Re: [A-List] Why Working Less is Better for the Globe

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When the long-overdue US recession hits, Americans will see their faith
in market free enterprise shaken as the Japanese have been losing their
faith in their command economy, despite the fact that the government has
been reasonably effective in insulating the Japanese public from
economic pain. The Campaign 2000 rhetoric in the United States was
already slightly populist and the recession has yet to begin. The recent
Bush tax plan was couched in heavy populist rhetoric. The problem is
that around the world there are visible signs of exhaustion. Asia and
Latin America are completely worn out after six years of tumult. The US
boom was fed mostly by global deflation, and there have not been free
lunches even in the US. Even those who are still doing well have to work
14-hour days and most families need to be two-income households to make
do. The press has stop running stories about people with $60,000 annual
incomes living in their cars in Silicon Valley because it is no longer
news. At this rate, unemployment may even come as a relief and a
guiltless way to get off the treadmill.
There was a moment in the late 1960s, before the Vietnam War blew away
all of America's surpluses, that people with good incomes were beginning
to take three-day weekends on a regular year-around basis and eight-week
vacations. From Los Angeles to Dallas to Scarsdale, fathers were home by
5:30pm barbecuing for the whole family and mothers had time for their
children, and the GDP was a mere $200 billion. Economists thought then
that if the GDP reached $1 trillion, all economic problems would be
solved. Instead, the GDP is now more than $10 trillion, and there is
financial crisis everywhere - from health care to social security to
education, even defense. There appears to be a problem with what growth
really is.

http://www.henryckliu.com/page26.html

Bill Totten wrote:

> by Dara Colwell
>
> AlterNet (May 21 2007)
>
>
> Americans are working harder than ever before. The dogged pursuit of the
> paycheck coupled with a 24/7 economy has thrust many of us onto a
> never-ending treadmill. But of workaholism's growing wounded, its
> greatest casualty has been practically ignored - the planet.
>
> "We now seem more determined than ever to work harder and produce more
> stuff, which creates a bizarre paradox: We are proudly breaking our
> backs to decrease the carrying capacity of the planet", says Conrad
> Schmidt, an internationally known social activist and founder of the
> Work Less Party, a Vancouver-based initiative aimed at moving to a
> 32-hour work week - a radical departure from the in early, out late
> cycle we've grown accustomed to. "Choosing to work less is the biggest
> environmental issue no one's talking about".
>
> A backlash against overwork fatigue, the Work Less Party is one of a
> growing number of initiatives aimed at cutting work hours while tackling
> unemployment, environmentally unfriendly behavior and boosting leisure
> time. According to Schmidt, author of "Workers of the World RELAX",
> which examines the economics of reduced industrial work, working less
> would allow us to produce less, consume less, pollute less and - no
> complaints here - live more.
>
> "As a society, we're working exponentially hard to decrease
> sustainability and it's making us miserable - just look at how
> antidepressants are on the rise", he says. "In order to reduce our
> ecological footprint, we have to take working less very seriously".
>
> Americans work more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world.
> According to the United Nations' International Labor Organization, we
> work 250 hours, or five weeks, more than the Brits, and a whopping 500
> hours, or twelve and a half weeks, more than the Germans. So how does
> ecological damage figure in to the forty-plus workweek?
>
> Do the math: Longer hours plus labor-saving technology equals
> ever-increasing productivity. Without high annual growth to match
> productivity, there's unemployment. Maintaining growth means using more
> energy and resources, both in manpower and raw materials, which results
> in increased waste and pollution.
>
> Unsurprisingly, the United States is the world's largest polluter.
> Housing a mere five percent of the world's population, it accounts for
> 22 percent of its fossil fuel consumption, fifty percent of its solid
> waste, and, on average, each citizen consumes 53 times more goods than a
> person in China, according to the environmental nonprofit, Sierra Club.
>
> When people work longer hours, they rely increasingly on convenience
> items such as fast food, disposable diapers, or bottled water. Built-in
> obsolescence has become standard business practice - just throw it away
> and make more - leaving mountainous landfills in its wake. "Earning more
> often means spending money in ways that are environmentally detrimental.
