4/4/4: 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, 4x the compensation.
Sounds incredible. What book is this?
I can’t say for certain unless I go look through the book since I just took this from my photo library for the rule, but I’m nearly certain this is from Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (Rest In Power).
Thank you for spreading the gospel of Bullshit Jobs! Its not mentioned enough.
Anarchist library link: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
Thanks for the link!
You’re very welcome!
Graeber was such a great mind, everything I watch or read of his is just truth after truth nonstop.
Bullshit Jobs is actually the only thing I’ve read from him, besides maybe one article. What else do you recommend?
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is amazing, as is Debt: The First 5000 Years, but if their length is daunting, davidgraeber.org has a bunch of great articles and papers he’s done. I like “Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you!” And “The Practical Utopians Guide to the coming collapse”, but it’s mostly all worth reading. He has a lot of great lectures on YouTube also, if that’s more your style, and a few longer form interviews on podcasts like SRSLY Wrong.
OP is correct, this is from Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Here’s a link on the anarchist library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
Highly recommend the book, really changed how I view work.
I build satellites and actually enjoy my job. Sometimes I am disappointed when my 8 hours is up and I have to go home. What about those people?
With significantly more capital and free time, you would be able to develop and manage your own projects outside of the workplace, allowing you to continue developing yourself, your skills, and your contributions to your field. If you prefer to put the majority of your efforts into a single project or workplace, incentive structures could be developed to acknowledge your outsized contributions while not imposing such as necessary for everyone.
I think you have a great question though, and things like that would best be answered collectively, through discussion and experimentation.
What do you think? What would you prefer? What would be fair to you to recognize your extra efforts? What checks and balances would be needed to have a 16hr week as the basis for a livable wage, while still allowing for people to work more when desired?
I think definite exceptions would have to be made. For instance, some operations take more than 4 hours to complete, such as getting the satellite ready for install in the launch vehicle, or the work has to be done in a tight finite timeline, such as “you have 1 week to fully test, prep for launch, and install the satellite in the launch vehicle.” Of course, these are edge cases.
With my personality, I feel like my work ethic would suffer since I’d spend so much more time at home than at work and I wouldn’t want to do shit when I am actually there. I also think my skills would degrade, and I’d spend a lot of time trying to remember where I left off and what I was doing. Perhaps it’s just my career, and other careers/jobs wouldn’t have my issues.
I pride myself and my high work ethic, quality products, and kick-ass attitude, but I also need structure, routine, and discipline to function as an adult. When left to my own devices for too long, it all falls apart. Again, perhaps that’s just me.
I won’t turn down a bigger sack of money though. I do like money.
I can definitely see that, and can foresee certain critical projects also that may require longer shift times. I worry about endorsing an exception system allowing people to continually subject themselves to longer working hours indefinitely though, because I believe that much of the ability of the current 40 hour system to sustain itself lies in its reliance upon necessary but uncompensated labor. Domestic labor is part of our responsibilities to our community just as much as engaging in compensated labor, and when we allow for such long working hours, it often becomes untenable for many to maintain both their compensated and uncompensated responsibilities, which leads to the uncompensated portion of the responsibilities falling on a partner or relative or lower paid roommate. This to me, is unsustainable.
If you do not have the time to engage in your personal domestic responsibilities, it often means you’re neglecting your wider community responsibilities also. We need an active and engaged populace, and that means we need time for the populace to engage in governance, time that 8 hour days 5 or even 4 days a week do not allow for. Participating in governance isn’t casting a ballot once or twice a year. It’s going to every city council meeting and most community events. It’s engaging in shared labor such as community gardening. It’s volunteering in different contexts depending on one’s ability to help sustain others with differing abilities.
So while I think there will always be auteurs and geniuses who will want to work all of the time, I am hesitant to allow them, because by doing so they are withholding those talents from the rest of society for their own personal benefit. It would be better to have the Einsteins in the meeting room, than to have them off researching all of the time, because limiting those insights to one realm in order to full exploit them is allowing myopic thinking to cloud our idea of progress.
I do think that specific projects may warrant burst activity, wherein individuals work long hours, but I think those need to be contrasted with extended periods of respite, whether or not those involved want to do so.
These sorts of proposals always seem biased toward white collar work. If you can accomplish all of your work for the day in 4 hours and spend the rest of the day “sitting in cafes arguing about politics” then that’s great for you, but wouldn’t someone need to work in that cafe to bring you the coffee? And if more people are going to be going to cafes, wouldn’t those workers need to work even harder? And wouldn’t the people who harvest the coffee beans and the people who ship those beans halfway across the world and the people who inventory these shipments and divide them up across multiple retail spaces based on demand all still need to work the exact same amount, if not more? To me, it seems like blue collar or retail workers will get the short end of the stick while the people with bullshit jobs that contribute nothing to society get rewarded with even more free time. But of course that’s nothing new. People with essential jobs have always been the first ones to get shafted.
This guy: "Oh gee golly, all of this pretending to work all day sure is hard. I wish I had more free time :( " The girl bringing him coffee who makes minimum wage and just learned she’ll need to work a double shift today and will now need to make arrangements to have her kid picked up from day care: “Wow that must be super hard, I literally cannot imagine having to deal with that”
I don’t know man, I’m not going to pretend I have any better ideas but we need to start framing these things better. Obviously I would love for all workers to have as much free time as possible, but when people keep talking about work in terms of “going to pointless meetings all day” or “typing stuff into spreadsheets” then it’s hard to take their ideas seriously.
I have worked in construction, landscaping, electronics repair, IT, customer service, retail, food service, and I’m in assembly of and testing of robotics now. Not in a single instance of any of those jobs have I ever felt that I needed to work nearly as hard or as often as I do, were we adequately staffed, and properly compensated. You’re extrapolating the chronic understaffing of the current times to this hypothetical I have posited. If your boss has to pay you 3x overtime for every minute you work over 4hrs, do you think he’s going to make you work doubles, or hire more people? Why wouldn’t that be possible otherwise.
Edit: If you’re one of the owners of a collectively owned coffee shop, and you decide to work more hours because you want more money, why would that be negative? You all benefit, you all gain increased payout from increased revenue. If you have a kid, why would you choose that over your kid when you have enough money to live already?
Why does your conception of third places only include commercial entities? Why wouldn’t a society with a sudden glut of free time be incentivized to create places in which they can exist without continual and perpetual consumption? Even if consumption is your goal, I don’t see why it needs to be done through and in commercial areas. I Can currently go to city park with beer and drink it in peace, legally, without ever requiring anyone to “service” me, and without incurring any additional costs for existing in that area. Third spaces should not be primarily consumption places, they should be community spaces.
You also ignore that this points out that the productivity for such work schedules is already here. The reason the barista makes a shitty minimum wage is because 90+% of all of the value she generates is being leeched by a parasite class, who do not produce anything. If productivity gains had been redistributed as wage gains for the workers, we would already be working less hours. Including that barista. Min wage is trash because the powers that he want it to be, and not enough people fight it for it to be anything else. A minimum wage tied directly to cost of living (and thriving, not living in abject poverty), would mean that that worker would have enough funds saved up to say FUCK YOU to her boss if they tried to make her work a double, because part of a living wage is having enough saved up to cover you in the event you need to quit working for whatever reason. Not to mention that removing many of the entirely pointless levels of middle management who’s only job is to make their boss look good, or to oppress the employees they’re hired to “manage”, suddenly massive amounts of capital would be freed up from almost every corporation on the planet that could go towards the actual workers, such as those baristas.