up where you left off.

If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. So you have to go back a few phases and start again. And what ends up happening - sometimes you might have days like this where you wake up at eight in the morning, or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, man, I didn't really sleep very well. I did the sleep thing - I went to bed, I laid down - but I didn't really sleep. People say you go to sleep, but you really don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep. It just takes a while; you've got to go through these phases and stuff. And if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well. So how do we expect - does anyone here expect someone to sleep well if they're interrupted all night? I don't think anyone would say yes. Why do we expect people to work well if they're being interrupted all day at the office? How can we possibly expect people to do their job if they're going to the office to be interrupted? That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense to me.

So what are these interruptions that happen at the office that don't happen at other places? Because in other places, you can have interruptions, like, you can have the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. And if you talk to certain managers, they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions. They'll also say - sometimes they'll also say, "Well, if I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?" which is ridiculous of course, but that's one of the excuses that managers give. And I'm one of these managers. I understand; I know how this goes. We all have to improve on this sort of thing. But oftentimes they'll cite distractions. "I can't let someone work at home. They'll watch TV. They'll do this other thing." It turns out that those aren't the things that are really distracting. Because those are voluntary distractions. You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV. You decide when you want to turn something on. You decide when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk. At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions that really cause people not to get work done are involuntary. So let's go through a couple of those.

Now, managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and Youtube and other websites. And in fact, they'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work. Some of you may work at places where you can't get to these certain sites. I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here? You can't go to a website at work, and that's the problem, that's why people aren't getting work done, because they're going to Facebook and they're going to Twitter? That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy. And today's Facebook and Twitter and Youtube, these things are just modern-day smoke breaks. No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does everyone care about someone going to Facebook here and there, or Twitter here and there, or Youtube here and there? Those aren't the real problems in the office.

The real problems are what I like to call the M&M's, the managers and the meetings. Those are the real problems in the modern office today. And this is why things don't get done at work, it's because of the M&M's. Now what's interesting is, if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work - like at home, or in a car, or on a plane, or late at night, or early in the morning - you don't find managers and meetings; you find a lot of other distractions, but you don't find managers and meetings. So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere, but you do find at the office. And managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people. That's pretty much what managers are for, they're for interrupting people. They don't really do the work, so they have to make sure everyone else is doing the work, which is an interruption. And we have a lot of managers in the world now. And there's a lot of people in the world now. And there's a lot of interruptions in the world now because of these managers. They have to check in: "Hey, how's it going? Show me what's up," and this sort of thing. And they keep interrupting you at the wrong time, while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do, they tend to interrupt you.

That's kind of bad. But what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings. And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work. We all know this to be true. And you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees; it doesn't work that way. The manager calls the meeting, so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people - is to say, "Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. I don't care what you're doing. Just, you've got to stop doing what you're doing, so you can have this meeting." I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop? What if they're thinking about something important? What if they're doing important work? All of a sudden you're telling them that they have to stop doing that to do something else. So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter usually. Because meetings aren't work. Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later.

But meetings also procreate. So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting and tends to lead to another meeting. There's often too many people in the meetings, and they're very, very expensive to the organization. Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting, but that's not true, unless there's only one person in that meeting. If there are 10 people in the meeting, it's a 10-hour meeting, it's not a one-hour meeting. It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one one-hour meeting, which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes. But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. You don't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook. You can't. I don't even know if you can. You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour. And so we tend to fill these times up when things should really go really quickly.

So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially to offices. These things don't exist outside of the office. So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation. What can managers do -- enlightened managers, hopefully -- what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort? It's that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." Because the offices are well-equipped, everything should be there for them to do their work, but they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that? I have three suggestions I'll share with you guys. I have about three minutes, so that'll fit perfectly.

We've all heard of the casual Friday thing. I don't know if people still do that. But how about no-talk Thursdays...nobody in the office can talk to each other. Just silence, that's it. And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work actually gets done when nobody talks to each other. This is when people actually get stuff done, is when no one's bothering them, when no one's interrupting them. And you can give someone - giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work. It's better than a computer. It's better than a new monitor. It's better than new software, or whatever people typically use. Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable...'

Hands Up Who Wants A 30 Hour Working Week?

Reposted in full from The Punch, 22 February 2011

'Is there one clear possible area of policy reform that would provide a good basis for making society more civil? A core issue that affects a range of social well being indicators and our life choices? Could too much to do and longer working hours be at the heart of the discontents and social inadequacies of contemporary life?

Reducing standard working hours would challenge some basic political and social assumptions such as the ways our time is allocated between paid work and the rest of our lives. In most developed nations, we have moved in the opposite direction, from long-term commitments to reduce standard working hours (48 hours to 35) in the last century to implicit support for ever longer working hours.

I remember debates in the 60s and 70s about how we might use the increased leisure that we expected to come from technological change and automation.

This shift seems to have come from the move to market models of society with other policy changes that underpin our current obsessions with economic outputs, not social well being. This move that started in the 80s put macho versions of self-interested individualism at the core of policy.

It undermined the original ideas of the women’s liberation movement which was to change dominant macho cultures - not just add women into them. Therefore it is my feminism that questions the relative importance of public paid work and private unpaid tasks.

How about we start the push for a norm of a 30-hour paid working week?

If this is sounding radical or unattainable, the UK think tank, the New Economics Foundation has just produced a report, Towards 21 Hours, suggesting we should aim for a future paid workload of 21 hours per week.

The author, Anna Coote, starts her case with the following points:

1. John Maynard Keynes envisaged that by the beginning of the 21st century, most people would work only 15 hours a week.

2. If time spent on housework and childcare was given a monetary value equal to the minimum wage, it would be worth £253.7 billion: 21 per cent of GDP.

