Of holi-hours and other things
Revisiting the Fordist holiday scheme
– By Laura Nemeth and Torben David
The 20th century phenomenon of the steady, 9 to 5 job is drawing its last breath. Even unwieldy public administrations, those last bastions of job security and rigid organisation, are now hailing core working hours as a remedy to satisfy the ever increasing demand for more flexibility. Flexibility, however, is not as rosy a concept as it often seems. Sure, flexible working hours allow you to pick up your kids from school, maybe even spend a day working from home. But all of this is only possible because of the Internet — that invisible cord that ties your home and office together, with the smartphone as its tangible link. The Internet is both a blessing and a curse, allowing you to leave your office, but also making sure that your office never leaves you. To be fair, this issue has not gone unnoticed and there have been attempts to address it on both sides of the labour divide. For example, the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) secured the right for managers to leave their work at their (physical or virtual) desk. German car maker Volkswagen took matters even further and cut the invisible cord by killing of its most prominent physical emanation; email servers are switched off at night.
With the increasing entanglement of leisure and workdays we are de facto abolishing the Fordist consensus of the 40-hour workweek. A system designed by the notorious statistician Henry Ford to maximise the productivity of his factory workers in the early 20th century, its applicability to the modern office job should have always seemed doubtful. Now, however, a shift away from this century-old golden law of labour appears increasingly inevitable. As the traditional frontier between work and leisure continues to erode, it will take more than just a few adjustments to accommodate such monumental change.
What we really need is a new understanding of the concept of free time to counter the potentially adverse effects of our new understanding of work. By introducing more flexible working conditions, we have, maybe unintentionally, also diminished the difference between leisure, or holidays, and working days. The result is a vacation day on which you “just quickly” check your emails, but also a work day on which you may leave the office at 1 pm to have lunch with your parents-in-law. The convergence of our time at work and our supposed free time really only leaves us one choice if we want to maintain a meaningful difference between the time allocated to work and leisure: measure our time spent with leisure activities the same way we measure our time at work.
In other words: hours. This might sound absurd at first, but consider this: Under the Fordist paradigm we have been measuring our work life in hours per week for the better part of the last century, yet we never applied the same standard to the flipside of the coin. This worked in a world where days off were well-defined, but as we allocate hours to work more flexibly, we should also shift our perception of leisure time. This could be done by replacing our traditional 24-hour long, contractually guaranteed holiday with 24 separate hours, to be used at our convenience. It is the logical pinnacle of our desire for flexibility, and all that at zero personal cost. Whether you prefer spending your “holi-hours” every now and then at that hipster craft-beer place in Portland you love so much or rather posing in front of the Niagara falls for entire days, the allocation of these hours and thus the duration of your downtime becomes wholly your own choice.
Of course this is not the first attempt to rethink holidays. Notably, Netflix has introduced the concept of unlimited holidays in its work contracts. But what sounds like a dream more often ends up being a nightmare in the highly competitive environment of the digital economy. “Unlimited” holidays quickly turn into no holidays when deadline creeps upon deadline and leaving the office equals considering yourself dispensable. The hourly holiday model does not only convince with its simplicity, but also with being more efficient for both employer and employee. Isn’t it much easier for a company to compensate a few hours of an employee’s absence a week than a two-week long disappearance? This deregulation also has the potential to reduce the amount of senseless hours spent at work without anything to do.
The ideas briefly sketched above are far from being fully developed, but they are a first step towards a new understanding of holidays. Many questions remain: What is the optimal ratio of leisure to working hours? How do employees apply for their hours off? Will every hour that is not spent working be counted as a holi-hour? In any case, we probably won’t see the current holiday scheme go away any time soon, with its laws and regulations being ingrained in both legal code and social norms. But as the trend towards more flexible working hours continues, the need for more flexible holidays will grow, ultimately paving the way for a new form of vacation. So let’s start shaping it now.
