
Juliet Schor wants a four-day work week
The TED Interview
What's the Unsolved Problem in Your Field?
Juliet short is working on the future of work in Ireland. She says we have to connect this conversation to the climate crisis and carbon reduction. What's the impact of a four day week with five days pay on carbon omissions? Is it going to balance people who are now in their homes, turning on the lights and heeding them?, she asks.
00:00
Transcript
Play full episode
Transcript
Episode notes
Speaker 2
Right. Right. Sometimes what I so I find it question to like you might report
Speaker 1
with a
Speaker 2
question rather than a thesis, but it's still a focus, a concise focus. I think pretty often a thing that I find myself doing is insisting that something is a paradox where the people the rest of the people at the table are like, no, that's not a paradox. And I'm trying to make them be confused about it. Right. So it's not quite holding on a thesis, but I mean, it is sort of a thesis. It's a paradox. It's a thesis. Yeah. It's that I'm trying to induce confusion or to induce a certain kind of puzzlement. Right. But but the point is,
Speaker 1
it's sustained attention because you're sustaining attention to it and you aren't letting them turn away
Speaker 2
from it. And yeah,
Speaker 1
right. Right. It's going to death.
Speaker 2
It's so I feel like a big part of what I'm now thinking of is like a big part of the sort of difficulty here is that in a social situation, there's this problem of the coordination of attention, right? It's like, what are we all supposed to be paying attention to? Now, you know, if I'm in charge of that and I can be like, everyone, here's what we're going to pay attention to. This is the question we're going to be looking into. That's basically just me teaching a class. And I'm very comfortable in that environment. But you know, usually at a dinner, like after a talk, even if I was the speaker, I'm not allowed to do that. And so there's this question, how will the attention of the group coordinate itself around a topic? And will it stick? Will it stick to one topic? And typically it won't. It will just waver between topics. So it
Speaker 1
seems to me that when you're trying to get a group to stick to a topic, what people often do is they have to have a thesis, but the thesis can neither be too obviously right or too obviously wrong. A thesis that will grab the attention of a community will often be a thesis that as we asserted by someone with status in the group, somebody who it's worth, say, disagreeing with and who seems to be overstating their case. And I think people often do this on purpose. They exaggerate a claim to just the right degree so that they're tempting people to respond and rebut them. They are putting out some tempting meat for some other people to go after. Like, you're trying to tempt an animal to come after some meat to come out of the woods or something, basically. I think I see people that sort of a standard MO style of enticing a group of people to talk to something as somebody prestigious throws out an apparently too strong of a claim, a claim, and then tries to defend it a bit. And then other people go, that can't be right. He's the, I'm going to take this guy down. I'm going to show him he's wrong because they think they see a way to rebut this. And often the person who did this knowingly says something a little exaggerated that they can sort of pull back from a bit. But this is the way to get people to talk about
Speaker 2
it.
Before labor unions fought for them, society didn’t have weekends as we know them. In the 13th century, the average male peasants in the UK only worked 135 days a year. In a post-pandemic and increasingly virtual world, what is the future of labor? Juliet Schor is an economist and sociologist whose research focuses on work and consumer society. In this episode, she shares her thoughts on modern working practices and how her current research on the four-day work week could help address society’s major problems–from burnout at work, to the effects of work on the climate crisis. Juliet also highlights the fascinating ways we have and might continue to reconfigure business in the 21st century, especially as it pertains to the dynamic–and at times predatory–sharing economy.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.