More work in more time
by classless, 8 May 2008
Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. [ … ] By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. [ … ] if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level.
Thursday 8 May 2008 at 17:31
Prick:
The Census number that most accurately captures the economic well-being of Canadians is family incomes. While the headline-grabbing portions of the StatsCan report picked up on individual earnings, what really matters to Canadians is total income at the family level.
Thursday 8 May 2008 at 21:15
That’s it.
I’m deleting all off-topic comments on this thread.
Those who are not welcome here: if you’ve been told once, you’ve been told a hundred times — go back to your toilet and chat amongst yourselves about the ‘brown peril’ and ‘Trots’, we aren’t here to provide you a platform.
Thursday 8 May 2008 at 22:31
Just to avoid any misperceptions: I linked to the source but I really only post this because of the quote and its statistical perspective. Of course, going back to 1948 is not an option.
Thursday 8 May 2008 at 22:36
A three day week would be most suitable. The current mania for presenteeism is doing us all a disservice.
Saturday 10 May 2008 at 2:08
It is worth remembering the ambitions/hopes for a leisure society in the original socialist writings and agitated for by the proponents of a socialist society, and how this ‘ideal’ has been mostly forgotten and usurped by liberal filth and its associated apologists and ideologists.
Certainly, it is almost a taboo now, to even think about leisure in a positive sense in the ‘developed’ world these days. Work for work’s sake (and the moralistic priestly incantation to work for a so-called ‘higher’ end) is now the de-facto and default position presently - a disgusting ideology — I say fuck labour (not work) and all it entails.
The will to investigate the circumstances that demand the sacrifices that are deemed self-evident and instructed from on high of us (the working class) is nearly non-existent. The fightback needs to begin somewhere. Even hippy shit is an advance from where we are now. That’s how bad shit is at the present stage.
Destroy liberals and their attendent ideology. This is our duty. This is demanded by humanism (let alone any project of universal emancipation).
An example: Veblen carried on one of his many social analyses and observations linking functioning to the complex nature of human life. Adam smith had used the term “irksome” to characterise “labor”; for Marx it was much more than that: “Labour” in being exploited, was responsible for the “alienation”, the dehumanisation, of the working class.
Agreeing with Marx (though using different vocabulary) Veblen attempted to show why “labour is irksome” and moved him on to show how the historical process transformed work into labour, and in doing so, suppressed the best and brought out the worst in us.
For both Marx and Veblen labour (small ‘L’) is a dirty word, whereas work is not only life-saving but can be life enhancing. In English we have allowed the two words to become interchangeable, and they have lost their distinct meanings from their Latin origins. In the ancient world labour was the function of slaves, something done at the bidding of another to that other’s gain; work, however arduous, is done at one’s own bidding, whether to merely survive or to fulfill oneself, or something between the two. For Veblen, the “instinct” of workmanship is what requires and brings out the best in us as a species.
hate bloggertarians — hate liberals - hate any fucker who disagrees — and destroy them in body and (non-existent) soul.
Veblen:
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/%7Eecon/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/irksome
Saturday 10 May 2008 at 11:35
The current mania for presenteeism is doing us all a disservice.
Even more, the current mania for presenteeism is making us all ill. It is essentially anti-human.
Whereas Will and I would disagree about some, though not all, aspects of liberalism, I am with him 100% on the debate about ‘useful work v useless toil’. Some work will always remain tedious, irksome and necessary - like bloody housework - we can’t be totally liberated. But it is possible to get great pleasure from work and that is being destroyed by current employment regimes.
In addition, if you look at the damage being done to adult education, the areas being lost are often described as ‘leisure courses’, the funding is being confined to courses relevant for employment only. This is a perfect example of why Will is spot on about the denigration of the word ‘leisure’.
I am just beginning to appreciate how little leisure we have and how employment seeps into the few corners of life we have left. Leisure is great, leisure is fun, leisure is necessary for human well being. And leisure can include blogging as well as what I am about to do - sit in the sun, then veg out on the sofa and finally go down to the pub for a surreal game of cards.