How many hours a week do you work and are you working most of the time? as separate questions, they will be compressed into one.

And I'm adding: Why do you do your job?

I'm just not feeling like we are getting to the heart of why we work.

And I think it's time to read another Pink -- Drive.

We will launch our campaign at the Hub Westminster Changemaker Fayre at 6pm on the 27th! Stay tuned and get your wallets ready!

26 October 2011, from 3pm until 9-ish pm

17 November 2011, from 3pm until 9-ish pm

We will be asking you for answers to our five questions:

What is it about your job that no one realises?

How many hours a week do you work?

How much of that time are you actually working?

If you had more time to with as you wished, what could you do?

What do you need in your work in order to be more fulfilled?

Next week is also Somali Festival week at Oxford House, so make sure you stop by for that too!

Oxford House is on Twitter @oxhse

The point of installing myself in places is so that I reach people without the digital equipment or digital skills to contribute of their own volition. We want to rethink work-- what we want from it, what we contribute to it, what we learn from doing it. This is a digital age and we deserve jobs policies that address this, not the industrial revolution. The way we work and what we want from it has changed and is changing. We'd love to talk about it with you!

So we've re-launched as rethinkwork.org (I know, right-- can you believe no one had purchased that URL?! Ours now!).

You can now also find us on @rethink_work on twitter.

The original videos to go with our 21hours Experiment will remain on our youtube page, as will the expert videos. We hope that we can come back to them one day soon.

Until then, keep it here.

But we've taken testimony from experts attempting to explain the current state of things?

What's the place for this?

We're going to put the expert testimony all up on our youtube page as a resource for interested parties.

So that's what we're going to do.

We're going to ask people to contribute to our little project (and we're keeping the name because it was afterall all started from inspiration by the 21 Hours report) by vox pops, their own video blogs, 'found' video blogs, and maybe an installation or two.

If you'd like to know more about how we envision the project going forward, jump on over to Ann's PhD page for the latest iteration.

I engaged Ramon Arratia via Twitter, emailed, and he replied that he "profoundly disagrees" with the premise of the experiment. He said: 

(n.b. @ann_lytical is Betty Worker's alter-ego Ann Danylkiw, producer of this film-like-thing-we're-up-to)

My response was, 'great, want to say that on camera?'  And so off I went this morning to see Mr. Arratia at the InterfaceFlor showroom in London (super-swanky, by the way). 

Arratia expanded on his disagreement for me: 

(clip, full interview will appear on the site shortly, and will be edited into the final film-thing)

We understand what he's getting at: it's society we have to change; we have to make people realise that there is value in things other than consumption. And he's dead on that when thinking about sustainability we get too focused on the materials.

Where we disagree and where we think he fails to connect consumption with well, sustainable economics is that (it's an assertion of nef's work upon which this idoc-webdoc-experiment-thing is based) if we have more time we will do less "quick-fix" consumption. Arratia wants us to build a knowledge, passion, life's work kind of economy -- a socent driven economy-- whilst... people continue to work at jobs they hate full time??

Arratia says he wants people who love history to be able to sell that and then work as much as they want full time. We're familiar with this attitude: it's common amongst socents. But what they often fail to realize (though Arratia does?) most people work at "crap jobs" that they hate, should they be given the time opportunity to retrain or study what it is they really love?

Nef's work contends that it is a time issue; Arratia says it's impossible to ask people to work fewer hours because they will still want to consume and even status consume.

We don't buy that, necessarily: nef's assertion in the "21 hours report" is that people will stop "quick-fix" consuming and fix things themselves, make meals at home, upcycle things themselves. We're not certain what will happen to consumption. We suspect that consumption will possibly increase in the short to medium term* if people had more time to not work but we'd like to see, which is kind of the point of running our little experiment. But it looks like Mr. Arratia won't even consider it for InterfaceFlor.

After all, for the company that tries our experiment, we're asking that they hold income for their employee participants constant. That is, we suspect the story is in a realisation that comes with discovering what you can do with time when you've got it. We spend so much time going from A to B to C that we haven't time to stop and think, for our brains to relax enough to subconsciously process our lives and then realise innovations we could make (personally and professionally). That's the other mistake Arratia makes: he assumes that people who manufacture things, that knowledge and creativity aren't part of their jobs; if you empower employees, no matter what the job, creativity and innovation-- knowledge economy-- are involved, but I digress.

