4 opinion

March 14, 2012 - Over the Edge

PAUL STRICKLAND
CONTRIBUTOR

n average people are working many
more hours per week than was normal
just forty. years ago. Indeed, a cult of
Work for Work’s Sake has arisen.
Unemployment is now double what it was 50
years ago, says Bruce O’Hara, a representative
of the Work Less Party.
“Fifty years ago one breadwinner working
40 hours per week could support a family and
save money,” O’Hara observes in his 2005 es-
say, “The False Promises of Growth”. “Today’s
typical family has two breadwinners working a
total of 90 or more hours per week, and saves
almost nothing.”

This is an absurd situation, he contends.

“This doubling of the family employment
load is particularly vexing when you consider
that today’s worker produces twice as much per
hour as their 1950s counterpart,” O’ Hara notes.
“What kind of prosperity is this, when our re-
ward for producing twice as much per hour is
that we have to work LONGER?”

I have learned through UNBC graduate stu-
dent Thomas Cheney that since the publication

of O’Hara’s essay, Canada’s Work Less Party
has lost its certification as a party at the national
level. However, the conclusions in O’Hara’s es-
say and the party’s police statements remain as
valid now as ever.

Rising tuition and costs mean too many stu-
dents have to take on not just one but sometimes
two or three jobs off campus to stay financially
afloat. There is time only for immediately neces-
sary assigned readings and studying for exams —
not for reading at leisure in related areas or even
in unrelated areas that would allow for intellec-
tual synthesis and serendipitous happening upon
new ideas or insights. Aristotle wrote in the Ni-
comachean Ethics that leisure for contemplation
is essential for profound understanding of a field
of knowledge. In his Metaphysics Aristotle says
the priests of ancient Egypt made great strides
in astronomy because they had the leisure time
to observe the heavens and trace the movements
of the stars.

Upon graduation many students face signifi-
cant debt loads at high interest rates that force
immediate job choices — choices that might not
be the best in the long run. Added to mortgage
payments, student loan payments may require
working excessively long hours to try to remain
solvent. Editorialists in the mainstream press be-
moan the low current birth rate in the province,
but maybe excessive payments on debt have
something to with delayed family formation.

The sociologists Robert D. Putnam and Kristin
A. Goss, writing in The San Francisco Chronicle
(Sept. 24, 2000), note that an epidemic of de-
pression has swept across the United States dur-
ing the past three decades. The majority of em-
ployers and political rugged individualists tend
to say that this is just a personal mental-health
problem for the people involved, but Putnam
and Goss suggest it is a “work-time” problem
that needs to be addressed by society as a whole.

Unemployment rates are unacceptably high
while too many of those lucky enough to still
have full-time, career-track jobs have to work
too many hours of involuntary overtime.

“When unemployment is very low, work-
ers’ bargaining power increases, and wages rise

in step with productivity,” O’Hara continues.
“Moderately high unemployment makes it much
easier for corporations to hold wages down, and

to bully workers into unpaid overtime. High un-
employment converts workers’ increasing pro-
ductivity directly into rising corporate profits.”
In the mid-1980s, during a rare moment of can-
dour and straight talk, Ernie Isley, then labour
minister in Alberta’s Conservative provincial
government, said a jobless rate of at least six per
cent is necessary for there to be a psychological
value in landing a job.

David Korten, a former overseas develop-
ment officer for the U.S., says an economy
should serve the people, and not the other way
around. In his essay, “What’s an Economy
For?”, Korten, also a former Harvard and Stan-
ford Business School professor, draws attention
to The Wall Street Journal’s continuing editorial
position that Europe is headed for trouble be-
cause Europeans put in fewer work hours than
Americans do.

Like O’Hara, Korten points out the great
leaps in American workers’ average productiv-
ity over the past four decades.

“Yet, we are working longer hours to make

ends meet and we can no longer afford things _

we once took for granted, such as leisure time,
family life, education, health care, retirement,
parks, clean water, and jobs that pay a family
wage with benefits,” he writes in the essay pub-
lished in John De Graaf’s Take Back Your Time:
Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in Amer-
ica.

“What goes?” Korten asks. “What’s an econ-
omy for?...”

The situation is only marginally better in
Canada, partly because of the greater number
of workers enjoying union protections in this
country.

Korten goes on to say that, “to take back our
lives, we must replace what I call the global sui-
cide economy (devoted to the service of money)
with local living economies (devoted to the ser-
vice of life).”

We are killing ourselves for money,” Korten
says. “The self-destructive dysfunction of the
corporate global economy is centred in the
global financial system, which holds both gov-
ernments and corporations hostage to financial
speculators for whom the long term rarely ex-
tends beyond next quarter’s financial state-
ment.”

The Protestant work ethic many of us have
been raised by may no longer be applicable in

the twenty-first century, says Christian Wil-
liams, a researcher at Sweden’s Uppsala Univer-
sity. “We were encouraged to work hard and to

thus become a successful and productive mem-
ber of society,” Williams says in his 2011 essay
“A New View of Work”. “But what if this advice
is wrong?”

“As the economy reaches and breaches the
limits to growth, working long hours causes
market failures, giving weight to the idea that
governments should intervene to reduce average
working hours,” he says.

In today’s full world, Williams says, “work
has become a common-pool resource, vulner-
able to over-exploitation. In the absence of so-
cial and cultural norms to take care of this com-
mon-pool resource, governmental intervention
is the best option for preventing market failure
and encouraging an optimal amount of work.

“Unfortunately, our work ethic is worsening
the situation.”

We are in the grip of a cult of Work for Work’s
Sake. It is supported by corporate media and by
neo-liberal and neo-conservative governments
who urge the importance of consumption and
upscale housing above all as the key to happi-
ness and social well-being.

This is not the way to happiness, O’Hara says,
citing the book The High Price of Materialism
by psychologist Tim Kasser. Kasser’s research
indicates that purchases of material goods result
in surprisingly small — and fleeting — increases
in personal happiness.

“Enduring and significant increases in hap-
piness tend to come from four areas: friends,
family, community, and service to others,”
O’Hara says. “The greatest sources of life satis-
faction are the very things the modern rat-race
doesn’t leave you time for.”

The exams will soon be finished.
Now you need to store your
possessions for the summer.

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