The ten day week

The item on the radio: Corporate profits are at an all-time high, worker productivity is at an all-time high, unemployment is still horribly, miserably high. Why am I not surprised? Companies have discovered that they can get along without the dead wood. There is plenty of dead wood in the so-called private sector, as well as the public sector.

Fortunately, there is a solution. And, just as fortunately, the solution will drive everyone totally nuts. The solution is the ten day week. I used to bring up the ten day week as dinner party chat, and was generally ignored. No more.

Turns out my whole new structure to life was tried before, during the French Revolution, as part of the attempt to rationalize everyday life. I have been legitimized. Or delegitimized, depending whether you are a French aristocrat or not.

Before the revolution in France, necessities were priced in a delightful way. Bread was sold by the loaf; if the price of wheat went up, the loaf was a little smaller. If milk was scarce, a little water was added to the bottle. And so on. But the peasants, in particular, always paid the same amount for the loaf of bread or the bottle of milk, and were a bit insulated from the varying prices of staples. Folks who cheated the peasants were driven out of town.

But the revolutionaries demanded that, by golly, the system should be rational, and this foolishness must end, and the peasants must pay for a measured amount of bread or milk or anything. The peasants would have none of it; together with a bunch of similar bad moves by the revolutionaries, the emphasis on rationality in daily events turned the peasant class against the revolution.

The ten day week was another of those doomed ideas. Revolutionaries divided the year into twelve 30 day months -- which were renamed -- and each month had 3 ten day weeks*. At the end of the year, there was a five day holiday period. Each day had ten hours, each hour had 100 minutes, and so on. They were obsessed with the decimal business.** Didn't matter; the bible said seven days. The revolution was doomed.

That was then. Fortunately, we are no longer in the grips of religious fundamentalism. Snarky. The new ten day week will be divided into one five day unit called the First, and another five day unit called the Second. Half the population will work during each unit. A job will have two...hmm...occupants. Everyone will have a job for five days of ten, everyone will have leisure for five days of ten; the economy will blossom, and lions and lambs will do whatever together. Note that I have, with my usual modesty, not named the half-weeks after myself.

There will be some problems. What about families in which two parents, say, are working? Well, if they both work the First, or both work the Second, the family will have the whole other 5 days together, and will need day care for only five of ten days, rather than five of seven. If the adults work different periods, all day care problems are nicely solved. Vacation scheduling will be easy. Couples can take the same half-week, or the opposite half-week, depending on how they are getting along. Work scheduling will be difficult and will provide jobs for all the extra middle managers.

Strange loyalties will develop, and perhaps the Super Bowl will be played between the winners of the First and Second divisions, at some time during 5 DAY, those magical five extra days.

The big, big deal: there will be no unemployment!!! None at all!!! An immediate demand for workers, and then, of course, demand for goods and services. The ten day week saves civilization!!! And all my idea!!! Time to pick up my Nobel. I hope I know how to act at the dinner.

Whatever solution exists, there is no question about the problem. Current financial blahs are demand based, not supply based. There is plenty of capital around looking for places to settle, but not enough demand to buy stuff. If there was ever a time to take the wealth from the wealthy, this is it; the usual rationalization, that wealthy folks provide capital, is even more goofy now. We don't need more capital!!!! We have capital up our ying-yangs, or whatever the plural of ying-yang is. We need people buying stuff!!!

The French revolution and the ten day week aside, what are we to do with all the extra folks for whom there are no jobs, and never will be? Our young men, for instance, can't all go into the killing vocations. We need manufacturing jobs for them; we need the factory floor. Office work won't do; "Hell's Angels, Wayland Branch" colors may go fine in the factory, but not at Chase bank.

The ten-day week is my best idea -- actually, my only idea. I don't think anyone else has any ideas to compete. During the last boom, the killing industries provided jobs, and the housing industry provided jobs. One of them (guess which!!) is out of business, and it looks now like the killing industries are going to be able to get along with the labor they already have. This is where our enslavement to the supply/demand nonsense really gets annoying.

There are more of us than there are jobs, and we have no clue about how to cope. Until we pull manufacturing back from wherever it has gone, we will suffer the disastrous consequences of trading jobs for wealth. Bad idea when we started, worse idea now. We need manufacturing. We need factories.

Once again, we had what we needed, and we gave it all away.

That total isolation thing? Starting to look better, isn't it?

*Of course, Thermidor appears in Lobster Thermidor, a dish rumored to have been prepared for Napoleon I during Thermidor. In the Julian calendar that was about July 13 to August 12; the name is derived from the root therm, meaning heat. Duh. The common rule-of-thumb, no shellfish in months without an "r" in the name, applies only to oysters. Turns out the best time to eat lobsters is in months ending in "r", except December. No idea how this maps onto the revolution month names. Blah, blah. I love this stuff.

**The French revolutionaries, we should note, did not divide their ten-day weeks into two five-day units, so I can still revel in my creativity.