Vintage IWW 4 hour workday prints
Can you imagine? Would give us so much more rest and free time.
The average office worker is only productive for 3 hours a day.
Every article talking about this study talks about how bosses can squeeze more labor out of workers, or how workers can squeeze more labor out of themselves, but the reality is that the human brain only has so much capacity to focus on unpleasant tasks, and people generally won’t work more than that without the threat of force (like in manual and service industry jobs where work is easily quantified and workers are being monitored all the time to make sure they don’t slack off; the threat of being fired and losing one’s ability to eat is the threat of force). People in hunter-gatherer societies do about that same amount of work.
The working day isn’t only about productivity, it’s about keeping you busy too, so you’ll have no time do to other things (like study, discover that you can fight back capitalism, organize, things like that).
Of all the things we fight for, we don’t realize that the standard 8-hour work day is slowly killing us of the drive to do anything at all. So many of us have to commute to work, most families need both parents to work just to afford a decent quality of life, and at the end of the day (after 8 hours plus commute time, plus necessary errands and scarfing food) we don’t have time to be healthy, to foster new relationships, to worry about other people’s problems in the world because we’re too busy killing our own minds so slowly we don’t even realize it. It’s why netflix culture exists because honestly, of the very rare couple hours I might get to myself at the end of the day I need to climb out of my own brain and step into another world or I think I’ll go insane.
The 8 hour work day needs to disappear. It doesn’t make anyone more productive and we’ve all taken it as something so standardized we don’t even consider the idea of petitioning our governments to change things.
Imagine a world where you actually have time to live in it. Imagine that.
Okay, so I went to a regular highschool, and due to health reasons was transferred to the dreaded “alternative school”- the boogeyman of education where most kids a step from prison supposedly go.
That was a lie, btw. Yes, some problem kids went there, but it was for teen parents, or kids that had to get jobs to help with the finances at home, or had health problems like me that meant they couldn’t go to school 8 hours a day.
You went to school for four hours a day, they had a morning and afternoon shift, plus you got to go to your classes for however long, so long as you spent at least 45mins in each as basically all students were at different grades and places, so the teacher would give us the curriculum, and we worked out way through it at our own pace, coming to the teacher as required or demanded per the lessons. You failed tests, you had to redo the section and keep studying until you could pass.
Oh my God, you have never seen more cheerful teenagers in a school setting. we loved it. The stress levels were way down, drama was minimal, everyone did well in classes unless they had a learning problem and needed more help. My health and depression improved. IT. WAS. GREAT.
We also got stuff done. Wide awake and raring. I finished English III in a month. A MONTH. I also got kicked out of class because I kept giggling while reading Huckleberry Finn, and then had another girl sent out to sit with me as I basically tutored her in the hallway all the things about the book she wasn’t understanding.
We wanted to graduate. Since we were in charge of how fast we worked through our courses, people were diligent about it. No one was late, people rarely had to miss school, we stuck to our studies, and everyone talked about how much better they were doing and how things had improved just because of how they were having to do things changed. We were still studying the same subjects and had the exact same criteria to meet, but because of how we were doing it- that was the difference.
I was there at 7:30AM, home by 1PM. We also didn’t have homework, because we weren’t allowed to take the course books home. People were finishing classes at a faster rate and with better grades than they ever had before- and were generally happy on the whole.
People aren’t meant to be worker drones. We aren’t built for it.
Published
Meg's Mumbles 