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COVID lesson: Work sucks, everyone should work less. But, uh …
Here lies the Opinion Newsletter of The New York Times, promoting an article — one of many recently — on how we all need to work less, and this part stands out:
“If everyone worked less,” she writes, “it would be easier to spread the work out evenly to more people. If white-collar professionals were no longer expected or required to log 60 hours a week but 30 instead, that would be a whole extra job for someone else.”
Or as Susan Lambert, a professor of social work at the University of Chicago, puts it in the essay, the goal is “one reasonable job per person,” not “two for one and half for another.” Lambert goes on to make the key point that “the overlap between the overworked executive and the underemployed hourly worker” is “that they cannot fully engage in their personal or their family life.”
So in the end, no matter what we are doing by day, Covert writes, “we shouldn’t just be talking about the parameters of how we get work done in a postpandemic world. We should be pushing to do less of it.”
Some of that math is no doubt fuzzy. But there’s a lot of things we need to unpack here, quickly.