3. Shorter working hours does not mean less productivity. In fact, studies suggest that those who work shorter hours are more productive.’

Later, Coote states:

A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.

I am not proposing we go as far as that at present. However, I am proposing that the Federal government address time issues by:

Initiating a Time Budgeting Policy framework as the basis for assessing which Government policies affect peoples’ allocation of their time to paid work, unpaid work, leisure, production and consumption.

Referring to the Productivity Commission a brief to look at hours of work vis a vis outputs and outcomes and productivity.

Terms of reference could include:

1. Are terms such as full time and part time of any serious value?

2. Changes to current definitions of hours of work as the basis for policy making.

3. Are current terms used by ABS or other policy and reporting authorities for policy making still useful or just for international comparisons with the ILO (International Labour Organisation)?

4. Would it be possible to look at a paid work unit of 3 or 3.5 hours being established as the basic unit of paid work and multiples of this be used to record and assess time allocations?

5. How do we value the productivity of unpaid work and its relationship to paid work in areas such as care and home production?

In the pre-feminist days there was no discussion of unpaid work, just paid work and the problem of too much time off! The feminism of the 70s was devised under the widespread assumption that the future would inevitably contain shorter paid working hours for all. We need to ask what happened as like the paperless office, the ‘leisure’ that never happened.

The 80s saw working hours become longer at more senior levels, while less skilled workers lost their jobs. Productivity became associated with long hours worked, technology was used to get rid of routine support workers and hours lengthened as people became fearful they might lose their jobs.

Women who moved into paid work, often part time, over the previous decades were seen as not serious workers, if not full-time overtime oriented. The feminist options for all workers to be able to combine paid work, career, family and community responsibilities became less possible.

Few, if any, men are prepared to challenge the false proposition that longer hours means more productivity.

Less time on paid work means having more time for other activities that can reduce consumption of services and other goods: care of others, home productions, creative involvements, volunteering, leisure and pleasure.

If both men and women took similar time allocations, it could break down the implicit gender barriers in paid and unpaid work and reduce consumption. It means more paid work to share around, so those in paid work should be more able to manage the multiple demands and pleasures.

And it may increase individual productivity as there is evidence that shorter working hours are more productive. Maybe we can learn more from Aboriginal priority setting values?

Start by doing away with the useless distinction between part time and full time as more or less than 35 hours per week. This could be a first step in defining what reasonable socially responsible workloads could and should be.

Any takers?'

Willing Slaves

Great post/review of 'Willing Slaves', Madeleine Bunting's analysis of why we work too hard...

Excerpt from The Guardian, 3 July 2004

'...There's a great tradition of what we might call anti-work writing, which stretches back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. The thinkers and pioneers of the Enlightenment truly believed that commerce, machinery and wages would bring freedom to the British peasantry. But that was not how William Blake, Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, DH Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and EP Thompson, among many others, saw it. They saw capitalism and its machines as slave drivers. Now Madeleine Bunting has joined the argument, and the question she asks is: what has happened to the promise of work? Hard work was supposed to bring wealth and satisfaction. Instead, argues Bunting, with an abundance of statistics and anecdotes to back her up, it has brought worry, illness, poverty and debt. Why do so many of us voluntarily submit ourselves to low, low wages, long, long hours and high stress? Why do we willingly enslave ourselves?

In the late 18th and all through the 19th centuries, the great project of industrialisation was to take a nation of strong-willed and independent agricultural workers and transform them into docile wage slaves. The two principal methods used by those at the top were fear of God and fear of hunger. A new work ethic was promoted by the Methodists, who preached every Sunday to the new working class that it was their moral duty to work hard. God wanted you to work; God was a sort of über-boss, or "overlooker", in the jargon of the time. Slack off at work and the eternal flames of hell awaited.

Crucially also, wages were set low to ensure the worker returned to work on Monday morning. Hunger was found to be an effective prod to ensure that workers - men, women and children from the age of six upwards - made it to the mill on time.

These evils were, of course, resisted. First there was the 10-hour-day movement. Then, eventually, child labour was abolished. The trade unions - after much struggle, it has to be said - managed to improve conditions. The eight-hour day was introduced. Surely things are better today? The physically brutal conditions have gone, and no one is so poor today that they starve.

Bunting argues that we are still enslaved. We may not die from hunger, but we are certainly overworked and stressed out. Work has overtaken us, she argues; it has invaded our consciousness. And the physical hardships of working in the old mills have been replaced by new psychological hardships. Wages are low, hours are long, stress levels are rising...

...For all its blather about "work-life balance", the government remains firmly attached to work as a panacea for all social ills. Tony Blair believes in work for everyone. "Anyone of working age who can work should work," he said in 1998. That included single mums and the disabled. And those unwilling to join in are sent on various Restart schemes.

So if it is true that work is a gigantic con trick that we are now waking up to, the question remains: if we dismantle the job system, then what do we replace it with? How do we live?

One answer is to live well on less. If we do not desire the panoply of products that are sold to us each day, then we will not have such a voracious appetite for money. Less money means less work. Less work means more freedom to do our own work or do what we want to do. Bunting gives a few inspiring examples of families who have downsized, gone part-time or freelance.

Bunting also calls on the unions to help. They have become so obsessed with wages, she says, that they have forgotten about conditions and employee well-being. They have neglected the terrible effects that not being able to control one's own time can have on the human spirit. A shorter working week might be a start. Russell and Maynard Keynes thought that four hours a day was enough. The government, Bunting thinks, could be doing more. Are there legislative solutions - more generous maternity and paternity leave, and so forth? More bank holidays? But first, perhaps, we need to reject the work ethic in ourselves, embrace liberty and redefine, as Bunting suggests, the meaning of success.'