Isn’t it about time we started working on the basis of productivity, not hours?
It’s an intriguing idea: the future is not about working more, but less. While recent research claims that some Amazon logistics workers in the UK are forced to work more than eleven hours a day, leaving them exhausted, a BBC report, “The compelling case for working a lot less”, explores productivity based on working hours, concluding that the eight-hour working day is absurd, and that the ideal would be to work much less, or even to make work — and pay — independent of the number of hours spent laboring, but instead to do so based on productivity and meeting objectives.
Everything indicates that we are heading toward a scenario in which machines will do most of the work performed by people today. The autonomous vehicle, already in use in Phoenix (Waymo), Boston (Lyft with vehicles provided by NuTonomy), and in 45 other cities around the world, threatens to deprive drivers of their jobs, even if they create many other related positions. If you like to drive, you should know that if you want cheaper insurance, you will have to accept your vehicle doing most of it, because it does it much better than you. And this is just the beginning: in the future, actually driving your own vehicle will be expensive, very expensive, even if no government makes the obviously impopular decision to forbid you from doing so.
And if you make your living flipping hamburgers or making pizzas in a fast food restaurant, your days are also numbered: more and more robots are taking over these kinds of tasks, and although some new jobs will be generated, most repetitive tasks where humans add little, will go.
The trend seems clear: even in companies that continue to generate employment, like Amazon, overall, the industry is shedding jobs, moving toward a future in which the idea of a job for each person will make no sense any more.
But what if we think about work in another way? What if the idea of an eight-hour day doing a specific thing gave way to another type of work, in which a person does things a robot can’t — at least, for the moment, and if this idea of productivity linked to hours, which has always been open to question, led us to define work differently? On the one hand, we could distribute jobs more equitably among a larger number of people, and . on the other, find a healthier balance between professional and personal life. After all … why eight hours? Who — and when decided on that figure? The eight-hour day was a victory by workers, a compromise based on mainly physical, not intellectual labor. In a world in which physical labor is increasingly carried out by machines, wouldn’t it make sense to revise these principles? There are no universal truths here: experiments in Sweden with six-hour workdays seem to point to greater productivity and better general health.
Over the course of my professional life there have been times when I worked long hours, but I never measured them. I have always worked at what I need to work on, and nobody has ever asked me to account for my time. I tend to work long hours because I like what I do, not because I am forced to: as long as the results of my work are adequate, my employer doesn’t care how many hours I work or from where I work, something many people see as a luxury, although I spend many hours preparing classes and relatively few actually teaching, but I think this surely applies to many other jobs.
What would happen if we began to think less about the hours worked and more about the productivity obtained from our labors? Could we create more flexible, more equitable and healthier productivity models? How would employers, labor unions or governments respond to such proposals? Why do we cling to the eight-hour day as a fundamental element of the equation, even though it is pretty clear that is really just tradition?
(En español, aquí)
