Work 83 hours a week and start a charity in your spare time

This is an old formulation; our questions have now expanded to 5 and we'll begin putting up information about how to contribute soon.

We'll be this is an answer the Tories would've like to see to say why the Big Society might have worked.

Japan's 'Freeter' & our increasing temporary employment

The ‘freeter’ is the Japanese term for someone who perpetually works part-time in order to spend the other half of their time exploring their passions. 

The term obviously conjures up the notion of ‘freeloader’ in western culture, it’s someone who lives off of others. But we’d like to ask whether the negative connativity of ‘freeter’ is deserved.

See here from the anthropology blog ‘Anthropology Archive’:

“During the 1980s, a new type of worker, termed ''freeter,'' emerged in Japan. ''Freeter'' is a contraction of ''free Arbeiter', and implies a serial part-time worker who only holds part-time jobs or who moves from one job to another. A freeter has no intention of settling down to a serious career, and spends most of his or her time pursuing other interests or just enjoying freedom….

The declining chance of coming across a permanent job to which a young person can commit themselves undermines their commitment to the job in which they are currently engaged, and results in a rash of unemployment and job-switching. Young part-timers become dependent upon their parents, creating the so-called ''parasite singles'' phenomenon (Yamada 1999). The emergence of parasite singles is a direct consequence of a substantial decline in labor demand for young people and of structural changes in the corporate environment, as well as of the psycho-social characteristics of today's youth.”

Japan’s economy is an interesting case study in super-efficient, fast-paced rise to global economic wealth that it provides a vision of post-great-recession cultural attitudes. 

More mainstream cognition regarding (over-)consumption and disillusionment with the political ecology of wealth were present in Japan after the beginning of it’s recession  and continued throughout it’s decades of stagnation. You’ve only got to check out the work of Japan’s most translated author, Harukai Murakami:

“Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdi-vided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfash-ionable good, and ditto for bad. … Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world—philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration. “ Dance, Dance, Dance

The question we'd like you to consider is this: what’s wrong with working to earn enough to get buy? What’s wrong with putting your ‘real energy’ (for lack of a better term) into your passions? This is the kind of life that artists and innovators have always had. They say that those who truly never work a day in their lives are those who enjoy their work. Spending time on your passion may mean that one day you find a way to make a living at it. 

Or not. And that’s probably ok too. Economic prospects are fewer these days and governments have less money. Local cooperative caring, farming, digital organisation, youth ministries all need a few good volunteers who probably wouldn’t do it and do it so passionately and so well if they had to.

What we’re looking for here is a balance, a balance that provides for everyone economically and humanistically. What do you want out of life?

Tips for CEOs for 2011: Consider Time

As the start of the year is upon us sustainability, management, HR websites are all coming up with 'top tips' lists for promoting better, more efficient work places this year. Unsurprisingly, no one mentions shorter work hours, but they do mention adjusting how they use time.

DEGW a major proponent of flexible work has a couple of goldstar tips on their '10 Tips for Maximising Efficiency and Productivity in 2011':

2. Scheduling practices. Whether it is on Outlook, EMS, AgileQuest®, or simply a whiteboard in the office, make sure employees notifies their team of their whereabouts, when they are travelling, working from home, or at a client’s site

6. Daylight! Encourage individuals to let the sun in! Make sure that blinds and doors that obscure the beauty of the surrounding environment are not used when they are not required.

10. Encourage community. Create events where individuals can share their personal experiences or skills. Instigate weekly meetings where the agenda is personal, not business focused. Rotate responsibilities for providing refreshments: happy hours, breakfasts, lunch and learns or show and tells. Make it fun to be a member of the team or organization.

No where on the 10 list does DEGW suggest employees 'break out' of the office. But the combination of these three seem to point in that direction. I once had a conversation with IFTF's Anthony Townsend about 'breakout' business practices, employees having meetings whilst cycling through the city, setting up chairs outdoors and claiming space to 'work'. Part of 'breaking out' into other spaces I think lends itself to thinking about how we use time and its place in our 'work day'.

On the Guardian Sustainable Business website, Dr Tima Bansal from the Network for Business Sustainability writes, "Experiment through pilot programs. Many employees want to make a difference, but it's hard to be creative if they're running hard all the time. Give employees the opportunity to create something bigger than themselves – plus the time and resources to do it – and they may come up with an idea or product that redefines your industry."

The following paragraph recommends forming "unlikely" business alliances, but I'd like to examine the underlying logic for this statement. In order to foster innovative business practices -- innovation being the buzzword of the next decade-- people need time to think. We've all experienced this: you're out with friends or taking the kids to a film and all of a sudden you solve that problem you've been having at work or come up with an interesting way to do it. When our minds are relaxed our subconscious kind of organises thoughts and memories from our daily lives, files them in place in our brains. Until that process happens it's hard to innnovate.

