I think we should also start with 6 hours work days or 4 days 8 hours. It will free up time to try new ideas and spend more time with family and loved ones. 6-7 weeks of vacation would also be something to try. Ie optimizing for life quality.
I remember reading a discussion about this in a german online newspaper a while ago. (In light of an initiative of the Finnish cabinet exploring 6 hour workdays, I believe).
When reading the comments, I expected people to dismiss the idea as unrealistic or naive but to agree with the spirit and to share the general goal of reducing worktime.
I was not expecting panic and outrage.
It was a minority (and certainly skewed by the groups of people who post online in the first place), but a notable number of commenters were violently opposed the idea, not out of economical concerns, but because they believed the end goal of having more free time itself was highly problematic - that it would encourage an unhealthy lifestyle, erode morals, would pose a danger to social order, etc etc.
It was a sobering read and a reminder that status-quo bias is still very much a thing.
If I'm not allowed to spend my time working, it is not free time!
In a free society, work hours is an agreement between consenting adults. If you want to work part time, that option is widely available. But why force your preferences on the rest of us?
Agreements made when the power balance is unequal are by nature not going to be fair. It is to the advantage of the one with more power to use it to get their way. For example, Silicon Valley had a famous issue of anti-poaching agreements to force wages of engineers down. Legally forcing these things is an attempt to deal with power imbalance to the benefit of the most people.
People in the experiment the gp post describes do not want to work 'part time', they want to work 'full time' for 30 hours a week. The fact that you describe that as 'part time' undermines your argument that work time is simply an agreement between adults (as opposed to a schelling point dictated by law, tradition, and convenience).
People don't freely choose to work in a vacuum - they are coerced into it (through property law). I work to avoid homelessness and starvation, and so do most people.
If I stop working, eventually somebody will turn up at my door and throw me out onto the street.
No, but good luck trying to burn some piece of forest to get your piece of earth for your farm. You cannot justify the existing order with basic human needs. In some places you even have to pay for access to water.
"biological need" is a strange way to describe being violently attacked in your place of shelter for working insufficient hours for the capitalist class
Nope. It is a right, not an obligation. Your employer can't stop you if your want to test your wings. Though this has actually been around in some form for quite a few years.
I started my first company in 2001 by getting 6 months off from Ericsson. I wanted to during that time, Ericsson would have to allow me to come back and continue as an employee. Quit permamently after three months. Now I'm happily running my fifth startup.
I left formally after three because the new business was taking off that I couldn't see any reason to go back. Better to have 100% focus on the new business.
I realize the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937 is considered anathema among libertarians and many owners of enterprises who employ low-wage workers, but I don't think you'll find many takers among populace at large.
The "freedom" you are talking about is the freedom to take or leave work schedules we consider abusive today. If you want to go back to a world where employment means 12/7 or starve, you are free to campaign for the repeal all you like, though. Your senators' aides are standing by, call now. Meanwhile, I will be lobbying them to constrain your freedom a little more.
My god it’s so true. I’m a robotics engineer and I’m an advocate of what I call “reduce the human cost of living to zero” through automation and democratic arrangements. The idea being that we can make it cost very little for society to support non-working people, such that work is not compulsory for survival. It’s similar to a basic income but it’s universal basic services where we try to get the marginal cost to zero (we can IMO make it cheaper than a basic income).
I get so many people telling me “but people would be miserable, they need work to be happy and have purpose.” UGH YES I agree, but I never said I would ban employment! I just want people to be able to take a year off now and then, or work half time, or volunteer or do non-capitalist work and be fine. People seem to think that if we weren’t desperate for employment we’d just sit around bored all the time. That’s not what wealthy people do! Human beings are far too creative to just sit around and do nothing. Eliminating compulsory work is about increasing freedom. We’re smart enough to find something good to do with that freedom.
Well, but sadly it is true for people who have been in chains for years, that they don't know what to do anymore(except drinking and watching TV), when suddenly there is no one around anymore to tell them what to do. Lots of people quickly degrade after retirement.
You can also see that effect already in schools. Currently there is school vacation and you see lots of groups of bored teenagers hanging around.
