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Should we all work less?
Technologies connect us to others 24/7, which often means we can work around the clock.
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: The conventional economic wisdom right now is that we need more: More sales, more growth, and especially, more jobs. But sometimes, the conventional wisdom is just that. Conventional.
So we'll wrap up our Future of Jobs series today with this counter-conventional thought: That for jobs at least, maybe less actually means more.
Adriene Hill reports from the Marketplace Sustainability Desk.
Adriene Hill: Imagine having more time to cook dinner...
Julia Child: And so I'm going to start off with the bacon.
More time to work up a sweat...
Exercise instructor: We're making beautiful legs here today.
More time to ponder the meaning of life...
Person: Hmmmmm...
If you're the sort of person who does those sort of things, it could all be yours -- if you are willing, able or forced to spend a less time at work.
Mike Schiepke: It's freed up a day, so you can do a lot of loose ends and errands in a day that you normally wouldn't do.
Mike Schiepke is an architect in Santa Monica, Calif. We meet outside during his lunch break on a stunning fall day. He's working only four days a week now, after his firm cut jobs and hours. He says there are good things about his slimmed down schedule; he gets to spend more time with his son. It strengthened his family.
Schiepke: We're on the same team, we're team Schiepke.
But the problem is that less time at work means less money, means cutbacks.
Schiepke: We do our own lawn, we wash our own cars, the cable's gone. We even looked into getting rid of the cell phones, 'cause is that a necessity, you know? So we really had to reprioritize.
Economist Juliet Schor, from Boston College, says accepting those cutbacks and making friends with reduced work-hours could help solve the country's unemployment problem.
Juliet Schor: Work-time reduction is an obvious way to go forward, which would allow us to share the work that we have.
The basic idea is that there's a pool of work that needs to get done: If I do a little less and my colleagues do a little less, we can hire someone else. Some other countries have actually tried this out. France, for example, cut its average work week to 35 hours -- with debatable results. Some researchers say the shorter work week added as many as 350,000 jobs. Others find no significant change to unemployment.
Schor says cutting time at work can also be good for the environment -- people working less have less money to buy things and they have more time.
Schor: They can do things more slowly, which tends to be associated with a lower carbon footprint.
Peter VanDoren: The first rule of economics is go after the thing you want to go after, never go after it indirectly, because it won't work out the way you thought it would.
Peter VanDoren is with the libertarian Cato Institute.
VanDoren: If you want more employment, then subsidize firms to create jobs.
VanDoren says culturally being told to work less would be a non-starter. U.S. workers would resent the government saying they could only work a certain number of hours, a point Schor doesn't contest. Change, she says, would need to come by making sure people aren't penalized for working fewer hours. In the Netherlands, for example, employees that work fewer hours can't be denied promotions.
VanDoren, from the Cato Institute, says the whole discussion of reducing work hours is really so "public radio."
VanDoren: It's a middle class and college-educated notion of what work is like.
No doubt, reduced work hours wouldn't be sustainable for the large number of America's working poor, scraping by without any budget flexibility. Schor agrees; you'd have to change the minimum wage, she says.
With the way jobs are structured today, reducing hours is also not in most companies' best interests. My employers will pay the same for benefits -- whether I work 40 hours a week or 32. Still, Schor thinks work-time reduction might catch-on in the U.S., especially if people have a choice, rather than are forced into it, like our architect, Mike Schiepke.
Back out in the California sun, I ask him:
Hill: If your firm came back to you today, later this afternoon, and said if you want, you can come back five days a week. Would you do it?
Schiepke: Yeah, I would do it. Yeah.
He says he'd miss his days off, miss extra time with his son. But he feels committed to his firm, he likes his job, his work and the lifestyle that comes with it.
I'm Adriene Hill for Marketplace.
Ryssdal: You can catch more from our Future of Jobs series on our website. And while you're there, check out our Future-Jobs-O-Matic, the skinny on which jobs will be hot and which ones won't a decade from now.
There are two major problems with the fewer-hours-for-more-people solution, both of which are merely touched on by your column. First, it can only work if you're willing to accept the consequences, as France was not. Second, the reason recoveries start with increased hours rather than hiring is that an hourly wage and even health-care is the least of an employer's costs for each employee. As long as the goverment makes it vastly more expensive to hire a worker than to pay existing workers overtime, companies will choose the overtime option.
But also, in France the government imposed the shorter work-week on the private sector. Rather like the President's chilling statement that there's a point at which one "has made enough money," it may be true that those of us who have jobs should only work a certain amount so that more of us can work. But none of us want the government telling us where that point is.
There is no mention of the increases in productivity for US workers that have been trumpeted for the last generation. This increase means that most middle class workers are expected to put in 9 - 10, even 12 hour days without additional compensation. And in the run-up to the Great Recession, how many of us took on the work of former job holders, just to hang on to our jobs at all? It is long past time to rethink this notion that one can never work too much, and redistribute jobs into realistic work weeks. Our children, communities and schools will thank us for it. What will Schipke's son say when he finds out his father's job is the most important thing in his life?
Wow, this is naive. "economist" Schor wants to reduce one worker's hours/pay so that another worker can have same. This is no net gain. We must realize where jobs come from: they come from economic growth, which comes from reinvestment. Our $$ are sent overseas which employs workers in those countries, so why are we surprised that the jobs are not here anymore?
So I work less and make less money so I have to drop my cell phone service, satellite t.v. now I can't go out to eat anymore. So then the cell phone company, satellite t.v. and restaurants all have to lay off more people. I don't see how that helps.
I don't understand the statement that the solution to cutting hours for the working poor is "changing minimum wage." So if a business pays 10 people to work 40 hours a week now pays 11.5 to work 35 hours a week, but has to pay them the same dollars per week, how is that going to work out? They'll make up the cost with lower unemployment insurance premiums? More likely, they'll stick with 10 and salaried managers will have to work more to make up for the hours. And what about those salaried people who are paid for what they do, not how long they work, whether it takes 40, 50 or 60 hours per week? You are going to force them to be less productive? What if that person is the only one at work who knows a certain job, and they are needed 40 hours per week? This idea is so unrealistic it is almost not even worth the airtime. The solution to 10% unemployment is not 80% underemployment.
As a full-time art director in exile, and a freelancer of necessity, with actual projects few and far between...
I would warmly WELCOME a solid 4 day work-week with benefits, 3 day weekends, and jokes around the water cooler. Let's do it NOW !!
We can't do this. More leisure time would mean people would be less harried, worried and fatigued; less time at work would mean less time immediately under the thumb of the boss' arbitrary authority.
When people live like that, they start to image that they have _rights_ (see: 1965 <i>et seq.</i>); they start questioning the values and economic artifacts of their civilisation...they might, for example, wonder why the benefits problem that partially stands in the way of this humane and practical reduction can't be solved by making those government programmes, as they are in _decent_ places---paid-for by a reasonable tax structure that exacts more from the very rich who benefit the most from their being a government around to protect their unnaturally large accumulations of property. If we were more free and less frenetic, fewer of us would believe absurd religious and political doctrines that only benefit the people who run and own our society.
And we can't have <i>that</i>.