One thing I've learned speaking with people about the '21hours Experiment' is that a lot of people relate shorter work hours and flexible work practices with a strategy to avoid employee burnout. There is even a small social enterprise somewhere outside Bristol that is trailing shorter work hours for this purpose.*

Shorter work hours sometimes seem unrealistic to people because of a culture of presenteeism. People burnout and allow themselves to burnout because they feel like it's right and proper to put work first and be at work all the time, to dedicate so much of themselves to their work. Sometimes people have to be told they are burning out and need a holiday.

Nevertheless, it seems that employees that feel that they have flexible work circumstances 'work' better at work.

There are two themes that have been flushed out here, I feel, two starting places that I'd like to spend the next half of the year using to start a dialogue about the nature of work:

1. time is a construction, intra-organisationally, how flexible is 'work'

2. is it right and proper to believe that work is work and life is life or should we love what we do and do what we love (and never 'work' a day in our lives)?

Any thoughts, blogosphere?

*They have declined to speak with me about what they are doing or be part of the documentary.

Hari's 'Management Consultancy Scam' and the origins of work science

Once again I'm going to beg-off the highlights reel for Dr. Cross' work. I'm only to the mid-1920s, which is 15 years short of where his narrative stops; also, it's Saturday night. 

Instead, I'd like to relate an interesting factoid from late 19th century British labour struggles that is related to a news story that came across my Twitter feed yesterday: Johann Hari has a new piece on the Independent site about how management consultancies are experiencing high demand for their services now that, because of the recession, firms are belt tightening. They're looking for advice about how to stay in business and optimize their profit margins.

Hari writes, "The number of senior consultants has swollen by 10 per cent in the past year, while the number employed by local government has grown by 11 per cent." Firms, especially the larger corproations, are spending hundreds of millions dollars on what one interviewee called "snake-oil."

Today, as I continued my reading of Dr. Gary Cross' excellent history of the 'quest' for shorter work hours standards in Britain, I came across the historical beginning of 'work science.' It happened between 1890 and 1900: scientists started to study the way human biology functioned in work.  The first work scientists were closely allied with firm management.

Cross writes, “Indeed, it was a tool of an enlightened employer, intent upon optimizing output rather than wasting labour by failing to “husband” and maintain properly his “human capital” ”  (112). Work processes and production systems began to be designed such that workers could work longer without fatigue.

And thus the field of 'fatigue science' (I don't know if this is a technical term, or one simply favoured by Dr. Cross) grew in response, allied with workers.  In 1904 the British government created the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration and commissioned a Professor AF Stanley Kent to research industrial worker fatigue.  His study was one of the first into British industrial worker wellbeing and it marked a turning point in which the British government began to take worker health and welfare seriously.

Research into worker health and welfare continued into the war years, reaching its apex with the formation of the Health Munitions Workers Committee (HMWC) by then PM Lloyd George; the Committee's influence in labour relations would become considerable.  The HMWC carried out several studies from 1916 to 1918, all of which concluded similarly: worker daily net output per hour and output per week increased with fewer hours worked. 

HM Vernon conducted one such study and found that (where workers were working 70+ hour weeks, and 10-12 hour days) hourly output was 34% higher on a 61.5 hour work week, 58% higher on a 54.8 hour work week; weekly output was 11 % higher on a 61.5 hr work week, and 9% higher on 54.8 hr work week (117).

In another study cited by Cross, Ethel Osborne for the Industrial Health research board in 1919 found “Moreover, output per hour rose with hour diminutions only gradually over a four-month period. This confirmed the doctrine that workers did not simply raise output to recover lost piece-rate income. Rather “a worker found unconsciously and gradually by experience that he could work more strenuously and quickly for a short-hour week than for a long-hour week” ” (117-8).

Contrast these conclusions with a dominant ideology of the day: Taylorism that sought to motivate workers with pecuniary (waged) rewards for over-time worked, pieces produced.

Contrast these conclusions for today's management consultants who advise the willy-nilly cutting a given firm's workforce by 30% (as in an example in Hari's article). What if the consultants had advised those workers be kept on the payroll, but their hours reduced? And told management to adapt to low/no profit margin and moreover, how they could sell it to their shareholders?

At the time that most trades in Britain achieved a standard 8 hour day, european society had just undergone a major national psychological blow: the Great War.  We stand today in a similar position: economic theory and standard business practice has largely been proven to be in error.  We are just as uncertain about the future as we were then, the global economy has been decimated, just as it had then.  It's time for management consultants to do a great big rethink about their place in a changed society, just as workers did following the Great War. (Ooooo, there's another post in there...;)

Pre-Crisis Employment Recovery: how long?