There is something very wrong with a "free society", when most of its people don't know what to do with their free time except to kill it. (The very concept of timekilling is disturbing as well)
But yes. I am 100% behind the idea of robotic basic income!
People can learn again, that there is more to live than mindless huzzling and consuming.
Agreed. I’ve found that most people don’t spend time thinking about the ideal society. So when you talk about an ideal society and you describe one aspect of it, they imagine you’re talking about a society where everything is the same except that one aspect. They have a very hard time imagining what the world would be like if many things were different.
It might take a generation for people to adjust, like Clay Shirky describes at the start of his talk “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” from 2008:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
But it also wasn't a civic surplus until people actually got the money and time to make use of it. The fight for the 8 hour working day took more than half a century and had a price steeped in blood. Getting wages above survival level likewise.
Somebody would have to build and fix those robots. I'm not worried. Plus I don't expect robots to create meaningful art and literature. Compulsory work can be boring, or stressful or dangerous. Like what those kids in Bangladesh are doing, dissasembling ships. I'd much rather the dissasembly was done by spider metal cutting robots.
> we can make it cost very little for society to support non-working people, such that work is not compulsory for survival.
If we are supporting people that legitimately can’t work, sure. But supporting people that can work, but don’t — that’s where I have a problem because my willingness to work, even in jobs I might not like gets punished through taxes. Why do I have a personal responsibility to support others that are unwilling to support themselves. We are talking about grown adults, if they have nothing to contribute to society, why would we subsidize that? Some layabout watching Judge Judy all day gets a free pass while the guy working on a hot roof all day is supposed to pay for that? Who is going to be a janitor if they don’t have to? Producing something of value to society is part of being a part of a society. People have a responsibility to take care of themselves. They might need some temporary help now and then, but making dependency a permanent state is a great way to ensure that government has ultimate control of your life.
But we already have existing data that says that people who are given free money don't just become unemployed, and the only people who do take the free money to be unemployed are parents and teenagers who are trying to parent and study respectively. I think personally that sounds amazing. If someone wants to watch Judge Judy all day, every day, for months chances are they have a mental illness and need to be treated the same way as someone whose back is thrown out needs to be treated.
People will take jobs for the similar reasons we take jobs now- we want money, and take higher paying jobs to afford nicer things. In a world where bases are covered, luxuries will definitely be a better carrot than the stick of homelessness.
I won’t force you to support them. I WANT to support others because I feel good doing so. At normal jobs I’m just helping some billionaire get richer (my last job I worked indirectly for a billionaire). I would way rather work day in and day out to support regular people like me.
And since you brought it up, I find your attitude disturbing. “Why should I have to help other people” is kind of a gross question. You don’t want to help other people? Doesn’t that make you selfish? Again I’m not saying I will force you to help, but why are you against the idea of helping others anyway?
I see that you mention government. I didn’t mention government. I said society could provide for everyone. We can do that without the government.
You did say "democratic arrangements" which you might be able to wriggle out of admitting means government. In either case, what is your plan for dealing with a dissenters to your view, especially if they wind up being in the minority? Remember to leave out force, threat of violence, and other coercions, lest you contradict yourself. Or strike "democratic arrangements" because it's a heavier hammer than you think it is.
People who don't want to interact with society or be helped by society can... not interact with society or be helped by society. They can go out in the woods somewhere or develop a religion that gives you excemptions.
You can also organize among your minority group and protest that your rights are being violated, or hire lawyers to sue.
Oh my god you act like I’ve never heard of libertarianism. A worker owned cooperative can be democratic without being a government. And I agree with authors like Murray Bookchin who advocate for a kind of anarchist communism where you have a “government” but not a state. I personally advocate for a state-free society and have no interest in rule by force. I wrote a story about a democratically arranged worker owned cooperative that feeds and houses all its members two and a half years ago:
http://tlalexander.com/corporation/
I’m not concerned with people who don’t want to participate. They don’t have to and we don’t need their support. Such a system can be supported entirely by those who want to support it.
