If study after study shows a connection between leisure and productivity, why are we being worked to exhaustian in the name of production? In the United Kingdom, the New Economics Forum has released a report called 21 hours calling for a new work-week norm. "Each person in Britain already works an average of 20 hours a week if you spread working hours evenly across the population," reports Zoe Cormier in the New Internationalist:
It all comes down to what we consider 'work': what labour we think is worth paying for. If all the time spent in the UK on unpaid labour--raising children, cooking, household chores and so on--were paid at the minimum wage, it would account for 21 percent of the country's GDP.
...Rather than allowing the labour to remain unaccounted (and underappreciated), we could "redistribute paid labour, reduce the differential between paid and unpaid work, and make better use of assets," says
Coote.
"Having the normal working week could solve a litany of social problems," writes Cormier, and it could have an effect on climate change as well:
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Leisure-Productivity-21-Hour-Work-Week.aspx
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