OPINION:We should try to use the negative aspects of the downturn to our advantage
HAVING READ Sarah Bakewell's excellent biography of the French philosopher Montaigne, How To Live, I wondered how we, as a somewhat frazzled nation, could do with considering his stoic advice: "We should have a wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them.
“We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, so that when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new for us to do without them.”
Irish people are facing up to loss on many levels right now and we are uncertain, quite naturally, what the right response should be. Now might be a good time for us to “build a little room behind the shop”, just for ourselves, to help get us through this difficult period.
Here, we could find the time and necessary solitude not only to re-evaluate what is important to us, but also to flip the negativities of the downturn to our benefit.
Most of us are doing less now but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. The Celtic Tiger made us all want to be seen as being busy, to reflect to society how well we were doing. Many of us worked long hours and allowed work to eat into our own time: in other words, we sacrificed our liberty.
However, having more time now may be good for us and our employers could reap the benefits of a reduced working week too. Those of us who have held on to our jobs are, in many cases, adapting to three- or four-day weeks, with the hope of riding out the storm. But these changes should not always be considered in a negative light.
The most frequent complaint of workers nowadays is that they do not have enough time to themselves. Technology was supposed to make our lives easier but instead it has added new constraints on the one commodity we cannot buy back or find enough of: time.
A survey of 4,000 workers in the UK last November found that the majority, on average, don’t unwind until 12.38am on Saturday night and are thinking about work again by 3.55pm on Sunday afternoon. More than half of the workers were also “too tired” to enjoy the weekend anyway. In that case, having a three- or four-day week means we get time to unwind and return to work properly recharged for the new week ahead.
Understandably, many workers may worry that a reduction in hours will see a dramatic drop in income and there is no getting around that. Yet the reduction may not be as severe as most people think when we factor in travel costs, lunches and hefty childcare fees. Instead, what we gain is something we cannot put a price on: more time with our children and partners, more time doing things we enjoy and more time for ourselves.
Winston Churchill talked about a “four-day week and then three days of fun”. Employers will counter this by saying that if we all had reduced working weeks, production would suffer but this is simply not true.
Last year the New Economic Foundation came to the conclusion that a 21-hour working week would increase workers’ productivity and reduce power consumption, which would see large financial savings made by employers.
Sometimes, however, I wonder if employers, having read the quote from the writer Henry Miller, are fearful of giving workers too much time to themselves.
Miller once said: “I think if I had two or three quiet days of just sheer thinking I’d upset everything . . . I ought to go to the office one day and blow out my boss’s brains.”
Surely we can work out a better solution.
Niall McGarrigle is a writer and freelance journalist living in Dublin