I read an interesting statistic the other day about US employment levels: they aren't supposed to recover to precrisis levels until around 2015. 2015? That's half a decade.

How long will it take employment to recover in Britain to pre-crisis levels.  Let's assume (somewhat stupidly, but nevertheless this is how these things are normally assessed) that this recession will be like the recessions in the recent past: the 1980's and the 1990's.  The British economy never recovered pre-recessionary 1980's employment levels.  After the recession in 1991, it took around six years for the economy to recover employment levels. Check out this graph from the ONS (via BBC) and not in particular that UNemployment levels began higher in 1990 (yellow line) than in the 1980's (blue line). 

employment levels in the UK, recessions compared (ONS via BBC)I want to recall for a moment, something from your Macro Econ 101 course: unemployment is grossly under-reported, in general.  Why? Because it doesn't take into account those who are under-employment (systemically nor chronically) or those who have stopped searching for jobs.  And I think, as this experiment is not only about reducing work hours but using that extra time to become employed in a job you feel most suited to, it's worth pointing out that unemployment numbers do not take satisfactory employment into account either.

Overall unemployment dropped in the last quarter in the UK from 8 percent to 7.8 percent and as the FT reports the UK economy created the most jobs in 21 years, "The number of people employed in the UK surged by 184,000 to 29.02m in the second quarter, the biggest rise since 1989," and it continues (this is the interesting bit-->) "although about two-thirds of the increase came from part-time work."

So called "part-time work" hours are the kind of hours a 21 hour work week currently fits into.  So, woohoo! for more "part-time work" -- employers are reporting spare labour capacity like it's a bad thing (rethink, please!) but on the other hand this probably means that there are loads of people now under-employed at insufficient wages because we know that minimum wage (in both the US and the UK) hasn't really (double meaning alert) risen since the 1970's.

There's lots of pretty talk about how technological advances will allow the economy to recover more quickly than before.  But without proper worker retraining and proper alteration to wage levels, we think, this is doubtful. Unemployment for people over 50 has risen 52% (Guardian) in the last year, is now at the highest level in a decade. Though strangely, we seem to be trying to return to business as usual as the Telegraph has reported that by this fall City jobs will have recovered to pre-crisis levels. Well, bully for them.

For more on employment levels, the Guardian has a nice interactive graphic here about jobless claims in the UK since 1984.

W.K. Kellogg's 6 hour work day paradigm

For the experiment trailer I took two days out of my July holiday and road tripped with my dog to Iowa City, Iowa to interview Dr Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt (University of Iowa) about his work on leisure studies and in particular his documentation of the Kellogg 6 hour work day paradigm.

Hunnicutt is a jolly man with the countenance of a true American midwestern gentleman-- disheveled gray hair and matching long beard, an air lacking in any kind of formality and generously infused with hospitality.   His passion for leisure studies and simple ability to stand up to those that dismiss his discipline is heartening. 

Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. 1996. Kellogg’s Six Hour Day: A Capitalist Vision of Liberation Through Managed Work Reduction. Philadelphia: Temple.

What I wish to highlight about Dr Hunnicutt’s work and indeed about Kellogg’s grand experiment is as follows:

Kellogg’s 6 hour work day was part of a 4 day week (shift)*, which granted amounts to 24 working hours which is slightly longer than the hours suggested by the 21 Hours report.  But where the report sites episodic evidence of short-term, economic recession driven reductions in working hours, Kellogg’s paradigm presents a long-term working experiment with definitive results during both periods of economic recession and economic growth.  Kellogg’s plan illuminates just how much work time and the necessity of higher earning is actually a creation (perception) of man.

First, the 6 hour work day shows how divisive working hours are for gender and gender roles.  Workers found the extra two hours liberating; and the extra two hours a day was sufficient to challenge gender roles with in the marriage.**

Hunnicutt writes, “as work began to lose its place as the dominant social and cultural focus, traditional patterns of status and control that had been established on the centrality of work were unsettled. Male dominance, for ex, was assured in a culture dominated by work; is was much less secure outside the job. Males, threatened, retreated to the job and fortified its importance with new language and stories.”

And later, “‘Kellogg Couples” were more likely than others to report sharing some home duties…. The six-hour day often created a fluid condition at home, opening up issues about the division of labour by gender and leading to vigorous renegotiations about housework and home projects.”

Women in particular found that with two hours more a day they felt “free” from family work and house work to do things that could be defined as well-being essential activities or self-betterment activities.  Men and women as part of family units both found that they had extra time to spend with their children doing activities that were not composed of functional activities.

