A world with a 15 hour workweek
Peer into the fog of time and you may catch a glimpse of a glorious future
Imagine: it is 2060.
Ingrid whizzes on her e-bike along the green lane into the heart of The Hague. Her destination is a vast, predominantly wooden office opposite the Ministry of the Interior. After she has wheeled her bicycle into the basement and parked it there, she climbs the stairs to the 5th - and highest - floor: home to the Bureau for Workable Policies. She has an appointment with the members of her small team who are working on the bill for a universal basic income. Other colleagues from the Bureau have sent them their initial thoughts on the proposal and the team is now going to work on a list of implementation criteria. They get straight to work, in three hours their working day will be over.
They manage to make good progress and at the end of the meeting they walk into the park behind the Bureau, where they enjoy a late lunch and chat. Henk, at 80 years of age by far the oldest member of the team, compares their work that morning with the early years of BWP. Although it was set up to check whether implementing agencies would be able to execute proposed legislation and whether the new law would make life easier for affected citizens, the agency's founders soon realised that one of the biggest obstacles to implementability was the perverse management culture that reduced all work to financial indicators and incentives and which was always on lookout for the elusive 'streamline'. That management outlook deprived employees of autonomy and job satisfaction and bogged down the work in Kafkaesque bureaucracy. That is why the BWP was given the temporary task of reforming the civil service in such a way as to give employees more control and autonomy. The resulting vigour quickly inspired emulation in the private sector. Achievements that Ingrid had taken for granted that morning.
Later that afternoon, Ingrid rides into her little garden, where she puts the bicycle on the charging stand with the solar inverter. She, her partner Anil and her teenage son Aailt have only recently moved into this new corporate house. Just under six months ago, she found out she was pregnant. The flat they were living in was a bit on the small side, so they registered for WoningNetXL - the national database of social housing. This house fitted their needs nicely. Rent remained one third of their income.
Anil finds them on the sofa in the living room. Ingrid drags over the pouf for footrest, reclines and settles in. Anil pours her some tea and tells her enthusiastically about the permaculture education project he runs as a volunteer at his old primary school. The school had cleared a new piece of land for them and together with the children they had planned the rotation of the plants. Once the tea is finished, Ingrid runs upstairs to telechat with a couple of friends. Together, they are working on a business plan to bring the biomimicked metal (“bends, doesn't break”) that they invented with the help of an ai to the consumer market.
The next morning, Aailt joins breakfast at around nine o'clock (Ingrid and Anil have already eaten, but are still enjoying their coffee). Bewildered, he tells about his history study project. He is preparing a presentation on changing work habits.
- ‘People used to think that they could only find creativity and personal development in jobs with 40-hour work weeks - or even longer!’
Anil looks at him obliquely over the rim of his coffee mug.
- ‘That's right. Equally unimaginable but perhaps even sadder is that others worked that same number of hours in jobs that didn't even interest them.'
- 'But why?'
- 'Well. Either you weren't earning enough to make ends meet with fewer hours, or you were earning so well that the salary became an end in itself.’
- ‘Oh'.
- ‘You have to realise that there was a time, around the turn of the century, when health care, housing and education became increasingly expensive. There was a lot of uncertainty.'
- 'But those people with that a-grade salary didn’t experience such uncertainty.'
- 'No, indeed. So when working hours were reduced, and when the institution where Mum now works helped make life simpler, many of those good-earning but not very satisfying jobs actually were called into question. More and more time was left over to discover what else life had in store. People just needed a different yardstick to measure their lives by.’
Ingrid gets up to hang her tableware in the drywasher.
- ‘Aailt’, she calls, taking the cloth off her e-piano in the side room, 'Don't forget to visit grandpa and grandma before school'.
(Re-published from Dutch original.)