There’s another benefit to businesses: People can work hard for four hours. We have to pace ourselves for eight. The longer the shift, the less productive we become. See some of the studies that’ve been done about one of the most foolish job shifts of all, the long hours for doctors and interns. Me, I want doctors who are awake and able to use all of their mind on my problem when I need them.

Sleep’s a huge issue for both efficient work and good health. Add in fewer accidents, and the shorter work week would save billions for governments.

Here’s the first 3 paragraphs:

There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is.

Work hard and the world respects you. Work hard and you can have anything you want. Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 hours a day at the office and make 300 grand a year that you never have time to spend, sublimate your soul to the corporate machine and enjoy a profound drinking problem and sporadic impotence and a nice 8BR mini-mansion you never spend any time in, and you and your shiny BMW 740i will get into heaven.

This is the American Puritan work ethos, still alive and screaming and sucking the world dry. Work is the answer. Work is also the question. Work is the one thing really worth doing and if you’re not working you’re either a slacker or a leech, unless you’re a victim of BushCo’s budget-reamed America and you’ve been laid off, and therefore it’s OK because that means you’re out there every day pounding the pavement looking for work and honing your resume and if you’re not, well, what the hell is wrong with you?

I think you’re overcomplicating the problem, and also making some assumptions that Russell is calling for sudden and instant enforcement of the se ideas.

Let’s take it back a step and start with the real premise: would you agree that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of lesiure? That there’s no inherent moral goodness in labour?

Russell was one of history’s leading logicians, and what he’s really getting at here is that a number of the features of our society are results of starting from bad axioms: in this case the idea that labour is a virtue. It follows from this idea that rejecting the axiom would EVENTUALLY lead to a different set of societal features.

So, he’s not saying “hey, right now everyone works half as much”, he’s saying “if person A gets the ability to complete the same amount of work in half the time, there’s nothing morally wrong with him doing that”.

Our current society would look on this efficiency gain and say either “great, now person A can produce TWICE as much in the same time, so we can double production”, or else “great, we can fire person B since person A can now do the work of two people and maintain the same production”. Russell wants to point out that there’s nothing wrong with the third conclusion: “We can maintain the same production, and have person A work half as much”.

So, instead of forcing everyone to instantly work half as much (and “half” is an arbitrary number–the same logic holds if it’s “seventy percent” or “one millionth”) he’s saying “let’s just make our decisions as they come using a set of axioms that doesn’t overvalue labour and undervalue leisure”.

What follows on from that is the kind of world he thinks we would eventually develop. The fact that the development would be evolutionary would address most of your specific concerns–there’s no sudden transition, just a change in how we look at the world, and then a long series of decisions that get made differently because of that change.

However, let me just try to address your specific concerns as well:

There are questions of increasingly complicated shift negotiations, doubled tax paperwork, the productivity decrease that comes with communal space and resources, discouragement of people who work best with a long ramp-up time, etc.

You seem to assume that the amount of work at any given employer would remain constant, so a decrease in labour time by individuals would result in more employees at any given employer. I would argue that Russell doesn’t see this at all, but rather that he sees increases in efficiency reducing the amount of labour time without altering the employee count at any employer.

On the flip side, many employers would prefer to hire part-time staff for whom they need not provide health insurance and other benefits of full-time salaried employment; but I don’t see that as advantageous to the workers. I don’t think a present-day commentary on these ideas is really complete without consideration of at least the question of benefits, and some analysis of the current trend towards preferring contractors over employees and how it might either lead to or seriously undermine the likelihood of an arrangement like the one Russell recommends.

Well, of course, it wasn’t obvious to Russell in 1932 that the specific problem that you cite would occur, although he would have been entirely familiar with the predatory nature of unfettered capitalism and how it can lead to such things.

My answer to the issues is simply that they are predicated on the current labour laws and current distinctions between full and part time, etc. Even if we can’t do anything to ameliorate the whole problem of employers (rationally, under the current set of axioms–but that’s another whole argument) trying to reduce employee stability, there shouldn’t be any real change in the status quo because of this. If the size of the common “work week” were to decrease this would have to result in a change in the definitions of “full time” and “part time”–it’s that evolutionary thing. If everyone is working a twenty hour week, then that’s a not a part time job.

