“Creative jobs” and KQED
Radio radio
I’m going to be on KQED Forum this morning at 9AM Pacific, talking about the 4-day week:
Imagine if your company announced that it was piloting a shorter work week. You’d work 32 hours for 40 hours of pay, and it would be up to you to get your work done in less time. With those free hours, maybe you could take a day off each week, or start the workday at 11, after exercising or taking your child to school. The French have tried working fewer hours. Some Spanish companies plan to pilot a 32 hour week, with financial help from the Spanish government. But could this be something adopted by U.S. companies, where working long hours is often expected? We discuss the idea of a shorter work week, what might change for employees and if it would be bad for business.
Should be a great time! I just need to make sure the dogs are well fed and walked before then, so they don’t bark at everything….
On Skills and Work
One of the most important lessons I learned while writing SHORTER is that the distinction between “creative” jobs and non-creative jobs is pretty nonsensical. I’ve spent a lot of my career studying people— scientists, artists, novelists— who society (and academia) recognizes as extremely creative, and in so doing, and slowly came to think of other kinds of jobs as less creative.
When I was researching SHORTER and cataloging the benefits of the 4-day week for employees, I went into it assuming that everyone would get something out of a shorter workweek, but that the specific benefits would be different: that people like Web designers and software developers— the creatives— would talk more about one set of benefits, and mechanics, nurses, or cooks would talk about others.
Turns out, they don’t. Yes, there are different things you need to do to make a shorter workweek a success in different industries, but everybody benefits in essentially the same ways.
And one of the reasons is that while we don’t classify what certified nurses’ assistants or baristas or mechanics do as “creative” work, all those jobs require creative thinking, problem-solving ability, and empathy. Getting a dementia patient dressed and fed requires creativity. Just try it yourself.
This is why essentially all workers benefit from a 4-day week in the same ways. The term “creative” is not a description, so much as a claim: it’s a way for some categories of workers to elevate themselves, not a way to distinguish between jobs that are actually rote and robotic from those that allow mind and spirit to fly free. (And creative jobs have their share of boring stuff, as anyone in them quickly learns.) Unfortunately, in an economy that continually trumpets the value of innovation and new ideas, categorizing jobs this way also has the effect to devaluing work that falls outside creativity’s warm embrace.
This is all to introduce Annie Lowrey’s recent Atlantic piece, “There’s No Such Thing as a Low-Skilled Worker,” which argues that the popular concept of low-skilled jobs does more harm than good. These often are essential jobs (just think of the disconnect between “essential workers” and “who gets paid the most in our economy” that the pandemic laid bare); there’s a lot more skill needed to do them well than we usually recognize; and we shouldn’t see all of them as jobs that we need to try to train people to rise above:
The problem lies not with American workers, but with American jobs and American policy infrastructure. Too many jobs pay too little. They’re too dangerous. They offer too few benefits. They offer no union representation. They are inaccessible to millions of Americans who are pushed out of the labor market by illness, disability, poverty, the arrival of young children, or discrimination.
“All jobs could be good jobs,” Lowrey writes. “But only policy makers and business leaders have the skills to make that happen, not workers.”
A Milestone
Thanks to everyone over the years who bought a copy of the American edition of REST. Thanks to you, I recently got my first royalty check (after “earning out” the advance that my agent brilliantly negotiated on my behalf).