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Yukon News
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
INSIGHT Are you working a 15-hour week? by Keith Halliday
YUKONOMIST I
t is a safe bet that most of your ancestors spent most of their daylight hours working to find enough food and shelter to get by. Some of your forebears might have been idle and overfed priests or potentates of some long-forgotten kingdom. Others might perhaps have stumbled into some uninhabited temperate ecosystem rich in food that didn’t run away or fight back. But most of your ancestors, most of the time, struggled to keep body and soul together. Consider, however, the amazing productivity of the modern farm and factory. Just a few per cent of the population produce our food, and just a few per cent more could run the machines that would produce
more clothes and tools than our ancestors would know what to do with. With food and basic needs taken care of, the rest of us are in “services.” We are newspaper columnists, lawyers, barbers, car detailers, yoga instructors, real estate agents, consultants, marketing experts, video game testers, policy analysts and so on. Famous British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that by now everyone would be working a 15-hour week. A few people are working this little by choice, but not many. And there has been an increase in leisure time for many people in recent decades. When I was a kid, we considered it normal that my father would work five days a week plus half of Saturday. This is less common now. Most advanced countries also have more holidays than they used to. But most people still work 40hour weeks. Some statistics even show that in the United States the average weekly hours worked has gone up in the last 30 years.
Part of this is a choice people make to have more toys and bigger houses. It takes money to produce those extra snowmobiles, big-screen televisions and extra rooms that you seldom use. But a professor from the London School of Economics has a more insidious theory. David Graeber has recently written an article entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” He claims that “huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.” It is one thing to think that someone else’s job is a worthless waste of time. But Graeber is right to point out that more than a few people think this about significant chunks of their own jobs. It brings back a few painful memories from my work experience, both in government and the private sector. When I worked at the Department of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s, some diplomats were talking
about striking or working to rule (to protest how much lower our salaries were than government economists or sociologists, in case you were wondering). A friend of mine was against the idea, saying that he was worried that the powers-that-be would find out how little they noticed we weren’t working any more. A corporate efficiency expert once told me about a major corporation that laid off 10 per cent of the white-collar staff at headquarters. No one in the field, and definitely no customers, even noticed. Yet the people who were laid off all had busy calendars and often worked overtime. What does this say about the value of the work they did before they were laid off? Of course, some people enjoy the idea of having tricked “the man” into paying them 40 hours of money for much less work. They still have to go into work, however. It can’t be good for the soul in the long run to think so little of the work one does. Assuming you don’t aspire to having a bullshit job, there are a few questions you can ask
yourself. First, did you make something beautiful that made other people happy? Musicians and artists often get paid much less than corporate bullshit jobs, but I suspect many of them find their work deeply satisfying. Second, if you are not fortunate enough to delight others with your talents, did someone else at least find your work worth paying for? A pizza delivery guy or a professional dog walker does an honest service that the customer is willing to exchange cash for. That’s more rewarding than being paid big bucks to reformat the PowerPoint presentations at corporate headquarters. I don’t know whether Keynes was right that we could get by on 15 hour weeks. But I think I’ll use his theory to justify taking an extra week of vacation next year. Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and author of the MacBride Museum’s Aurore of the Yukon series of historical children’s adventure novels. You can follow him on Twitter @hallidaykeith
The Yukon could be a model for consultation Ken Coates and Amanda Graham anada has discovered the art and mystery of consultation. The processes – familiar to all Yukoners – of land claims negotiations, government planning (remember Yukon 2000?), duty to consult and accommodate, and the imperatives of 21st-century politics have had a profound effect on governance and political life. Add to this the speed of the Internet and the power of social media and we find ourselves in an age of mobilized public opinion and engaged citizens. Yukoners and other northern Canadians are at the forefront of the broader global transition to consultation-based democracy. The process of land claims negotiations, which started largely behind closed doors, was pulled by First Nations and territorial politicians into full public view. The Yukon 2000 process expanded the range of consultations to include visioning the future and planning for economic growth and sustainability. The Umbrella Final Agreement codified extensive consultation commitments before the rest of the country
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became accustomed to greater citizen engagement with political and governance systems. The territorial and, indeed, the national political processes have not yet fully internalized the culture of citizen consultation. The electoral process appropriately leaves elected officials in a final decision-making position, with authority over the civil servants charged with implementing those political decisions. Many groups, however, see consultation as providing an effective veto over government action. If there is sufficient opposition, the argument goes, the government must back down from their plans. This is neither legally or constitutionally sound – elected governments have the right to operate within their constitutional limits. The culture and power of consultation remains a work in progress. Initially intended as a means of getting feedback on government proposals, community consultations are increasingly taking on overtones of an alternative political process, a type of binding referendum. When a major initiative, from a new govern-
ment program to a resource development, generates strong and consistent criticism, governments routinely find themselves facing what is effectively an additional opposition force, often with considerable moral authority and substantial public support. The Yukon has one of the most elaborate political cultures in Canada, combining standard political structures and processes with constitutionally protected procedures for First Nations engagement and an emerging system of broader consultations. The territory is a numerically small political community with broad familiarity with issues, proponents and critics. Yukoners care about what happens around them and have strong motivations to engage with government issues. In the years to come, the Yukon will probably emerge as a national, if not global, model for the politics of formal consultation and community engagement. More and more, politicians, civil servants and the public at large are being asked to come to terms with the realities and possibilities of consultation. In the territorial arena,
all actors face new challenges to incorporating open, fair and appropriate consultation processes. Consequently, there is a growing need for deeper understanding of the strengths of informal and formal consultation and for the prospects of including community engagement – in limited and legitimate ways – in political decision making. What is underway, in the Yukon as well as more broadly, represents a profound transformation of the political process. The intersection of elected governance, partisanship, aboriginal rights and the ease of mobilizing public engagement will take years to shake out. The process of getting there will be challenging, occasionally messy and controversial. In the end, with the Yukon at the lead, we are in the process of redefining politics, governance and the very role of the citizen in public affairs. The Northern Review, a Yukon College-based scholarly journal, takes note of this important political transformation. Earlier this year, we received a manuscript submission from researchers at the University of Saskatchewan
that examines consultation and decision-making process – “Fixing Land Use Planning in the Yukon Before It Really Breaks: A Case Study of the Peel Watershed.” Following the recommendations of peer reviewers, we accepted the article for publication in our Fall 2013 issue, expected December 2013. We have now published it open access as an advance online article: www.yukoncollege. yk.ca/review. Please feel free to download the article and engage with the authors. The Northern Review hopes that, as a result, the discussion will further the conversation here in the territory on the rapidly emerging political culture of consultation and engagement. It is time for everyone to get ready for the future. Ken Coates is an editor of The Northern Review and the research chair in regional innovation of the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan. Amanda Graham is also an editor of the Northern Review and instructs for the University of the Arctic and the school of liberal arts at Yukon College.