(As an aside, as a Canadian I am automatically a bleeding heart on the benefits question: health care in particular should be FREE for everyone.)

If the pay for forty hours of work a week is a living wage, how are people expected to support themselves on twenty? Will minimum wage be doubled, via legislation or an organized labor revolution? Or is the suggestion that it’s better to have two people not making enough to live on than it is to have one person making enough to live on and the other destitute? I don’t think it’s enough to say “four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life”; on what is that entitlement based? Certainly no employer will want to double the wages paid in order to ensure that forty part-timers can live as comfortably as twenty full-timers used to do.

Here again we’re back to the axioms and evolutionary change. Remember, what Russell’s saying is that “modern techniques” in 1932 made it possible for a set amount of production to be acheived with much less effort than previously. So he wants to keep that level of production with a reduce in the amount of labour time expended. Since the production level is the same, there’s no loss of revenue–it doesn’t cost any more, or any less, to produce the same amount, it just takes less time. Since there’s no loss of revenue, there’s no need to reduce the labour cost.

So, eventually, as efficiency continues to improve it should be possible for less and less time to result in the same amount of production. Instead of turning that gain into increased profit, or increased production, Russell says “hey, sometimes we can turn that into increased leisure, too”.

His statement of entitlement is based on the state of affairs after the war–it was clear that production needs, even the production needs of a country at war, could be met even with all the people involved in the war diverted from the labour pool, so with them back in it, it should have been possible to meet the (reduced) needs of the country with a much small number of hours per person. His “four hours” is a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on that, and on his ideas of where we could end up if we gave leisure the same weight we given profit in our decision making.

I was particularly amused by the suggestion that one should “indulge scientific curiosity” with one’s newfound leisure time; my first thought was “Where’s the money for equipment going to come from?”.

There are a lot of different kinds of curiosity that can be indulged with no more equipment than a knowledgeable conversation partner, or a book. We’ve been trained to think of science as something that happens in abstruse jargon in strange rooms full of million dollar machines, and there is certainly some of that, but that’s a pretty small fraction.

The accountant who kicks back after a grueling four hour day and feels like he’s got the mental energy to tackle The Brief History Of Time, or The Selfish Gene, or whatever, is taking the first steps of that indulgence.

And, of course, increased leisure without a decrease in funds, will naturally lead a lot of people to additional education. If I had 20 more hours a week to play with I would certainly be taking a class or two, either at the local university, or via distance education, all the time. Over time this would naturally lead to more people capable of doing the abstruse jargon / big machine stuff. I’ll even go further out on my dream world limb and say that a population that is on average more educated, and more interested in the world generally (due to less stress from work, and more energy to be involved) would get behind an increase in funding for research. So it would be not only more qualified people, but more funding. (That’s taking quite a few steps beyond what Russell explicitly says, though.)

Cheers!

I find it intriguing that neither your commentary nor the original seems to address the negative consequences to employers of having, say, twenty employees each working eight hours a day rather than forty employees each working four hours a day. There are questions of increasingly complicated shift negotiations, doubled tax paperwork, the productivity decrease that comes with communal space and resources, discouragement of people who work best with a long ramp-up time, etc. On the flip side, many employers would prefer to hire part-time staff for whom they need not provide health insurance and other benefits of full-time salaried employment; but I don’t see that as advantageous to the workers. I don’t think a present-day commentary on these ideas is really complete without consideration of at least the question of benefits, and some analysis of the current trend towards preferring contractors over employees and how it might either lead to or seriously undermine the likelihood of an arrangement like the one Russell recommends.

I also see a question of mathematics: If the pay for forty hours of work a week is a living wage, how are people expected to support themselves on twenty? Will minimum wage be doubled, via legislation or an organized labor revolution? Or is the suggestion that it’s better to have two people not making enough to live on than it is to have one person making enough to live on and the other destitute? I don’t think it’s enough to say “four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life”; on what is that entitlement based? Certainly no employer will want to double the wages paid in order to ensure that forty part-timers can live as comfortably as twenty full-timers used to do. I was particularly amused by the suggestion that one should “indulge scientific curiosity” with one’s newfound leisure time; my first thought was “Where’s the money for equipment going to come from?”.

It’s not a bad idea or a bad essay. It just doesn’t seem to have much to do with the real world.

