![\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ANew_office.jpg;](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2017\/04\/800px-New_office.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Remember that?<\/p>\n
Well, OK, not a historical 20-hour week, but predictions of such?<\/p>\n
I remember a book I had as a child in the 70s, that imagined life in the year 2000. \u00a0Yes, video phones instead of smartphones, and also futuristic clothing. \u00a0I don\u2019t recall whether there were Jetson-like robot maids or hovercraft, but I do clearly remember the statement that people would work only half as much as they do now.<\/p>\n
And more recently I stumbled on a book for adults, written in the 60s, again predicting life in the year 2000. \u00a0I\u2019d like to find it again, but I wouldn\u2019t have the least idea of where to start with a search, and it now strikes me as rather odd that it was at the library at all, given how aggressively they cull outdated books. \u00a0Maybe it was long enough ago that I read this, that it precedes their aggressive culling policy.<\/p>\n
It seems to me, if I remember correctly, that it very cautiously guessed that we might have video phones and some sort of computer connectedness, but failed to anticipate the internet and smartphones (and my memory of thinking, \u201chow wrong they were!\u201d means I must have been reading this after the advent of smartphones). \u00a0And yet it again predicted that our workdays would be halved.<\/p>\n
And it seems to me that this was the key prediction of the future \u2014 that automation wouldn\u2019t produce mass joblessness, as we fear now, but would mean that we\u2019d all work a lot less.<\/p>\n
Not only has that failed to come to pass, but instead we mock the French who have attempted to implement a 35 hour workweek (which I\u2019m told doesn\u2019t necessarily result in 35 hours of work per week, but instead means a lot of \u201ccomp time\u201d).<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s consider the question: \u00a0why hasn\u2019t part-time work become more prevalent?<\/p>\n
Of course, to some degree it has \u2014 employers have, after all, responded to the Obamacare mandate by moving their retail, fast food, and other unskilled workers from no-benefits full-time to 29 hours per week, leaving them to try to cobble a living out of two part-time jobs, or living in poverty if they can only manage the one. \u00a0But among professionals, and especially those in the upper middle class whose income level would position them quite well to forgo a part of one\u2019s salary in exchange for more leisure time, the opposite seems to have happened, and demands are for longer working hours, except for the small percentage who, like me, are on a Mommy Track (and even then, many nominal part-timers report working nights and weekends anyway).<\/p>\n
Now, part of this is about the money \u2014 even people who are prosperous always seem to find ways to want to consume more. \u00a0Sure, a part-time wage for a professional might\u00a0buy a typical suburban house, but if your colleagues all live in McMansions in the top addresses (and with the top-ranked schools), are you really going to stick your neck out and say, \u201cno thank you\u201d? \u00a0And there\u2019s always another vacation to take (even if you take your conference calls from the hotel room while the kids play), another level to move up in terms of the prestige of the car (because you deserve<\/em> the BMW 7 series this time), and so on.<\/p>\n But from an employer\u2019s point of view, too, there are costs to part-time employers, whether they\u2019re your top managers or your rank-and-file workers, because there are fixed costs associated with workers, and the more work you can get out of any one working unit, the more profitable you\u2019ll be. \u00a0Consider:<\/p>\n If we are speaking of the difference between full-time, and full-time-with-overtime employees, you could add to the list healthcare benefits, which are a fixed cost whether your employee works 40 hours a week or 60 hours. \u00a0And as I recall, during boom times at GM, the company far preferred to give its workers lots of overtime, rather than hire new workers, because of the costs they\u2019d face in eventually having to lay off workers.<\/p>\n And I don\u2019t know that we can really deal with these fixed costs simply by saying, \u201cfine, we ensure a level playing field by setting a 35 or even 30 hour week as the norm instead of 40 hours.\u201d \u00a0After all, it is exactly the exempt workforce that is earning enough to be able to comfortably shift to a fewer-hour workweek, and it is exactly this group that, by and large, chooses to increase consumption rather that its leisure hours, and it is for this group that the government (in our current legal framework) has no power to mandate reduced hours. \u00a0It would take a dramatic shift to move to what I believe is the case in France, where the category of \u201cexempt\u201d workers is much narrower than ours, and encompasses only the highest levels of management.<\/p>\n Yet at the same time, we need to figure out how to get from here to there \u2014 by which I mean that an end result in which everyone simply works fewer hours in the week is a far preferable result to one in which automation produces large numbers of people who aren\u2019t in the workforce at all.<\/p>\n Readers, thoughts?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image: \u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ANew_office.jpg; By Phil Whitehouse (Flickr: New office) [CC BY 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the 1960s, it was predicted that our workdays would be halved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6463,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[748,749,293],"class_list":["post-7307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-automation","tag-futurism","tag-part-time-work"],"yoast_head":"\n\n