What do you think, are we talking past each other? Are we off our rockers and Arratia is right?

Do you work for a company and would like to disagree with us on camera, as Mr. Arratia has?

*If we worked fewer hours, consumption might increase:

Culture is orientated towards consumption, we have arguably forgotten how to fix things and make things for ourselves. Though it shouldn't be assumed that we should or would make things for ourselves. As we move towards a professionalised "knowledge" economy (not in the accurate, but rather pop-politics sense) it might be that goods become worth more, more bespoke because there's more knowledge and artisanship required to make them (see Markus Albers, for a start, Juliet Schor too). So consumption (unless economic revaluation happens, but even then???) would monetarily increase: we'd buy less but higher value goods. We might also spend less on 'stuff' for the need to spend more on high value services like education (though to what extent will the cost of education fall if people start offering courses over the internet, time banking in exchange for instruction).

The picture that emerges from the interview is curious and perhaps illuminates the greatest thought barrier to a shorter standard working week: it's easier to switch to shorter standard working hours where production is mechanised because the "machine makes the decision."  Which is to say not all of Metro Plastics works on the 30/40 system: only the factory itself does. It operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; employees work 6 hours shifts, 5 days a week. But the management office where 'pencil pushing' and customer service activities take place works a standard 40 hour week, '8 hour' day.

What's the story?

Hahn says that it would be impossible to implement the shorter working hour standard for the office type work because they need to deal with customers across timezones, in the US and abroad.

I don't know if I buy that customer needs are too difficult to schedule into an eight hour day.

Hahn explained how Metro Plastics is able to maintain pay levels at 40 hours a week:

Cost savings are multiplicative and according to Lindsey "makes up for itself." Managers no longer have to deal with issues like tardiness or absenteeism because the cost to the employee for lost time is so high; quality control oversight is easier because there are no breaks (for lunch or cigarettes) so there's never a question as to who was responsible for a mistake, and mistakes are fewer because no substitutions on the assembly line have to be made whilst employees break (no cross training across jobs is necessary so everyone doing what they do is an expert; over an 8 hour period 3 substitutions used to have to be made).

Metro Plastics factory is staffed with (this again is disappointing) a demographic that tends to work part-time hours anyway: older people (grandparents very often), students, single parents.

Employees receive full benefits, 401k, and (even!) tuition re-imbursement.

Hahn says of tuition re-imbursement the as employers they "expect that you'll educate yourself to the point where we can't afford you any more." Working in the factory at Metro Plastics isn't considered "a full life career" by the company and yet there's a sense of job security.

They make no distinction for part-time, that is, the working hours aren't devalued as such and receive the same benefit as full-time working hours. (nb part-time work in the US is considered anything 30 hours and below, very often defined by law as such)

But the distinction made between the 40 hour office work and the 30 hour factory work, where both are valued the same in terms of receipt of benefits, both have a sense of employer investment in the employee as a person, the difference -- is it lack of respect to the office workers that they work 40 hours a week? Why are they more responsible to the company, owe the company more time-- if we leave aside consideration of actual pay levels and think in terms of benefits?

This isn't the first time I've encountered skepticism that people who don't do shift work (includes public servants where 'shift' like hours can be more readily enforced) could work a shorter standard work week.

(Try talking to social entrepreneurs about a shorter standard work week-- OMG!)

When I began thinking about the form of the experiment I expected that the barrier would be the other way around: shift workers, people who physically make things would be the job class where implementing a standard shorter work week would be the most difficult.

In my mind, people that do office type work, where interaction and conceptual skills are more important would be easier: from my own experience the writing, research, whatever goes faster if I'm less intellectually exhausted.  Even in the middle of a longer day, I'm always more refreshed after I've taken a walk, stopped to look in a local gallery on my way from point A to point B. Differentiation in my use of time during the day-- even if it means fewer hours at the desk working-- always has a positive effect on my productivity per hours worked because it's easier to focus (Tweetdeck off, of course ;).

I have to admit I'm ... puzzled. Are you?

xBettyWorker (Ann)

*interview conducted 4 January 2011 by phone