Five Days On, Two Days Off
My friend Pete Green wrote this somewhere you can’t actually read:
It is one of capitalism’s massive perversities that, while the amount of human work that needs doing to keep us all healthy and happy has declined enormously over the past century, rather than even considering a change to the completely arbitrary pattern of ‘five days on, two days off’, we just fill the gap by inventing stupid pointless jobs which wreck the planet and our souls.
Which is true. Pete’s song “Everything’s Dead Pretty When It Snows” (download here) is, in fact, about this sort of thing. Since I’m in full plug mode, I should mention that Pete’s also recently released a single.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
How true! Except that, in many cases, it is no longer five days but seven. The entire capitalist system is based around persuading us that we need more stuff, and in order to fund it we need to work longer and longer hours (thus not having any time to appreciate it). Not only do we need to work longer and more anti-social hours, we need both partners to work in order to maintain this standard of living, so that priorities like family and friends are expected to come second to pointless work.
Until employers come to realise that people come before money, or employees refuse to be treated like products, this will sadly not change.