21 hours
1st July 2011
Don't you just love finding academic research that backs up something you have always felt yourself? For years I have been banging on to anyone who will listen about our notion of 'full-time' employment not only being flawed, but potentially damaging to the well-being of individuals, families, communities, wider society and the environment.
Nobody works all of the time (24/7/365), so where does this artificial idea of a 35 to 40+ hour week come from, and what value does it have? A report produced by nef last year argues that for a whole host of reasons we need to move towards a society where 21 hours a week of paid work is the norm.
I have always had great difficulty with the term 'work-life balance', for whilst it aims to enhance quality of life, it still seems to unhelpfully pit paid work against the rest of a person's life; implying that it must therefore be a continuous and ongoing struggle. Our whole lives need to be in balance, for the sake of our own mental and physical health as well as the welfare of those around us and the protection of the environments in which we move. Many people currently work overly long days (often quite unproductively); they commute for many hours every week; they 'buy time' by wastefully throwing money at things instead of doing them themselves; and they damage health, relationships and the environment along the way.
There are alternatives. Time and resources can be freed up for friends and family, for volunteering, for lifelong learning, for leisure activities, and so on. But this requires not only a leap of faith. It also requires an honest reflection of how much money and stuff we truly need to make us happy and what we are prepared to sacrifice in order to reach that goal.
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