Remember the promise of the four-day workweek?
For those of you who were alive in the the mid-1980s, you may recall all the talk about how much easier our lives would be with the advent of computers. By the late 1980s, it seemed that a reduced work-week would be a certainty. Our leisure time would be so copious we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.
You may now be excused for saying “What the *%@%! happened here?!” This is NOT the world we’re living in.
You are absolutely right. And there are a few reasons why things didn’t go as planned:
- The recession of the early 1990s. Growth had been so obscene in the 1980s that it was bound to come to a crashing halt at some point. And it did. Companies were soon looking for ways to cut costs.
- The global economy. Corporations started wondering why they should make goods in North America when they could make them at a small fraction of the cost overseas. As the price of oil dropped and other technologies improved, it became easier and cheaper with every passing year to move manufacturing where the cheap labor was.
The global economy expects more from us.
- More competition. The ease of shipping and communication coincided with the lowering of trade barriers meaning that companies were no longer competing regionally or nationally but globally. With it came even more pressure to cut costs in order to maintain profit margins.
Computers did indeed reduce the toil needed to manufacture things – and it did it for everyone around the world. In the competitive world of capitalism things had to balance out somewhere. The idea of paying the same worker the same amount of money for a reduced work week, when people elsewhere in the world were doing MORE work for a fraction of the cost seemed ludicrous.
Companies used technology to do more with less, shedding workers and combining jobs at a rapid rate.
This wasn’t just blue-collar work either. Office staff were just as vulnerable. Each manager or supervisor used to have a assistant or assistants to help them. Not any more. The computer made everything from the typing pool to the dictation machine obsolete. Those who are left in the office are now doing jobs that used to be done by two, three or even more people.
The other thing technology did was blur the line between home life and office life. It used to be that when you left the office you were done and could focus on your family or personal life. Now there is no place to hide. In the old days the office had to call you on your home phone - a sacrosanct piece of technology by the way. No one phoned you at home for business matters unless it was REALLY important.
Combine the cell phone and blackberry with the global economy (it’s always office hours somewhere in the world right?) and the pressure never stops.
Too much change too quickly?
The growing expectations of increased digital productivity have done terrible things to our health. Consider that we are animals. Our DNA evolves slowly over millions of years. Yet we have had to physically and mentally adapt to significant changes in the way we work and live within a generation.
Now I’m not saying I am in favor of turning back the clock, impossible as that would be. These same technological advancements have given us plentiful food, a much higher standard of living for the majority of the world (particularly China and India) and consumer goods in North America that are cheaper than ever before.
People forget how cheap consumer goods are now. Look back at old ads from the 1970s when you had to pay a couple of month’s wages for a new television set. Food was expensive too. We pay a fraction of the cost that we used to. So why don’t we feel better off? Why aren’t we working less?
Rising expectations
More people with more money means higher housing costs for one. Secondly, we feel the need to buy more to keep up. And sometimes cheap goods fall apart quicker.
Finally, technology keeps us buying. Gone are the days when you could buy a piece of technology (a TV, phone or stereo) and feel good about using it 20 years later. How quickly have we gone from Beta to VHS to DVD to BluRay to Netflix? LP to 8-track to casette tape to CD to iPod?
So what can we do to alleviate this stress-inducing lifestyle? How do we allow the changes brought on by the digital world to make our lives a better place? Well there is only so much we can change the global economy but there are ways of beating the stress of rising expectations in our own lives.
