NAOMI KLEIN INTERVIEW: "A 3-DAY WEEK WILL HELP TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH"

[SheilaT]

8. It's a lovely idea, and back in the late '50s and early '60s

it was commonly understood that we were moving in that direction, thanks to something called automation. Never happened. Unfortunately.

More unfortunately, even if we overlook the problem of minimum wage and the above-minimum-but-still-not-enough wages for lots of jobs, I have a hard time imagining lawyers and stockbrokers, just to name two groups, cutting their work hours so drastically. Or teachers, although that could happen by hiring more teachers so that none of them need to spend quite so much time in the classroom, and to make their prep time paid.

Personally, I've never been enamored of the 40 hour week, and even though I worked my share of overtime, I was always an hourly employee so I was always paid for my time.

There needs to be a huge change in how people think about work, and about the balance of work and the rest of their life, for us to have any hope to even move in this direction.

However, we did do something similar during the Great Depression, when we moved from a standard 60 hour work week, to a standard 40 hour one, and employers across every type of job, were astonished to discover their employees were more productive in 40 hours than they had been in 60. Who knew? Something similar would probably happen if we cut the standard work week to 30 hours.