SCIENCE MATTERS
by David Suzuki
In 1926, US automaker Henry Ford reduced his employees’ workweek from six eight-hour days to five, with no pay cuts. It’s something workers and labour unions had been calling for and it followed previous reductions in work schedules that had been as high as 84 to 100 hours over seven days a week.
Ford wasn’t responding to worker demands; he was being a businessman. He expected increased productivity and knew workers with more time and money would buy and use the products they were making. It was a way of spurring consumerism and productivity to increase profits, and it succeeded. Ford, then one of America’s largest employers, was ahead of his time; most workers in North America and elsewhere didn’t get a 40-hour workweek until after the Second World War.
Since standardization of the 40-hour workweek in the mid-20th century, everything has changed but the hours. If anything, many people are working even longer hours, especially in North America. This has severe repercussions for human health and well-being, as well as the environment.
Until the Second World War, it was common for one person in a household, usually the oldest male, to do wage work full time. Now, women make up 42 percent of Canada’s full-time workforce. Technology has made a lot of work redundant, with computers and robots doing many tasks previously performed by humans.
People get money from bank machines, scan groceries at automated checkouts and book travel online. Many people now spend most or all of their workdays in front of a computer.
Well into the 21st century, we continue to work the same long hours as 20th century labourers, depleting ever more of Earth’s resources to produce more goods that we must keep working to buy, use and replace in a seemingly endless cycle of toil and consumerism.
It’s time to pause and consider better ways to live like shifting from fossil-fuelled lifestyles with which our consumer-based workweeks are connected; it would have been easier to change had we done so gradually.
The UK think tank, New Economics Foundation, argues that a standard 21-hour workweek would address a number of interconnected problems: “overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.”
Beyond helping break the cycle of constant consumption and allowing people to focus on things that matter – like friends, family and time in nature – a shorter workweek would also reduce rush-hour traffic and gridlock… And it would give people more options for family care. (David Suzuki Foundation employees enjoy a four-day workweek.)
Economic systems that require constant growth on a finite planet don’t make sense. The fact that the world’s richest 62 people now have more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population is absurd and tragic.
It’s time for a paradigm shift in our economic thinking.
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Excerpted from “Long work hours don’t work for people or the planet.” David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington. David Suzuki’s latest book is Just Cool It!: The Climate Crisis and What We Can Do (Greystone Books), co-written with Ian Hanington. Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org