As a country, we need a new "movement". We are finally getting our act together concerning the environment. When I was a young person, growing up in Pittsburgh, I can assure you that the word environment or pollution was not a common idea. We were fighting a war, and steel and coal were the stuff of our war effort. Even in peacetime, they were the lifeblood of the Pittsburgh area economy. There was only ever one steel plant within the city borders, the old J&L furnaces -- but there were many plants in Pittsburgh suburbs, that provided work for the people that migrated there from Northern Europe, and steel for the nation's vehicles, buildings and weapons.
In those days, factories and companies used the air and the ground with some impunity. It seemed unlikely that we could permanently damage our ecosystem -- we had never even thought that we were living in anything complicated enough to be dignified by that term -- it was just the air and the water. People who grew up in Pittsburgh were accustomed to a permanent haze in the air -- it actually became so thick on occasion that street lights would come on during the day. That "dust" on everyone's windowsill in the morning was actually soot -- and it was almost impossible to keep things clean.
It would have been unthinkable at that time to spend the money and the effort to stop "polluting" the air and the water. It would have made us uncompetitive -- it would have cost all of us a lot more money.
Well, today, the world understands that it costs all of us dearly when we damage our air and earth and water. It costs us dearly in our health and life expectancy -- and we cannot simply use up this resource. We all pay a great deal of money on the aggregate today to keep our ecosystem relatively clean. In fact, we have actually discovered ways to do things more efficiently so that the processes themselves cost less, and no longer damage our environment.
There used to be a number of paper companies on the Charles River in Massachusetts. They all polluted the river. Even after they realized the damage they were causing, it would have been very difficult for one of them to stop polluting the river, as that would have raised their cost of operation, and made them not competitive with the others. Any one of the companies could not take this step alone without going out of business. But if the rest of us recognized the problem, and simply forced them all to stop polluting -- they remained relatively competitive -- even though the price of paper likely rose somewhat as a result. After a while, their need to stop polluting gave rise to techniques that allowed them to manufacture paper at lower cost, and without polluting the river.
I think the time has come to shift our "environmental" focus to the quality of our work life. Something very similar is going on in that realm, that needs a commensurate response. I'd like to see a new focus on our "Environmental Quality of Work Life -- EQOWL - how does one say that?
Everywhere you look, we are doing more with less people, working longer hours, working harder, with broader spans of control, and at a more frantic pace. This is all in the name of competition and survival. Every one of our competitors, here and abroad is about cost cutting staff reductions, efficiency and effectiveness gains. We are automating work so that we need less labor, so that things happen more quickly, so that we can be responsive and competitive.
If you push our current trend to its extreme end result, it would appear that we will eventually have far less people employed -- and the ones that are employed will be working at a frantic pace, in jobs which continue to demand more efficiency and competitiveness.
It is time to pause and ask -- "why are we on the planet", what are we about here? Two-thirds of our economy is based on consumer products. These are things that most people really do not need, but which they purchase to improve the quality or enjoyment of their life. It always astounds me that we have so many shops selling trinkets and knickknacks when other economic systems are struggling to produce sufficient goods to maintain basic support. Our economy requires that people have confidence in their ability to earn a decent wage. Rolling layoffs, unemployment, more intense automation -- all work against that basic confidence. Most economists believe that our economic downswings are exacerbated because most consumers lack basic confidence in their ability to maintain their income into the future.
Our push for cost cutting and economic competitiveness seems essential -- but it is destroying our economy and our quality of work life.
So what's the alternative? The answer seems too simple -- what if we began reducing the work week by 1 or 2 or 3 hours a year, until we have more people back at work, and the rest of us have some sanity in our lives. We could make it illegal, or prohibitively expensive for anyone to work longer than the 37 hours, or whatever it would take to get to closer to full employment! Easy! Sure, things will cost more -- just as they cost more to pay for environmental sanity, or health care, or whatever. But we'll all bear the pain, and we will all enjoy life that much more!
Think about it!
Copyright 1996, Carl Scheider