A Call For Justice

Let's Reduce Full Time Working Hours from 42 to 32 Hours Per Week

Over the 100 year period from 1870 to 1970 the number of hours a person worked declined from 61 hours per week to 42. Why haven’t working hours continued to decline? It has been 50 years since the last reduction and the time has now come to reduce the working week by at least another 10 hours by the year 2022.

Long hours of labour are not necessarily conducive to productivity, quality of output or decision making. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence confirming that long hours are counterproductive as well as damaging to health. The daily news is rife with stories of lower level corporate employees who have been expected to work an obscene number of weekly hours to the detriment of their health which in some cases has led to an untimely death. A quick search of "dying due to overwork" will reveal the hazards of such practices. The same applies to the average 40 hour worker who, after commuting is factored in, can average over 60 hours a week in large urban areas.

Aristotle argued that free time was a necessary condition for full participation in cultural and political life. When overwork occurs the population is less engaged in the life of the nation. This can lead to disconnected and atomized citizens who become increasingly disaffected. This factor, combined with the class of people who are chronically underpaid and underemployed, can lead to the rise of authoritarian leaders who fill the gap with empty promises of a return to greatness and a better life, a situating we are currently witnessing all over the world. History shows us that these leaders are eventually overthrown due to the dissatisfaction of a population that eventually realizes that in fact, "the emperor really has no clothes." I propose that this rightward tendency can be slowed, if not reversed, by reducing working hours and increasing the minimum wage. These actions alone would provide the citizens with the free time necessary to cultivate and maintain democracies around the world.

Practically speaking, we can make this happen with the institution of a global carbon tax. This corporate tax would discourage the emission of greenhouse gases and act as partial compensation for the pollution and environmental damage that has been inflicted upon the citizens of our world. These citizens would then benefit from the collectivized industrial pollution that has occurred globally and would contribute directly in the reversal of such a seemingly irreversible destruction of the environment by imposing such a tax.

Philosophically speaking, we need to change the attitudes of leaders and citizens to begin to effect such a change. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, in aristocratic times this was easier to achieve since the population followed, at least in public, the dictates of the monarch while in democracies it is much more labor intensive to achieve such a change of minds. This is due to the diffuse and separate groupings of individuals in democracies and the fact that once they have established, individually, firm ideas, they do not easily change or give them up. We will have to work much harder to achieve a ripple effect whereby the idea of a reduction of the working week flows from various initial sources and radiates outward such as was done by Rousseau in the café culture of Paris to promote the ideas of the Enlightenment.

I do feel that this is possible since we can harness to positive aspects of social media to spread the idea and effect changes in the general population. This would be our version of a café culture. Often the people don't know what they were missing until their situation changes and I feel that this would be the case with a diminished work week.

Please advocate for the human right to reduce working hours from 42 to 32 a week while still maintaining a full time salary with a guarantee that any work over 32 hours weekly would be considered overtime and paid as such.