Leisure is the new productivity

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/12/opinions/schulte-leisure-productivity/index.html

by sethbannon • 12 years ago

51 30 12 years ago

edition.cnn.com

zenogais3• 12 years ago

Lost me at giving Henry Ford credit for the 40-hour workweek. Do you even read history?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

rifung2• 12 years ago

As far as I can tell, the link doesn't contradict what the post said. The article is US centric, and the link you gave supports their claim that Ford was the company which popularized the 40 hour work week.

"By 1905, the eight-hour day was widely installed in the printing trades – see International Typographical Union (section) – but the vast majority of Americans worked 12-14 hour days.

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit."

zenogais3• 12 years ago

Quote from the article:

"Ironically, it was only when Henry Ford took the wildly controversial step of shuttering his automobile manufacturing factories on Saturday and cutting daily work hours from the then-standard 12 to 8 that workers began not only enjoying leisure time at home, but became more efficient and productive at work."

Now if we re-read the Wikipedia article we see that, in fact, Ford was not the decisive factor but that there were a series of labor struggles before and after Ford's decision mostly outside the automotive industry that eventually won legislative support that truly universalized the 40-hour workweek. Thus Ford's role is minor, but perhaps decisive for the automotive industry only. Very different from the strong and historically warped claim made above.

wavefunction• 12 years ago

The eight-hour workday is one of the fruits of the struggles of labor unions before Ford Motors even got started. To then turn around and assign its introduction to a capitalist is ridiculous on its face but the sort of pro-corporate propaganda that is all too common in US culture.

cryoshon2• 12 years ago

According to this (probably sugarcoated) article, the average person in the US works more than 40 hours per week. Attendant to this claim is the assumption that salaried employees are paid the same amount regardless of how much they work.

We work more, and earn the same. We get zero guaranteed vacation days. We have labor policies that are worse than many impoverished countries.

Our politicians are absolutely not working on solving this problem. What is needed are large scale strikes with a few simple demands, but it won't happen because people are too afraid of being cut loose and losing what little security they have.

Delmania• 12 years ago

In the United States, they will never do this. Our society is too heavily influenced by the "Protestant work ethic", and we have a folk lore about hard work and success. Plus many politicians are "pro-business" and take the stance many business owners do: that we should be grateful for having a job and be willing to sacrifice for our company without any expectation of reward.

bjelkeman-again2• 12 years ago

The Dutch have a strong Protestant work ethic too, and are pro-business, good traders and still consider five weeks holiday normal. What is needed is people to realise that those five weeks is not lost business, but happy productive employees for the rest of the year.

MadManE3• 12 years ago

Why does this have to be solved at the legislative level? Can't we rally around the idea that we are worth more than we're being compensated, and change our behavior accordingly, or is that relegated only to legalizing pot?

harmonicon• 12 years ago

What would you suggest the workers do? Striking collectively until all business owners agree to pay more wage? How much more? What is fair?

I would think a federal law is the best way to solve the problem while avoiding repeating the messy negotiations.

Many workers depend on their paycheck to survive day to day precisely because of the meager amount. In today's USA there is very few union who can back workers up while on a strike.

Edit: Part of what I meant by the third paragraph is that someone else will take the job at low pay if you work away. Thus the fact you are saying no individually has little effect on wages when the market (currently) is filled with job seekers. It takes a whole bunch of us saying no together to have an effect.

a8da6b0c91d• 12 years ago

Why does this have to be solved at the legislative level?

One of the main reason people have to work so many hours is the government diverts much productivity to waste. The best example is health care spending. Americans blow 25% of GDP on it. For all this spending Americans achieve a life expectancy of 78. Mexicans achieve 76 with a far lower GDP per capita of about $13,000 and spend something like 8% of GDP on health care. From this I conclude American health care spending is essentially a wasteful racket. It's not a stretch to say Americans spend one full day a week working to pay for doctors and medicines that don't really work.

