The following dialogue was presented on Radio National, a part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in 1998. From the program intro: Today, Robert Theobald tackles the subject that won him fans across Australia last year: the issue of work, the attitudes we have to employment and the changes and challenges we face going into the next millennium.
Robert Theobald is an author, futurist thinker and the creator of The Future of Work, which ran on Radio National last year and has now gone into book form. He recognised back in the ’60s that it would be impossible to stay with the current maximum growth orientation and that realisation led him to look at the need for very different ways to relate to work and income.
Today Robert Theobald is joined by Charles Brass, an Australian who heads the Future of Work Foundation out of Melbourne. Charles has been challenging Australians to think about the need to move beyond the current patterns of thought for several years, and he often starts his talks by reminding people of how dramatically the labour force has changed in the last few decades and how little policies have altered.
Robert Theobald & Charles Brass
For the first time in human history, we can imagine a world in which people would choose the work they do in ways and amounts that satisfy them. Western societies have typically refused to look at this possibility, preferring to run on the current treadmill which has been increasing hours on the job in recent years in order to increase, or at least maintain, current standards.
The patterns since World War II have broken with the past. There was a steady decline in hours on the job during the first half of the 20th century. In the 50 years since the end of World War II, the decline in hours has slowed, stopped and even been reversed. This has occurred despite the growing evidence that there are more and more activities where people and the systems of which they are a part, would benefit from shorter times at work.
What is happening? Why have we refused as a society to take advantage of technological improvements to increase our free time? The essential reason is that for most people, it is taking more hours on the job, or more family members at work, to maintain existing standards of living. Buying the same amount of goods and services requires more commitment to earning money than was the case in the past.
Our current commitment to maximum economic growth has become counterproductive. The real needs of people and communities are no longer to obtain more stuff. Rather, more and more people want to enhance their quality of life rather than the quantity of goods they can obtain. People are ready to change the way they evaluate success in their own lives. They are looking for new ways to obtain satisfaction. While I know that people will not settle for failure or for having less of what they value than in the past, I know that they are willing to look at alternatives which are more achievable.
I am convinced that one of the reasons change agents have often been ineffective is that they have aimed to convince the public they must give up current standards, rather than help them look for more satisfactory directions. Today we shall look at the new ideas which are emerging about work and which offer positive options. More and more employers are sensing that work must engage not only the energies but also the passions of their workers if they are to meet their goals.
Even in this new context however, the idea that we could organise society so that people could choose the work they enjoy seems unrealistic to many. One basic objection always seems to be that nobody would be willing to do the unpleasant work. There are three primary answers to this issue. One is that we fail to recognise how different ideas about desirable work are. Not everybody wants to be involved in thinking; some prefer hard physical toil. Indeed, when tasks are allocated according to expressed preferences, it is amazing how much work gets done without people being forced to do what they don’t enjoy.
It is also critical to recognise that one of the ways that we decrease the amount of toil, as opposed to desirable work, is that we free ‘important’ people from doing unpleasant work. We are recognising that separating individuals from the chores and frustrations inherent in every day life gives them a distorted perspective which separates them from ordinary concerns and widens the gulf between the elites of the culture and the general public.
A third step is to decide which work people do not want to do and concentrate our technological imagination on how to get it done in different ways.
But even if it proved impossible to get all the dirty work done these ways, there are two very simple additional steps which are feasible. The first would simply increase the payments for the work that people did not want to do. We would move from our present culture where the more attractive work is normally the best paid, to one where the least attractive work gained more money. This reversal would have many interesting effects. This way of looking at the world also suggests that in the future there may be competition for the most exciting work that will drive down its financial rewards.
The other step that might make sense, although it goes severely against the grain of current thinking, would be to require everybody to engage in ‘unpleasant’ work at some point in their lives. The challenge might come in the teenage years when people have lots of energy. Indeed what seems unpleasant in later life might be seen as attractive if the structures were created well. It has long been recognised that sitting people at school desks when their hormones are running strongly, is asking for trouble. In addition, such a process would enable young people of different classes to learn to live and work with each other.