> We're finding that to compensate for lack of time, you actually need
> more money to work those extra hours", says Monique Tilford, acting
> executive director of the Centre for a New American Dream, a Maryland
> group promoting environmentally and socially responsible consumption.
> "When people are time-starved they don't have enough time to be
> conscious consumers. The overarching theme of our organization is to
> remind Americans that every single dollar they spend has a carbon
> impact, to make the connection."
>
> If the world started clocking American hours, then it would be
> detrimental to its environmental health. According to a paper issued by
> the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, DC, if
> Europe moved towards a US-based economic model, it would consume fifteen
> to thirty percent more energy by 2050. This would impact fuel prices
> worldwide and boost carbon emissions, resulting in additional global
> warming of one to two degrees Celsius. Any reductions in greenhouse gas
> emissions made through conservation, cleaner fuels or green technology
> would be overwhelmed by increased industrial output.
>
> "Productivity normally increases every year, but we haven't seen massive
> productivity gains reflected in our working hours", says Mark Weisbrot,
> CEPR's co-director, who also authored the study "Are Shorter Work Hours
> Good for the Environment?" "Because there's no limit to what we can
> consume, a change of values has to take place if the planet stands a
> chance of survival".
>
> The problem is, France has already begun following America's lead by
> increasing the workload. In 2005, France effectively abolished its
> 35-hour workweek to counter high unemployment - the highest in the
> European Union, hovering at roughly ten percent - though a subsequent
> International Monetary Fund paper examining the impact concluded there
> was no significant increase. And this May, the new French
> president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy, whose campaign to "work more, earn
> more" helped win him the presidential seat, promised to make overtime
> largely tax-exempt. His goal: strengthen consumer purchasing power and
> galvanize the economy.
>
> Only if Weisbrot's research is correct, France's increased productivity
> would create even larger problems, especially considering France's
> current productivity is greater than America's, with a GDP (Gross
> Domestic Product) per hour of $37.01 versus $33.77. Today's push towards
> a heavier workload is in many ways a historical precedent. In both the
> United States and Europe, work hours declined steadily from the
> beginning of the industrial revolution until World War II, when labor
> unions were key in fighting for shorter hours. After the war, the
> forty-hour workweek was legally in place, and governments promoted
> economic growth in order to match it.
>
> But since the 1970s, with the advent of technological advances and
> increased automation, most European governments have continued
> shortening work hours whereas the United States has opted instead to let
> wages fall. In the late 1960s futurists predicted an Age of Leisure,
> hypothesizing that the largest issue facing the country at the end of
> the century would be too much leisure. "It was the kind of problem I
> thought I could deal with - in fact, I was looking forward to it", says
> John de Graaf, producer of the groundbreaking 1997 PBS documentary
> "Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic" and a frequent speaker on issues
> of overwork and overconsumption. "Of course, I didn't reason we'd put
> all our productivity gains into more stuff".
>
> Quoting data from his current campaign, "What's the Economy for Anyway?"
> which examines America's economic policies in light of quality of life
> issues, de Graaf says the evidence proves we're not better off. "It's
> staggering. The USA has declined relative to all other industrial
> countries in virtually every quality of life measured - health,
> equality, savings, sustainability - though that's not so with the GDP
> and certainly not with the number of billionaires", he says. "Yet we're
> still constantly being told we're better off".
>
> Yet suggest alternatives to the status quo of GDP worship, like
> shortening the work week, and resistance is great. "Here, the business
> community fiercely opposes any mandates relating to time", says de
> Graaf, noting that by controlling or regulating time, they maintain the
> upper hand. "What's happened in Europe is people have discovered it's
> nice to have some time in their lives, and in getting some, they've
> wanted more. Whereas here, business has kept that door completely shut."
