RDH - The Century of the Eight-Hour Day, Instrumental in the Push to Complete the Final Stage in the Project of Human Civilization, Should Be Phased Out, Concludes Panel

The Century of the Eight-Hour Day, Instrumental in the Push to Complete the Final Stage in the Project of Human Civilization, Should Be Phased Out, Concludes Panel

March 9, 2007

The author, increasingly bored by the pressures of a workaday world and concerned that civilization might be running off the rails, decided it was high time to convene a panel of experts on the human condition. Their charge: to recommend changes to the American lifestyle that would forestall global warming and make life more livable.

A summary of their report includes seven recommendations, presented here in order of urgency.

"But I love my work." Don't worry. A shorter workday will give you more time for it. The new system would merely stipulate that you not work your employees more than three and a half hours a day.

1. Move to a three-and-a-half-hour workday. The eight-hour American workday, adopted toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, was a gradual and grudging concession; there was much work yet to be done, and industry needed all the help it could get. The four central innovations of our time—electrical circuits, sound recording and transmission, moving pictures, and the combustion engine—which we now take for granted, would need decades of testing and improvement. Fortunately, two world wars came into the picture rather early, providing a sort of technological proving grounds for all of these marvels.

Now we have everything we need, including a century's worth of recorded entertainment. The time for striving and wars is over. A few hours each day from each adult should prove to be more than enough to keep the whole system afloat, provided we scale things back somewhat.

This first recommendation—for the three-and-a-half-hour day—should be treated not only as the basis for all the others but also as their culmination.

2. Eliminate the development and unveiling of new operating systems, bigger video display units, smaller mobile phones, etc. Computers as entertainment and communications centers have finally come of age; if the top-of-the-line systems on sale this winter are any indication, all our needs have been met. With everyone freed from the Moore's Law treadmill and with entertainment being the be-all and end-all of the new order, there will be plenty of time* and motivation to hammer out any remaining glitches and to remove the arbitrary line that still tends to separate the television set from computers and telephones. The ramping down of the technology sector will, it is true, create a huge surplus of advertisers, developers, programmers, and sales representatives. But many of these people can be moved into the space industry, to help maintain and perfect the current fleet of satellites, and to work with other nations in a sort of multinational "can you hear me now" campaign.

3. Eliminate commercial air travel and overnight couriers. Anyone in this age of mature telecommunications who continues to insist on rushing his or her body through the air, in a dehumanizing, exhaust-spewing canister, is being more than a little selfish and needy, concludes the panel. The same goes for packages. There will no longer be any need, in a world where we're no longer chasing after the next big thing, to invoke thousands of gallons of jet fuel for the sole purpose of getting someone's stuff to them right away.

"Is this piece supposed to be utopian or apocalyptic?" Both. But you have to admit, if a three-hour day were in fact implemented, life would begin to look a lot better to a lot of people.

4. Scale back health care to disallow treatment for self-inflicted maladies. A significant percentage of the technologically and pharmaceutically Byzantine health care system in the United States, as everyone who follows the news will have realized, is increasingly busy treating people who have made themselves sick by self-medicating their overworked bodies with tons of food and drink. The cost of caring for these people alone is in the many billions of dollars annually. But most of this money would be saved by instituting a straightforward "front door" policy: (a) screen all visitors to the hospital; (b) turn away all those who have become unhealthy as a result of a bad lifestyle. The time and money saved by such a step would be incalculable.

5. Discontinue all but a handful of automobile makes and models. The American romance with the automobile ended within a year or two after the first big oil crisis in 1973. American automobile companies are simply incapable of thinking small, and it is only thanks to loopholes in the government's fuel-economy standards that the industry managed a second wind, from roughly 1985 to 2005. Now that the era of the light truck is effectively over, however, it is time to admit that none of the endless variations and model debuts are exciting enough to merit all the effort. The billions and billions of dollars in savings—after most models have been discontinued, their assembly lines retooled for the few that remain—would, of course, be passed onto consumers (who would, in turn, be free, in their ample spare time, to customize their own cars themselves, or to acquire and restore their favorite classics).

6. Gradually develop and expand programs of recycling. Commercial jetliners and systems for testing blood glucose levels and a lot of the other trappings of the industrial age would lie fallow under the new system and would need to be recycled. Fortunately, there would be all the time in the world to develop this growth industry.

7. Create a campaign to reeducate humanity so that quality of life becomes, for the first time, more important than life at any cost. Life used to be more difficult to sustain and, naturally, human beings were anxious to build up and fortify their numbers. But we've gone too far. To put it another way, we've stood aside a little too passively as billions of unwanted babies have been born on the tides of chemically fertilized crops and the flesh of animals fortified against the stress of industrial confinement, as if birth control was some sort of secret rite reserved for the wealthy, educated elite. It is easy to see where this has gotten us: we claim to want business as usual, and we continue to hail progress, as, meanwhile, we engage in endless debates over immigration policies and sputter and strain under the yoke of health care and food-delivery systems that threaten to collapse. The panel, therefore, recommends a wholesale reevaluation of human priorities.

The Road Ahead

As you can see, the panel's recommendations begin with the simple step of scaling back the work week and end on a rather apocalyptic note. It is more than a little likely that the panel grew to understand, at some point in its mission, the virtual impossibility of getting anyone—let alone the United States—to make the first move in a world that has lost all perspective and which threatens itself, with each new day of fierce, agitated striving, with extinction.†

*Even factoring in eight weeks of vacation a year, one of the many corollaries to the shorter workday.

†But take heart, especially if you're rich. There's plenty of living left to do and quite a bit of beautiful countryside left to be enjoyed.