I’m sorry if I come off confrontational but your question seemed to be a “gotcha” that is honestly very simplistic. As an anarchist or “libertarian socialist” I’m quite aware of problems of the state. I will say that in many cases I think local governments may find it beneficial to support these systems, but I like the idea of this being done on a local level so individual cities can decide for themselves. In the same way that some governments operate trains, it is not the case that trains depend on government to be useful.
Remember the premise is to drive down the cost of meeting peoples needs.
If the cost of supporting peoples need is driven towards zero, then the cost of supporting your own needs will likewise gets driven towards zero. At that point, the amount of work you will need to put in to meet your needs will go towards zero, and the number of people that can be supported by a minimal amount of additional works will rapidly increase.
The point being that at some point the incremental amount of work needed to support a large number of people choosing not to work will be so low that it's not worth worrying about it relative to the potential benefits of creating a surplus large enough that it effectively becomes a choice for everyone.
While I'm sure a lot of people will choose leisure, a lot of us won't. We might work less. More likely we'll work on different things. If I had full freedom to choose my projects, I'd still work on something because I work on software because I enjoy it.
Liberating a huge number of people to pursue projects that the financial payoff for is extremely uncertain has the potential to be massively transformative.
There are plenty of ways we could reward those choosing to continue to do the minimal necessary work in a future like that, to ensure sufficient people want to.
> They might need some temporary help now and then, but making dependency a permanent state is a great way to ensure that government has ultimate control of your life.
I happen to agree with this part. The Expanse illustrates this potential case well: People on "basic" have their needs met, but are also locked out of work, and getting into the upper echelons where you can get a job and do better is treated as a privilege allotted via random allocations - unless you have friends in high places... People on basic don't dare rise up, because their life depends on not getting in the crosshairs of government.
This is why a lot of the left are concerned about universal basic income, for example - because it is a potential "bread and circus" for capitalism struggling to deal with future fallout of automation.
But that is different from opposing the idea of a system where automation is advanced enough and democratized enough that basic needs are available to be met everywhere, and nobody has the power to stop you from using the time that gives you however you want, including creating your own position to do better.
My current job is doing 4 days 8 hours because the boss read an article saying it increases productivity.
So, his opinion is that we should be more productive in 4 days than we are in 5. I do enjoy the 3 day weekends, but I have to admit that I don't like the immense pressure of the shortened week.
Can you just work less hard in the four days and then work on the fifth off day? It seems like that schedule should give you more options about how to work, but not require you to work the compressed schedule.
Ive been working four 4-6 hour days a week for the past year. I’m in my opinion quite productive. I think we need to stop thinking in terms of 8 hour days. An 8 hour work day is a lot! Same with five day work weeks. With four day work weeks you get perpetual three day weekend and that makes a huge difference. Actually recently I started working Monday and taking Tuesday off so I can attend a Tuesday night hack night at the local hacker space that I would not be able to attend on a work day.
One of the most productive teams I’ve worked on had unlimited vacation that was actually used. People were taking a week or so off every month and we’re still getting a crazy amount of stuff done.
Part of the problem with unlimited vacation is that companies that use it tend to do it to save money, since if you have unlimited vacation days they don't need to compensate you for unused PTO when you leave. They'll also try and create a culture where employees don't want to or "can't" take time off. It can be more nefarious than anything.
Of course companies that do that are usually startups, and if your startup tries to fuck you, leave. They probably need you more than you need them.
The financial aspect is certainly true though, as someone who hasn't moved around a lot and who pretty much uses all their vacation, that aspect of traditional vacation banking has never been a big deal to me.
The culture aspect needs to come down from the top. A senior engineering manager at a well-known SV company with "unlimited" vacation claims it works pretty well because, from his perspective, an expectation that you'll take time off and disconnect comes from the top. On the other hand, I've heard others at the same company give a less rosy report, so YMMV depending on teams, etc.
Only France has a 35 hour work week. 35 or 40, not much of a difference but nevertheless important since you can have a decent lunch break and still spend meaningful time with your kids if we account for commuting etc.
One gets get paid overtime for anything more than the 35h work week and can work up a limit of h/yr overtime. They also reduced overtime payments. If the company needs 70h per week from an employee, they'd probably be better off employing two people anyway, at least in theory.
