Whatever happened to "The Leisure Society?"
 

Excerpts from the article by Jeffrey Kaplan (link below):

In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world’s leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran “four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”

It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described “a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer.”

Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.p...s/article/2962

I was promised a four day work week (and not one of ten hour days, before you ask).

I expect that it is in the same holding area as my flying car. They are getting closer to the computer I can talk to, though.

Well, he did get it right. It does exist - in Europe.

Meanwhile, we're working longer for less.

So, we have less vacation than most developed nations, probably more per-capita prescription drug use as a result, worse health benefits, higher health costs, worse health outcomes....

Yea Us.:right:

P.S. Let's not forget worse maternity/parental leave.

I work 12 hour shifts.

They're making a big mistake.

I'm doing MY part! Are YOU? :p

Fascinating stuff.

Amen. But please to stay late tonight and please to come in on the weekend.

No thanks. ;)

Thom Hartmann's perspective - The Leisure Society has arrived...
 

for the 1%ers!

http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/201...-1-december-11

Let's clarify a few things about the situation in France.

The law states that we work 35 hours per week. That specific law has created a huge mess.

Prior to it we worked 39 hours a week with 5 weeks of paid leave.
After it passed, we did 35 hours but were paid as if we did 39


Let take myself has an example : I'm a computer programmer.

In my last job, I had the status of a clerck employee. I worked 35 hours a week + 4 hours paid at 25% more than a normal one. But these 4 hours were exonarated of taxes for my employer.

Other people may work precisely 35, 37.5, or 39 hours depending on the company.

In another job, I was rated as a manager. I had no one to manage not even myself. In that case the law states that I cannot work more than 217 days per year. No time limit save for the European limit of 48 hours a week. In reality I busted my ass 9 to 10 hours in the office and usually 1 or two more in front of my home computer.

I did exactly the same thing in these two jobs : writing programs.

Let's not forget all the possible deregulations for turism, public works, etc...

The law on the 35 hours of work per week was passed as a means to get more votes for the socialist party that was in power at that time. It was just demagogy and nothing else.

And let's not forget those working for the administration. We used to say that the law was hard on these guys since they had to increase their output from 29 to 35 hours.

Unfortunately, it's not really a joke.

thanks
 

Thanks for the Sara Robinson article. She has a link to this awesome Evan Robinson article on the International Game Developers Association site:

Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: Six Lessons

http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes...rk-six-lessons

Loved them both! :D

How many days per week?

all of them

Any body who didn't already read this fascinating article found by Bruce, please do yourself a favor and check it out. I was completely surprised--I had no idea why we had actually developed the 40-hour week standard.



And somewhere in there they point to long hours creeping back following the lead of technology-obsessed geeks with Asperger's! :bolt:

Toy, do you work in the games industry?

Hmm...
 

I'll ask my supervisor and get back to you.

While you're at it, ask your supervisor if you ever worked for Acclaim or Midway. I'm an ex-alum, never going back to the 80-hour-week bullshit again, personally. But we might know some of the same folks.

I had dinner with Lou Nicastro once, does that count?:p:

December 17, 1992
 

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation - EFFector Online Issue 4.01

Tom Forester, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing & Information Technology, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia:

The "paperless" office now looks to be one of the funniest predictions made about the social impact of IT. More and more trees are being felled to satisfy our vast appetite for paper, in offices which were supposed by now to be all-electronic. In the US, paper consumption has rocketed 320 per cent over the past 30 years, ahead of real GDP which has gone up 280 per cent (Tenner 1988). In absolute terms, this means that US consumers gobbled up about 4 trillion pages of paper last year, compared with only 2.5 trillion in 1986 - about the time that word processors and personal computers were becoming really popular. The two most successful office products of recent times - the photocopier and the fax machine - are of course enormous users or generators of paper, while technologies which do not use paper - such as electronic mail and voice mail - have been slow to catch on.

http://w2.eff.org/effector/effect04.01

hell yeah! Now give me back my beer.

No.

Wait.

You just keep that part. I'll get a fresh one.

Heck, as soon as I get my car back I'll be hitting the road for about two or three weeks.

Fetch me a coldie too, eh?

Everytime I see this thread title, my mind fills in as 'Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?'