Pile on other rackets such as massive overspending on defense, over-budgeted police and fire fighting forces, over-budgeted primary and secondary education, and you easily get another day or two. Americans in productive industries are spending probably near half their work week producing to pay for government connected parasitical industries.

Legislating less work time is not the primary problem. The first thing to do is address the question of Why are we as a society blowing so much money and effort on worthless crap? Cut back on the massive levels of waste and there will be more wealth with which people can choose how to spend their time, working or not.

bsder• 12 years ago

What is needed are large scale strikes with a few simple demands, but it won't happen because people are too afraid of being cut loose and losing what little security they have.

Exactly. Productivity has more than doubled since 1970. That means we have 50% fewer jobs.

We have a labor glut; striking in that environment isn't going to happen.

ripter• 12 years ago

We've successfully dealt with this issue in the past.

If Google and other big corps shorten work hours, then other companies might follow just like they did when Ford changed. Eventually it'll trickle up to legislation.

Chinjut3• 12 years ago

In support of the grandparent comment, one does suppose Ford was motivated to his actions not purely of his own accord, but, rather, was also influenced by the ambient environment of a thriving and contentious labor movement, which in its agitations was not afraid to employ strikes, etc.

cryoshon2• 12 years ago

So we're left waiting for the power players to make things better for us?

There's probably a better way that doesn't rely on them, I think.

tarikjn• 12 years ago

If (and I believe this), workers can be more productive with more leisure time, these companies will eventually prevail.

Why try to regulate the market into doing it as she implies by comparing European countries, where by the way, unemployment is very high for the young? It is the surest way of doing it wrong.

Nothing prevents companies from offering more vacation time, but forcing it with regulation will prevent a host of other good things to happen.

Matumio• 12 years ago

For some companies it may be more profitable to burn out employees and replace them with fresh meat. Do you even have a limitation on the weekly working hours in the US? Nothing against free markets, but the point of them is to improve our life.

squozzer• 12 years ago

It's quite possible that those who control the means of production already know everything mentioned in the CNN and like things the way they are.

Salaried workers tend to be college-educated. Putting them on the treadmill reduces their ability to innovate and thereby threaten the established order.

Hourly workers tend to have less education, which lowers their status and reduces their ability to threaten the established order. So leisure for them does not pose the same risks to the established order.

Quick, what were the professions of the following people - Jefferson, Lenin, Castro, Ghandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah? Hint: they probably would have a hard time dabbling in revolution today without failing to meet their quota of billable hours.

Chinjut3• 12 years ago

Small correction: "Gandhi".

[The fact that you included Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah in your list suggests to me you quite possibly are South Asian and thus perhaps are already aware of this and simply made a typo; however, as this mistake (or, rather, its variant "Ghandi") is so common (I see the misspelt version far more frequently in Internet discussions than the correctly spelt one), and is related to frequent misspelling of my own name, I use any opportunity I can to bring attention to the correct spelling]

yoshizar• 12 years ago

There is some pretty misleading writing in this article. Take the sentence below:

"Some years, international comparisons of GDP per hours worked have found, workers in Norway, Ireland, Denmark and even France, with their 30 days of paid vacation every year, their café culture, their generous paid family leave policies, their short work hours mandated by law and their new directive forbidding some employers from expecting workers to check work-related texts and emails after hours, beat us by a mile."

In other words,

In some years (not others), the GDP per hour worked is higher in countries where employees work fewer hours per year.

If people work 20% less and are 10% more productive per hour when they do work, they're still less productive in total than if they didn't reduce their hours.

Why does a company care if their salaried employees are more productive per hour? They just want that employee to maximize productivity over the employee's lifetime with the company.

If the article has only historical anecdotes to demonstrate that employees are more productive in absolute terms if they work fewer hours, that's not very persuasive toward the point the author is trying to make, that major industries and large companies should change because they get more value out of having employees work fewer hours.

I'm not saying I disagree with the author's point, only that they are using misleading evidence to try to support it.

Leisure is the new productivity

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