Russell brilliantly sidesteps the capitalism-communism dichotomy. I piss off friends on both sides who think I must be one or the other.

I think Russell’s classes would line up with Marx’s, so if you have a cushy job and have to work long hours at it, you’re still part of the labor class, not the leisure class.

I don’t think you would have the same escapist behavior in a leisure society, because our escapism is predicated on escaping labor. That’s true whether you’re employed or not: all those distractions are concentrated distractions to keep you from the grim parts of life in the labor society. A leisure society would encourage you to find distractions everywhere. Cyberfluff would stay, but you’d be less likely to find people whose lives are effectively divided between work and avoiding work.

I used to think the US needed a Labor Party. I now think we need a Leisure Party.

So, here’s my question: Shall we start Leisure Parties in our countries, or shall we start non-profits dedicated to promoting the principles of leisure?

The 20-hour-work-week is so darn sensible. Work between two meals, then live for yourself.

Oh, last thought: Marxists fall short in saying that religion is the opiate of the working classes. Those who want to keep workers working know that work is the opiate of the worker.

I suspect this would lead to better games (everyone has more time to think, and more creative energy to invest, and less deadline to worry about) and better, if less frequent (actors and directors need less hectic schedules too), HBO.

I agree about the similarity to Swift. It’s that same dry British satire.

I also agree that it sounds in many places like Russell thinks leisure would be a panacea. I suspect that he’s more than a bit tongue-in-cheek about the magnitude of the effect, except where he says “hey, even if 1% of the people who had more time did cool shit, that’s still a lot more cool shit”. And, of course, my comments about expanded leisure meaning more time for people to watch Jerry Springer, rather than create cool works of art still stand.

I’m torn about how to present Russell–to show some highlights of the cool shit he did in his life, to talk about why he talks to me, or to just present some of his works and ideas. I’m leaning towards the last one (with link to places where you can find out more about the man) for now, but I may change my mind.

I think I can admit I was wrong about the white collar vs “real” work thing. I suspect that’s just my laziness and inability to understand the “joy of a day’s hard work completed”.

Agreed. And More so, you wouldn’t be watching HBO because nobody would be putting in the work to broadcast it. Or worse yet, you’d be watching some low-budget artsy flick about watercolour painting done by somebody with too much time on their hands . And you’d still be playing the same old X Box 20 years from now and playing the same games because nobody’s building new technology…they’re just thinking about it. If everybody’s doing all the thinking and nobody’s doing the doing, it’s kind of like being an armchair quarterback: You think you know how to run the team but it doesn’t matter because you’re not going to get off your lazy fat ass to do anything about it.

I appreciate the arguments however. Biff, do you need a hired hand to help on the farm? On one condition – you can’t boss me around.

I found the essay very interesting, and at the start I found it had a bit of a sarcastic tone which reminded me a little of Swift’s A Modest Proposal. However, as I read on, I realized he was being serious, and though many of his arguments were logical and made sense, my overall impression (from only reading this one essay) was that Betrand suffers from the ‘Ivory Tower’ syndrome he talks about in relation to educational institutions. He seems to think more leisure time is the solution to societies faults. I am sure that more leisure time would be appreciated by everyone, but I doubt it would lead to the kind of world he envisions. Some bad people are just bad, and no amount of leisure time will make them good. The worst part is, these bad people are generally the ones who create successive generations of bad people, perpetuating the problem.

You might consider posting on some history of Russell personally in a future post in order to give us a bit of background to better understand where he is coming from with his writing.

One thing in your commentary struck a chord with me. You mentioned “white collar work is probably always more pleasant than “real” work.”
I think this is false, and I know a lot of people who would agree. Most of my friends who farm would prefer a days work on the farm to the ‘off farm’ white collar jobs that they have to do in order to provide for their families. For example, one of my friends owns and runs a successful Insurance Brokerage (white collar, with no boss), which can more than provide for his family and lifestyle. Yet, he has repeatedly stated he would much rather be on the farm working ‘hard’, than running his brokerage. He backs this up by working more hours on the farm than at the brokerage.
I can’t think of many things that I would consider more “real work” than farming. However, I find myself enjoying it a lot, often more than my chosen profession. There is something about facilitating the growth of both plants and animals that is deeply satisfying.

BTW, I completely agree on your statements about being judged on output, not hours. This drives me crazy as well.