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Make Us Work Less And Live More

Submitted by Alex Birch on Mon, 04/14/2008 - 20:41.

JobsAccording to a study conducted by Microsoft , "American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as 'unproductive.'" A similar study made by America Online and Salary.com determined that "workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two."

We've lost the conception of what work is, and replaced it with the idea of jobs. Work was originally a vital function of society; it contributed to the community as a whole and gave the individual a sense of belonging and importance. You identified with a skill or an ability and were proud of that. Today things have changed and most of the traditional work roles have been replaced by jobs, that carry only a small portion of the original function and have become part of a global machinery.

Jobs are the end product of a bureaucratic society. Besides the hundreds of titles (esp. for bosses!) that seem to be little more than cash-ins for lazy paper shufflers, we can spend hours in an office without actually doing anything of real importance. No wonder people surf the web, watch porn, listen to music and play Minesweeper on their working hours; they lack the motivation because they recognize they're only part of a faceless corporate world that doesn't give a dime about them or their family. Tomorrow they'll be replaced by cheap labour from China or elsewhere, lobbied through by the same people who employed them (this is what we call politics behind closed doors).

What's the solution? Jobs need to become work again. Cut the bureaucratic bullshit, reduce the administative overhead, skip the long meetings that lead nowhere, streamline all tasks, and don't be afraid to step over toes. This is what we should apply on an office level. On a societal level, the globalist world where a few people boss over a thousand people and the latter are simply mechanical cannon fodder for an endless stream of products no one needs, should be replaced by a local, communitarian world where you work for the people you know and feel that you're doing something important. You should be proud and happy to work for the community, because you'll know that you work for them and not for some greedy ubercapitalist in Brussel.

Our theory is simple: Make us work less and live more. Life on earth is short. We don't have time to fool around with silly abstractions and shuffle paper all day to meet constructed demands. The world is full of real demands and those aren't met today. We eat poisoned food, we live in unsanitary houses, we send our kids to violent schools, we live in dangerous suburbs, we study politically correct fantasies at universities, we vote for corrupt and bought-up charlatans, and the social healthcare is one giant bureaucratic mess. Let's fix this and we start out by streamlining, then localizing. It's possible -- in fact, it's the only possible future we have ahead of us, if we want to escape the madness we're in now. Vote Corrupt!

Groups Working on this Issue

There is a group called the "Center for a New American Dream" that is pushing for shorter work weeks, and for a shift from the provision of needs through the market to a provision of needs through communities and social/cultural/spiritual development. www.newdream.org

Also, there is the Center for the Advancement of the Steady-State Economy that is trying to do something similar. www.steadystate.org

There is also the Adbusters Media Foundation, who work primarily with the mass media to advertise similar ideas. www.adbusters.org

These groups might be a little bit leftist for some of our tastes, but hey, nothing is perfect. They are established and recognized groups who are trying to change some of the things discussed here.

"What do you do?"

I think a big part of the problem is that essentially everything is thought of as a viable occupation, as long as it's work. I think this thinking has stemmed from several generations of people who simply needed to find jobs to live, and therefore they passed on these ideas with regards to employment on to their children, and then their children, and so on. We need to stop this line of succession. Immigrants' who were tempted to the United States by lies lives depended on finding jobs and holding them, even if the work was harsh and destructive. Now we—the young adults, their great-grandchildren—are expected to follow along the same path thinking all work is good work. It's a lie.

Someone I knew, perhaps a year ago, got a temporary job at a McDonalds. My reaction was obviously a harsh one. Many friends simply replied with "It's a job." This mentality needs to be destroyed. Work should be meaningful; simply taking part and finding any destructive act to commit daily because you need to have a job only perpetuates the shitty situation and ensures that things will get worse when the collision with the brick wall occurs.

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