What are the benefits of this vision? For whom?
- more life time for personally fulfilling activities, more time for self-fulfilment
- stronger family ties
- people have more time to be politically active
- better psychological/mental and physical health
- better working morale
- more efficient work through more intense arrangement
- more meaningful work, because it is less harming
What are the negative repercussions of the vision? On whom?
- companies leave Europe
- business plan needed (this may cost)
- potentially more organisation needed (co-ordination, enrolment, etc.)
- less social interaction in day-work context
What is necessary for this future?
Politics:
- general acknowledgment and understanding of the vision and why it is so urgent/important
- laws and regulation for the new working situation: e.g. maximum work time (so people do not work double the time to earn double the money)
- a plan to interest companies in the regulations change to avoid a corporate run (increased productivity = decreased labour costs, economics of ALL companies change by the same proportions, change of prices along customer needs)
Resources (a rough estimation):
Presupposition: at an employment rate of 20% and an increased productivity by 20% and parallel reduction of weekly labour time to 20 hours around 44% of workplaces will be missing.
- We can either decrease the input by a) technological innovation, b) methodological innovation (co-operation and joint resource use of all companies in an administrative district)
- Or we can increase the output by a) increasing sales quantity (new customers or new markets), b) specialisation (missing workplaces can be covered by work programmes to ensure EU-wide full employment across all member states)
Another possibility is to reduce workplaces to just the needed, not harmful, and purposeful ones insofar needed to cover all needed labour.
Skills: We need the general understanding that a 4-hour work day is a lot more pleasant and long-term more productive and pleasing than an 8-hour work day. Regardless of how much virtual capital is being produced by senseless labour.