In order to discuss these and other questions, Charles Brass, who runs the Future of Work Foundation in Australia, will be talking with me. Charles has been thinking and acting to bring about change for several years. Last year he found ways to bring me to Australia and he is now part of a broader effort which will enable me to come back in September and October of this year.
Charles, I know from what you have told me in the past that people tend to reject the type of conclusions that I have developed there. You have, however, some data on trends which confirms the fact that past trends have already been broken, and that we have no choice but to move in radically different directions. Perhaps we can start with some of the things that you talk about when you raise these issues.
Charles Brass: Robert, thank you for a very thoughtful introduction, you even give me plenty to think about!
One of the slides that I tend to use is a picture of the front cover of the Bureau of Statistics Monthly Report on Employment Statistics in 1962. It has two graphics on it: one showing a man working at a lathe, another showing a man sitting at a desk with a telephone, and at the end of the desk is a typewriter and a pretty young girl typing away. And back in 1962 that pretty well described the world of work. The changes since then are huge and profound, not just the technological ones you’ve raised, but the extent to which work has ceased being a physical activity and become much more the shifting of information and also very profoundly, the extent to which women have moved from being a marginal part of the workforce, to being nearly 50% of the workforce this year.
Robert Theobald: You also talk about the fact that we think about full-time work, we think about 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, and that that’s really not the norm any more.
Charles Brass: Oh no. Well certainly 9 to 5, Monday to Friday is a working pattern enjoyed or worked by less than 10% of the Australian population in the 1990s. But I think the more interesting phrase is the one you used. ‘full-time’. Full-time work seems to me to be one of the most offensive phrases ever foisted on a population.
It began as an industrial concept, particularly in this country I think, as different from other countries where a very centralised system determined standard working hours. And it’s always been a sub-set of actual hours in a week. I mean full-time work was originally the sort of 40-hour week, and there have always been 168-hours in a week, so it’s always been a bit anachronistic in that sense. But what seems to me to have characterised our behaviour in the last 20 years, is we seem hell-bent on actually proving that the phrase ‘full-time work’ means what it says, in that those people who are fortunate enough to have ‘a full-time job’ are now being increasingly required by their employers to demonstrate that they mean it, that they are in fact owned by the employer for as much time as the employer can possibly squeeze out of them. And that seems to me to be an inappropriate way to behave.
Robert Theobald: But don’t you think that in a sense people are also willing to go along in the sense that they say, ‘Somehow we have to keep up our standard of living and if the cost is to work harder’, isn’t it both sides of the equation that there are people, although you know, as we go along we also remember that there are people playing, I mean this is an incredibly complex set of fluxes and trends and everything else, but it seems to me some people are still in, ‘Well if we keep working hard enough, we won’t have to change the way we live; we won’t have to think about the quality of life rather than the standard of living; we won’t have to change the perspective we have on life’.
Charles Brass: Yes, well one of the characteristics of the full-time job is that it also provides a full-time income, although particularly at the bottom end of the spectrum real wages seem to have been decreasing for a while. But certainly for hard core full-time people, the rewards have been significant and they have provided people with the opportunity to maintain their standard of living. And the alternate form of work, which is usually called part-time, but I think actually is much broader than that, and I prefer to use the word ‘contingent’ forms of work, are not only less secure but also less remunerative, which makes it difficult for people to maintain those standards.
Robert Theobald: Why are we finding it so difficult to understand that the world of work is so radically different from what it used to be? Why do we cling on to images that really don’t fit at all? What is it that makes it so difficult for us to just say, ‘This is a new world therefore it needs new practices’ because another one you raise is that talking about retirement in the context that we do which when we started in Germany it was 2% of the people who lived over 65, now with the longer life expectancies make the way we think about retirement at least to me, totally nonsensical. How are we so blocked? How do we continue to stick with models that even sort of a cursory examination should lead us to say ‘Hey, we have to rethink this’. We’ve got a debate on Social Security going on in the United States which assumes that growth is possible forever into the future, and that you aren’t going to rethink how we conceptualise retirement at all.