Second, the Kellogg paradigm is telling of historical revisionism on at least two levels:

Unions and thus workers went from fighting to protect ‘leisure’ time to fighting to protect their right to work (47). Though here, what is right and necessary to earn a living sufficient to provide for oneself and one’s family isn’t to be equated with the right to work where in this context, the right to work means the right to work as many hours as one wants.  It’s amazing what a little propaganda can do (from here I direct you to the Bernays story)

Second, job sharing and shorter working hours were once mainstream strategies for dealing with unemployment, originating out of different form of capitalist dialogue from both sides of the Atlantic, from industry magnates and academics alike. In order to protect itself against redundancies due to increasing use of machinery, there was once the understanding that labour had to make itself scarce in order to maintain living wage levels: shorter work hour standards were a way of doing that (48).  These strategies were part of capitalist not socialist strains: liberation and welfare capitalism.

Liberation capitalism and welfare capitalism are dialogues that thrived in industrial America and Britain.  In America, WK Kellogg and his associate Lewis J Brown were joined by the likes of Henry Ford, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and the American Association of Manufacturers in support of a 6 hour working day.  The Black-Connery bill was close to passing the US Congress as 30 hour work week standard in 1937, a bill which President Franklin Roosevelt lamented withdrawing support for. George Bernard Shaw and Julian Huxley both thought that by the end of the 20th century we would be working 2 day work weeks. Across the pond, Liberation Capitalism caused a ruckus from the work of Lord William Hesketh Leverhulme and EP Thompson, the later most noted for his classic tome “The Making of the English Working Class”; even Keynes expected a short working week of about 15 hours by end of century. (16-28)

Of course, these broad and rather mainstream movements for shorter working hours have been lost-- they aren’t mentioned in schools.

Lastly, one of the most fascinating characters in the historical narrative is a bloke by the name of Cummings.  He was a union negotiator in 1947, negotiating a return to 6 hour work day that the workers at the Kellogg factory stipulated as part of their agreement to work more and ramp up production for the war-time economy as mandated by President (Franklin) Roosevelt.

Hunnicutt describes him thus: “As far as Cummings was concerned, the only reason Kellogg workers could possibly want to go back to six-hours was to take a second, part-time, intermittent job with few benefits     and a considerably lower hourly wage. Leisure was of little value to Cummings, a thing to be exchanged automatically for meagre wages. His overriding reality was more money; thus the company must have ‘forced’ workers to work less than ‘full-time.’ “

The character of Cummings is indicative of the way in which society begins to value or mis-values at this point in history, work and money above all other things. Hunnicutt notes of Cummings in particular that the man couldn’t fathom that 6 hour work days actually protect the vast majority of workers at the Kellogg plant: by and large the small minority that wanted an 8 hour work day standard were typically men with seniority, where as the majority that wanted a 6 hour work day were those “in danger of being laid off or loosing seniority because of returning soldiers” (where returning soldiers would first, want their old jobs back, and second, constitute a large unemployed class) (100).

Once again, where today we have episodic evidence of shorter standard working hours working out for the best-- French companies keeping the 35 hour week even after it was repealed; local governments in the US shutting for an extra day or two a week and becoming more productive-- Kellogg’s paradigm is evidence that shorter working hours work in the longer-term and supports the episodic evidence that standard shorter working hours can work for society, and indeed produce a more equal society at that.




*N.B. 6 hour work day comes without a break for lunch because Kellogg found that workers would rather plow-through the time and leave earlier than spend the extra half hour if the day was only 6 hours anyway. Where the 21 hour working week can almost be conceptualized as 3 days of work a week, 8 hours each with an hour unpaid lunch as is standard in many office jobs.

** Though admittedly, by 1985 when the 6 hour day option ended, it was conceptualized as a ‘part-time’ position and about 75% of the Kellogg staff working 6 hour days were women.  In otherwords, the shorter working time had been diminutised, devalued-- “feminised.”

I (Ann) wish to thank Dr Hunnicutt and his Miniature Boxer for graciously welcoming me and my Bichon for almost two hours on a hot and hazy mid-western morning in July.

N.B. The drive from Central Wisconsin to Iowa City (and back) will be carbon offset-- truth be told I haven’t completely decided whether or not I believe in carbon offsetting because I do believe that as the market price stands, it doesn’t deter or alter behaviour, but I also believe until the market can be properly regulated and prices are properly fixed, I’d rather have it and do it than not (though this is like Easter and Christmas Catholics who go to mass ‘just in case,’ nevertheless...).  Therefore, offsetting is the policy of this experiment/documentary - thing.

What is the Research Office?

This is the page where we will be posting anything to do with-- you guessed it!-- research for the experiment/documentary.  Eventually, I'm sure this will end up looking like an annotated bibliography of a history of work-leisure-time balance in Britain and the United States.