THE EIGHT-DAY WEEK FOR BETTER LIVING
By L. Michael Hager
Comments and Feedback:
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 8:17 AM
Hager: Very interesting. It raises some important questions about the way we handle the distinction between our working and our home life.I think that the Monday morning feeling is due to fact that we are trying to accomodate to a change in sleep patterns rather than still being fatigued from the previous week, as you mentioned.
My concern with longer weekends is that the Monday morning feeling of trying to switch from relax to work mode will be more pronounced. A bit like coming back to work from being on holiday.
We could soon learn to adapt though.
Simon Jones
Editor of http://www,futurefacing.com
Northampton, UK
Email: future_facing@hotmail.co.uk
Thank you for taking the time to comment on my eight-day week article posted at the World Futurist Society Website.
To correct any inference that I would give employers weekends to hand back to employees, permit me to clarify what I intended in my article.
Since one consequence of enlarging the week to eight days would be to reduce the number of work days in a year, employers would likely want to compensate for the reduced productivity. The point I made was that the new weekend days (not the old ones) could be compensated for by moving non-date specific holidays to the weekends and by shifting some annual leave to the weekends. The latter would be determined by labor-management negotiations on an industry-by-industry or company-by-company basis.
Under the suggested approach, only the eighth days (falling between Saturday and Sunday) would be affected by the time compensations, not the traditional Saturday/Sunday weekend days. Indeed, the purpose of my proposal for an eight-day week is to improve the quality of life for working people.
I hope this explanation fully resolves your concerns.
Sincerely,
L. Michael Hager
President
Resolve-Consult International, LLC
l_michaelhager@hotmail.com
Tel: (202) 438-2092
Fax: (202)318-2603
www.resolve-consult.com
This article addresses the fact that market domination of our lives is deteriorating human cohesion, a perfectly natural progression.
However, the appropriate approach is to address deteriorating general intelligence and increasing self-absorption.
An intelligent consumer buys in accord with sound large-perspective principles, ie: does the research and does not buy from excessively exploitive and/or polluting sources. This is very difficult today(be sure and ask - why?), but the concept stands.
The consumer is the final control of the market(if it don't get bought it don't get made) and lack of intelligent consumption is obvious in the public's response to advertised fads - and reflected in the generally decreasing quality of products.
W Webb Ferrall, Harrisburg, Pa
specsense@yahoo.com
This is an idea long overdue!! I would like to promote the nine day week in Canada. It should be on the political agenda of the Green Party or any other progressive organization.
johnrobertbrown@hotmail.com
**Yet these raw numbers ignore non-weekend holidays and annual vacation leave, which could be distributed to the weekends, thus compensating for the work day loss in whole or in part.
Weekends you normally have off are not counted in your annual vacation time. Vacation time is calculated from your normal working schedule.
Why in the world would we want to "give" our weekends to the employer in order that he would be able to hand them back to us as "annual vacation". In my view that's a dumb argument only presented as a hook for employers to (hopefully) bite.
Most of the premise makes sense, just had to point that out. If we are going to make things better, then let's be straightforward and sensible, not try & sugar-coat it for people. You end up undoing what was set-out to do.
J Crawford
Albuquerque, NM
jczplace@hotmail.com
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