>
> But even many overburdened Americans fear change will signal further
> sacrifice - mostly to their paychecks. "But the fact is, we're already
> sacrificing our time and our lives right now", says de Graaf. De Graaf
> is also the national coordinator of "Take Back Your Time Day", an annual
> event scheduled for October 24, the date on which the forty-hour
> workweek was first inaugurated in the United States. A national
> organization with 10,000 members, Take Back Your Time has launched a
> campaign calling for national legislation guaranteeing a minimum of
> three weeks of paid vacation, an issue it hopes to make part of the 2008
> presidential campaign.
>
> As it stands, America is the only industrial nation that offers no legal
> protection for vacations. The average vacation in the United States is
> now only a long weekend, and 25 percent of American workers have no paid
> vacation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compare that to
> Sweden, which mandates 32 vacation days per year. President Bush,
> however, does know the value of vacation time. In 2005, he took five
> weeks off to visit his Texas ranch, taking the longest presidential
> retreat in at least 36 years.
>
> "We see overwork as a social, legal problem that needs political
> legislation", says de Graaf. "We are utterly unique in our dismissal of
> the need for time and the environmental costs; not to mention, the costs
> to our health and our families have been enormous".
>
> But by shelving time, we continue to suffer from overload, debt, and
> anxiety, and are stuck in a fatalistic rat race generated by heightened
> consumerism. So what fuels this need to accumulate in the face of time
> deprivation? Devoting his career to what drives materialism, Tim Kasser,
> associate professor of psychology at Knox College and author of "The
> High Price of Materialism", has sought scientific explanations,
> examining the relationship between materialism and psychological
> well-being.
>
> "Materialism is driven by an underlying sense of insecurity", says
> Kasser, who conducted a study where subjects were randomly assigned
> writing about death or writing about listening to music. The former
> experience an increased desire for consumption and were "greedier",
> according to Kasser. "Death is the ultimate end of time; it's
> interpreted as that feeling of not having enough time. In the last
> decade politicians have played off that insecurity. It keeps getting
> people elected, but it also drives us to think we need to work harder
> and harder", he says, noting the signs of insecurity around us are
> numerous: We don't know our neighbors and suffer from high divorce
> rates; our social safety nets have been dismantled; we have no mandatory
> overtime laws and minimal vacation. "All these work to create an
> underlying sense of insecurity, and we need to break out of that cycle",
> he says.
>
> Interestingly, Kasser conducted an empirical study comparing 200
> adherents of Voluntary Simplicity to a control group of 200 mainstream
> Americans and found the Voluntary Simplicity group was "simultaneously
> happier while using fewer resources", and that their happiness was
> derived from "less materialistic, intrinsic goals, such as personal
> growth, family and community". While the Voluntary Simplicity group was
> "still awfully far from having a sustainable ecological footprint",
> Kasser feels it's a positive start. "The correlation between the
> Voluntary Simplicity group being happy was due to those
> no-consumeristic, intrinsic values, and the reason they're living in a
> more ecologically sustainable fashion is also due to those values".
>
> It's just those kind of values Schmidt has tried to encourage in his
> Work Less Party. Schmidt, a former computer programmer, started by
> getting rid of his car and cycling to work, then took advantage of the
> savings by reducing his workweek, which allowed him enough time to write
> his book, make two documentaries, and organize a community theater group
> - all in the last three years.
>
> "People spend so many hours working they have no idea of how much
> creative potential they have, but you get a taste of mental freedom you
> want more of it. It's an explosion of creativity", says Schmidt, quickly
> adding, "I'm a workaholic, but it's the type of work that's the problem.
> Our society is focused on work that makes stuff that goes directly into
> landfills. Essential work such as art, music, creativity, community, the
> kind necessary to create a healthy society and planet, is being negated
> in favor of that."
>
> If there's any solution to increasing our well-being, as well as the
> planet's, Schmidt's advice flies counter to our driven consumerism. "If
> you want to protect the environment, you have to consume less, which
> means you have to produce less, and you have to work less. We have to
> keep the message positive - our standard of living will improve hugely.
> I think people are starting to make the connection."
>
> _____
>
> Dara Colwell is a freelance writer based in Amsterdam.
>
> (c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
>
> http://www.alternet.org/environment/52077/
>
>
> http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
> http://www.ashisuto.co.jp
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