It was in Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics that I learned John Maynard Keynes had predicted that by 2030 we would have championed technological advances and shared the benefits amongst us to reduce our working week to 15 hours.
We’ve got 6 years and a LONG way to go….
The idea was that technological advances would benefit the economy and improve our standard of lives, and that we would spread the wealth. This resulting in a person being able to work shorter week whilst still earning enough to maintain their quality of life.
Instead what has happened is that:
- The importance of profit has been emphasized, ahead of quality of life, work-life balance and even workers’ own wealth. We have been sold the story that driving profit will make workers wealthier.
- The wealth benefits and efficiencies of technology have been ever more concentrated in the pockets of a few, whilst the means of the majority are now diminishing – for example many young people working in the same industries as their parents could not, without support, aspire to purchase their own home these days, leaving them at the mercy of intense rental increase prices.
This combination resulted in a new class of ultra-high net-worth individuals, who’s wealth is growing at an accelerated rate, whilst others are feeling the pressure of a rising cost of living.
So, instead of technology being used to enable to workers to work less, and for society to spread the work that does need to be done amongst a greater number of workers, companies have gone in the opposite direction – using technology to employ as few workers as possible (as salaries decrease profit margins) whilst still maintaining the targeted output. Examples of this include supermarket layoffs given the emergence of self-checkout machines, and Amazon making 20,000+ people redundant in the same year Jeff Bezos took his USD 125 million mega yacht to sea.
A shorter work week is about money, inequality and value of living vs working. It’s about justice. Why should people input the same time, when each individual’s output is so much greater, but the increase in value of the output is not benefitting themselves? Shortening the work week for the same pay increases the value of the worker’s time – and it’s time for workers to stop being devalued.