People can be critical of France and Germany’s reduced work weeks and lower retirement ages but they really don’t know why they did it. They did it to reduce unemployment – when people work fewer hours and retire earlier more people are working. We have reached a point where there are more people who need jobs than there are available jobs. Some of this is because of outsourcing but also because of automation – factory robots are now doing many of the jobs people used to do, and yes doing it better. It requires factory robots to build the printed circuit boards in the device that you are reading this post on. [icopyright one button toolbar]
Billionaire Carlos Slim thinks he has a solution.
The world’s second-richest man, Carlos Slim, offered up a new plan for work and retirement during a business conference in Uruguay last weekend. Instead of retiring at 65 — or younger — after a hard-charging career, people should work a decade longer, he said. But workers should limit their work week to three long days.
Even shorter work weeks would be good for creativity, Slim reportedly told the group of leaders. “With three work days a week, we would have more time to relax; for quality of life. Having four days [off] would be very important to generate new entertainment activities and other ways of being occupied.”
Slim isn’t alone in his opinion that people work too much. In the UK’s theguardian.com, economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting economic policies that improve people’s lives, wrote that the U.S. work week is too long. Baker said that if U.S. workers adopted German policies and worked 20 percent less, unemployment would be virtually eliminated. (bold mine)
I was salaried for most of my career and the last decade or so before my retirement I was putting 50 to 60 hours a week 6 days a week. It certainly took a toll on both my body and spirit. When I finally retired my health was poor. So we have a choice people work less hours or we have a large number of chronically unemployed.