Do you want to do something about the family, or do you want
to talk about it?
If you want to do something about the family, there is no
other more important or more urgent policy than establishing the 4-hour work
day and the 20-hour work week (4/20 ww).
Of course, people who want to work longer hours ought to be
free to do so.
The essential condition is that those who opt for the 4/20
ww earn enough to live a dignified life.
Not today, perhaps. But, is there any reason why we should
not take, today, the first in this one thousand steps journey?
Step One
Do not tell me that the gentlemen who are taking home a
yearly salary of a few billion—billion—dollars per year cannot spare a couple
of zeros to add to the 1 dollar to the lowest paying jobs.
That will be an easy way to transform monetary wealth into
real wealth; financial accounts into food on the table. And the need to work
long hours to “earn a living” will be subdued.
No reliance on food stamps, please. That is a subtle way
through which neoliberals favor the privatization of profits and socialization of
losses (public sharing losses). And, while compelling the government to
intervene to literally save lives, they rail against the “expansion” of
government activities.
Step Two
The new economy. There is a great variety of experimentation
going on in the “new economy.” Perhaps, such experiments are already going on,
and either I am too deaf or misinformed, or “they” are too timid.
Step Three
Wherever the machines run 24/7, sharing jobs is the solution.
So, instead of 3 shifts of 8 hours each, we are going to have 6 shifts of 4
hours each. Easy math…
Step Four
Get control of the two-hour discussion in the morning and
two-hour discussion in the afternoon around the water cooler—sorry, I meant the
conference room.
Step Five
I work alone. I declare the 4/20 ww right now.
Yes, This Is the
Trend
Yes, this is the trend—toward sanity. Mainstream media
seem to shy away from this trend. But the Internet, thank God for the Internet,
is full of it. Please, google ”20-hour work week.”
Where Are the Tools?
The legal, practical, financial tools to obtain the 4/20
ww in the relatively near future are readily available.
Cooperatives and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) are
the tools of choice.
Consumer Stock Ownership Plans (CSOPs) have to become
more widespread. Can you imagine the day in which McDonald’s and Target and
Macy’s start rewarding the customers who keep them alive day after day by sharing “corporate”
profits with them at the end of the year?
In short
In short, to make the 4/20 ww a reality, we need to
operate the transformation of mainstream economics, whether of the right
(neoliberalism) or the left (Keynesianism) into Concordian economics; then, we
need to transform both individualism and collectivism (socialism/communism) into
Somism, the theory and practice of social
men and women in the social context; finally, we need to transform Rationalism
into Relationalism.
Only women can put these points across; only women can
sustain these transformations. Why? First, because women are eminently
practical. You know the story: While men are interested in achieving peace in
the world, women are concerned with such issues as to where to send the kids to
school; or what to have for dinner tonight.
And then, and then there is the most important reason of
all: Women are not irrational; they are relational.
It is thus women who will take a hold of Concordian
economics, Somism, and Relationalism and never let these things go until they
are translated into practice.
