Читать книгу The Case for a Four Day Week - Anna Coote - Страница 11

Behind all this, a powerful confluence of ideas has shaped prevailing attitudes about what is ‘right’ as well as ‘normal’. In 1926 – the same year Ford Motor Company introduced the five-day 40-hour week – Judge Elbert H. Gary, board chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, told the New York Times that the five-day week was impractical, uncompetitive and illogical, not only for steel workers, but for any other business. ‘The commandment says, “Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work.” The reason it didn’t say seven days is that the seventh day is a day of rest and that’s enough.’¹⁴

Judge Gary’s aversion to shorter hours drew on something much deeper than fear of commercial risk. He subscribed to a widely held belief that work was the God-given purpose of humankind. Where labour was brutal and coercive – as it so often was – it was helpful to distinguish between body and mind, as Descartes had suggested.¹⁵ For if humans were made ‘in the image of God’, then their Godlike essence could be safely located in the mind (or soul), which may be separate and immortal, leaving the mortal body to be honed and disciplined into a machine for the mines, mills and factories of industrial capitalism.

The mechanical clock was a vital component of that discipline. As clockwork became more reliable and widely used, it set the scene for what Marx identified as the commodification of time and what British historian E. P. Thompson described as the birth of ‘industrial time consciousness’.¹⁶ Industry required its human machines to operate predictably and reliably, in ways that could be measured, bought and sold.

According to time theorist Barbara Adam, the variable time of ‘seasons, ageing, growth and decay, joy and pain’ gave way to the ‘abstract time of the clock where one hour is the same irrespective of context and emotion’.¹⁷ We have since grown used to thinking about time in discrete, globally consistent units that can be counted uniformly – seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and so on. We live accordingly, staking out our lives by clock and calendar.

Clock time has served and strengthened a powerful work ethic that embraces the idea of hard work as a route to profit and success. This has deep roots in economic and cultural developments over several centuries. It has served modern capitalism well, but with increasingly toxic effects. For if long hours of paid work are the route to virtue and success, it follows that the main purpose and value of human existence is productive capacity. By this logic, those who are not ‘productive’ have no worth. Like wheat from chaff, hard-working ‘strivers’ are separated from lazy ‘skivers’.¹⁸ The former are rewarded, the latter punished – by increasingly ungenerous systems of ‘social protection’.

There are many politicians and business leaders who now seem keen to reverse the trend of reduced working time. They brag about sleep deprivation, while energy drinks, late-night gyms and self-help books propagate an ‘always on’ culture of relentless productivity. Tycoon Elon Musk of PayPal and SpaceX declares that ‘nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week’.¹⁹ Jack Ma, Chinese billionaire and CEO of the Alibaba Group, champions a ‘996’ routine of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.²⁰ All these attitudes have contributed to a strong cultural bias in favour of long hours of work.