Hi Dan,

 

 

I just wanted to write to you then to say that this is exactly what me and my husband have been trying to achieve and finding exactly the same bemused responses as you described. I cannot see what the problem is with the idea, it seems obviously sensible to me, particularly for parents as then each parent gets to taste the benefits of both staying at home bonding with children and going out in adult company. So far, all we've managed is for my husband to work full-time, but at least at a job which has reasonable hours so that he's home to eat tea with us all every day as well as working from home one day a week, while I stay with the children and try to do some freelance writing and some flexible home-based work with them hanging off my computer chair and screaming in my ear. There just aren't very many part-time jobs in my husband's industry at the level he wants to work at.

 

 

 

Liz Pilley

 

 

Sadly I haven’t actually thought about this idea much since writing the first entry. That’s the trouble with blogs. The best ones are written by people who should be doing something else, like working for example, but my work isn’t something I want to bunk off from. In fact I don’t really ‘work’ at all - although I do earn money - and perhaps therein lies the answer.

 

As Liz points out, most people’s reaction to the idea of only working part time is one of bafflement. When you think about it this is hardly surprising.

 

From the age of four we are brainwashed into thinking that we should spend five days a week from the hours of 9 to 5 doing something we’d rather not do in a place that, given the choice, we’d rather not be. By the time we escape this full time education system twelve years later it’s perhaps unsurprising if we no longer have the imagination required to live without such a regimented structure. When prisoners come out of prison they complain that they’ve become ‘institutionalised’ and so it is with work and school (or pre-work as Idler Ed Tom Hodgkinson refers to it).

 

The first step to rid yourself of an addiction to full time work, is therefore not a financial one, as most people would expect, but a psychological one. You have to rid yourself of the mindset of the Protestant work ethic. The ethic of meaningless toil you were subjected to in school. The ethic that you’ve grown up with that told you any job is better than no job. That hard work, no matter how pointless and devoid of meaning it may be, is better than being unemployed. It is certainly true that if a job is worth doing it’s worth doing well, the problem is that so few jobs are worth doing, so there simply is no point in doing them at all.

 

As to the financial question of how you can afford to only work part time the answer is to work out how much money you need to live on and find the most time efficient way of making that money. This is preferable to the common way of living where you work five days a week and spend the extra money you earn on pointless crap you don’t actually need.

 

 

As to how we make Britain go part time, Liz. I think the argument most ‘captains of Industry’ and ‘politicians’ would throw at me is the detrimental impact a part time economy would have on the British economy, and how that would impact on public services. So I’ll start reading up on that and, when I’ve got some good arguments, I’ll let you know.