Charles Brass: Yes I think talking about retirement is something we need to do in this conversation. But your original question, Why is it that we find it so difficult to conceive the change? I think there is a simple but quite profound answer to that. And that is actually for me embodied in the word ‘work’ itself. When I use the word ‘work’ I mean something much more than employment, and yet when certainly the political world uses the word ‘work’, they are thinking about that range of human activity which fits into the economic way of doing things, which fits into the model that a business, an organisation, has an idea, produces a product or whatever and then people attach to the wealth that is created in that product through the process of employment, takes the money out and then take it home and spend the money.
That particular form of getting work done that we call employment, has always been a very, well a relatively small sub-set of the work done in a society. And in fact over the last 30 years it seems to me that that as a proportion has been decreasing, and there are some statistics to back that up. And I think if we can just shift our focus away from getting work done through employment, to as you said in your introduction, getting work done through human endeavour and human satisfaction, we would come up with models that were thinking about the future rather than just reproducing the past.
Robert Theobald: I remember when we were talking in Australia, one of your vigorous complaints was that whenever you tried to do this sort of conversation and you introduced the word ‘work’, you saw people absolutely drifting back to employment. And of course we do exactly the same things with the Gross National Product figures, because we say that the only work that counts is remunerated work, and therefore the gap between a developing country where all the same sorts of home-based work etc. go on, and Australia is much wider than it really is, because all of that work takes place all over the world and yet we have made it invisible to ourselves and in consequence we sort of say, ‘Well if we give them more employed work everything is getting better’ and forgetting what are the crosscuts about what that does to the other work that goes on in the culture, and of course the social structures that get damaged in that process of saying, ‘Oh you’ve all got to be in a job in order to have a meaningful life in order to have resources etc.’
Charles Brass: Yes it’s a very big challenge. And for me, another one of the phrases that I use is I describe unemployment as a myth, which gets a bit of a laugh occasionally, probably a sardonic laugh because many people are clearly affected by increasing levels of unemployment. How could we possibly describe unemployment as a myth? Well it’s for exactly this reason. The particular form of work that we do in employment seems to be in some short supply, but the amount of work we want done as a people in Australia, seems to be if not increasing, certainly far beyond the current amount of work that’s done.
If I sit down with people and invite them to make a list of things they would like done, that are not done, everybody can come up with a list. And most people can come up with a list of people they know who are not doing as much as they want to do. So to suggest we have a shortage of work seems to me to be crazy.
So it does seem to me that the question is not about work that needs doing or whether perhaps technology is replacing people with machines, it does seem to me the question is about value, and how is it that a society creates value, how is it that people attach to that value or how is it distributed, and that’s where I think we need to focus the question.
Robert Theobald: Why is that we have in a sense, lost touch with the other values? I mean the United States is a classic case of this, where all sorts of human work relationships, for example childcare, is incredibly badly compensated. Almost all of the work which actually helps people to make more sense of their lives, is the work that doesn’t get paid. And now what’s getting paid is this incredible monster of information which at least in my mind is eating us up, an ‘Infoglut’. And now what’s getting paid is this incredible monster of information which at least in my mind is eating us up, an Infoglut. And I hope at some point we’re going to say, ‘You know, you can have too much information.’
So how do you engage this question? What are the places when you talk to people and audiences where they sort of say, ‘Ah ha, I’d never thought of it that way and if I think about it that way, I begin to see what you’re getting at.’
Charles Brass: Well Robert, that brings me right back to my first contact with you, and that is your most recent book is called ‘Reworking Success’, and the point you make in there is that the success criteria of the 20th century cannot afford to be the success criteria of the 21st. And I think this is where we do have this big dilemma. If you just stand back and have a look, even with the increased division in our societies, both in your country and in mine, there is no doubt that this economic world has reaped huge benefits, not just in physical things, and not just in the technology that allows us to sit on opposite sides of the world and talk today.
