Reducing the day, creating a world where work is one of the things we do with life, but not the only one, is the only way to have a truly valuable and competitive workforce in the 21st century.
Time changes everything, especially social customs. In Greece and ancient Rome, latrines were a public thing and not only that: they were a place of socialization. So when you felt the need, you took the opportunity to hang out too, with your friends.
In the Middle Ages, chatting while doing a bowel movement must not have seemed very Christian and people began to retire to a private room that used to be at the back of the houses, which had traditionally been reserved for meditation and solitary contemplation and which It was called “toilet”, from the Latin “retractum” (secluded place).
That’s why today we call toilets that way. The meaning of a word that designated a space was copied through a linguistic phenomenon called “metonymy”, to the device itself and, from there, to any place, removed or not, where said device is found.
The same thing that happened with toilets, happened with work. The word “work” comes from the Latin “trepallum” which was, no joke, an instrument of torture. A utensil made up of three sticks – hence “tri” “pallum” – in which people were crucified – generally slaves – to be tortured and then set on fire.
so that tripalliare, the predecessor of work, It meant to torture, or cause extreme suffering or hardship. Over time, this meaning ended up being applied to tasks that were carried out against one’s will and with great effort and sacrifice, or in other words, to work. In the Middle Ages, work was considered a form of servitude from which the upper classes were exempt.
It was not until the 17th century that Calvinists gave new meaning to the act of working as a form of devotion or as a response to a divine call (vocation) and that work began to occupy the place it has today in society, as center of the moral and value system.
And yet, in the last 25 years there has been another radical transformation in the nature of work that we still do not fully understand. If between the beginning of the industrial revolution and the end of the 20th century work was, indeed, that set of tasks that were carried out with resignation and effort, in the 21st century there are fewer and fewer jobs of those that consist of the mechanical repetition of a task that requires effort that the machine cannot do.
In the 21st century, the reasons why people contribute value to the economy are much more related to the generation of new ideas or the cultivation of certain relationships between people, than to sacrifice. Effort, that is, the use of force – physical or mental – has become obsolete compared to other human capacities, such as exploration, care or creativity.
We could safely say that what we call “work” today, and certainly the jobs of the future, will have absolutely nothing to do with the jobs that existed 100 years ago. And so we find ourselves in a crazy situation, where we have a social and legislative framework much more linked to that original meaning of an instrument of torture than to the reality of today’s world of work.
This is the reason why we have to move forward with all determination towards a drastic reduction of working hours in all sectors. Because the value that people contribute to the economy can no longer be measured in hours, nor does it multiply the more time people spend tied to their table. On the contrary, workers are more valuable (in all sectors) the more connected, the more trained, the more active, the more interests they have outside the company, the more ability they have to carry out projects and the more of the world they know.
And all of these skills are gained outside of work hours. If we want to be a leading country in the 21st century economy, we need many more people training, many more people inventing, many more people launching things that do not yet exist. Many more people questioning the status quo and inventing other ways of living, other habits, other icons, other trends.
Reducing the day, creating a world where work is one of the things we do with life, but not the only one, is the only way to have a truly valuable and competitive workforce in the 21st century.
#means #work
