The Starting Place for the Modern Story of Work

After over a year of talking up our experiment we come to realise that the experiment isn't the place to start.

The best place to start is to tell the modern story of work. In effect, we're starting a dialogue about how work has changed from an economy designed from industrial revolution and World War II.

We will do this in two ways:

1. make an idoc: an interactive documentary in the style of Studs Turkle's infamous book Working.

We've got 5 key questions to get us started:

How many hours do you work?

Of that time, how many hours do you really work?

What do most people not realise about your job?

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

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

2. write a book! Chris and Ann are now fundraising so that we can take time off to finish up all this research we've been doing about the modern story of work and put it all together into a book!

After a year of watching unemployment go up and household spending go down, of the rise of the austerity budget from Washington to London to Brussels, we now believe that we've got a more important story than we first realised:

Employment will not recover unless we fundamentally rethink work.

The strategies to increase employment currently being pursued by the governments reflect old economic models, whilst these might be relevant they've not been effective. We believe this is because the fundamental nature of work is changing. We intend to explore this in the book (and think these issues will be fleshed out in the documentary).

Stay tuned for more details!