Robert Theobald: With a little difficulty in the connections!
Charles Brass: Yes, that’s true. But the audience doesn’t need to know about that.
Robert Theobald: Why not?
Charles Brass: Also in our increased lifespans, and our increased health and our capacity to deal with the things that would have killed us years ago. We’ve been hugely successful. And I think because of that success, we have continued to do well what has brought us that success, and it is only now slowly that we’re coming to the point of saying, ‘Well yes it’s true that that brought some success, but we left some things behind. So can we just hold on for a while and bring those other things up to the same level so we can go forward as whole human beings rather than just part human beings.’ And to come back to your original question, it’s about that point where my audiences start immediately to say ‘Yes, that’s how I feel. I feel as though a significant part of me is being left behind, but I’m so caught up in a system that seems out of my control that I can’t do anything about it.’
Robert Theobald: And I think one of the surprises we’ve had in the work we’ve been doing together is how much resonance there really is if we could only put it together, but it’s still sort of fragmented, and the number of people who have written and called and said, ‘You’re speaking to the concern I have’, but how do we deal with this in a culture which clearly sees at least at the sort of public level, these sorts of questions as irrelevant, crazy, marginal, any of those terms. How do we get together so we can begin to say, ‘Look, we’re not marginal, there are lots of us out here, in fact probably we’re a majority’ and it is rhetoric of the elite that is the marginal thing if only we could get together and talk about what matters to us.
Charles Brass: Yes there’s a nice phrase in a newspaper article that I read the other day by an economist here in Melbourne. He said that as human beings we want to shop 24 hours a day, we want to be entertained 24 hours a day, we want to have all those benefits. But as employees we still want to work 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. And I think there’s something in that tension, that we’ve created this world in which we see ourselves as divided into employees and then people. And it’s some reconception of that as a whole where we start seeing ourselves as having multiple parts but of being part of a coherent whole, somewhere in there we’re going to find a way of getting people together. …
Robert Theobald: I want to come back to your reworking success because it seems to me that one of our dilemmas is that cultures really have never changed in history, at least this is how I read Arnold Toynbee. And what has happened is cultures have said, ‘We’re doing very well; we’re going to go on doing very well’ and eventually they ran out their string and some other culture which had started from a different, later place, said, ‘OK, we can do better than you can’ and took over.
Now there are couple of problems with that, it seems to me. First of all, we’re part of the cultures which would lose, but secondly I think much more deeply, I think we do live in a global culture, I don’t think you can now say that China or India or anywhere else is not caught in the same set of success criteria that the west has imposed. And unless somehow we can find a new process whereby we as individuals, as communities, as Internet communities, as all of these things begin to say ‘We must have this conversation, we must ask whether this is the success we want’, and that perhaps gives it a different framing, it makes it easier perhaps for us to say, ‘Well it’s not surprising this is difficult.’ It has to be difficult, this is new, this is not something where we’re immensely skilled and perhaps our frustration with ourselves in terms of, ‘Well, we haven’t got it right yet’ and we keep on having difficulty moving, changing, etc., would be less hard to handle if we realised just what a huge shift this was in the way we’ve always run societies.
Charles Brass: Yes, well you strike a very personal note with me. As you know, four years ago I had what I think would be described as a pretty successful corporate career. And the main reason that I quit that career was the fear (because I have young children) that exactly what you’ve just described would take place; that some other society somewhere, and it might be, well, wherever it comes from, some other society somewhere is going to take over because we’re too stupid to change. And I found it difficult to look my children in the eye and say that that was the world I was creating for them.
And I have to say that while the last three years or so haven’t been easy, they have at least made it clear to me that it is possible, and that the only restrictions exist inside our head. The technology now exists to do things in almost any way we like, and that seems to me to be the real wonder of the late 20th century. We now have the technology to do things almost any way we like. We seem hell-bent on doing them in one particular way, which seems to be the biggest and the fastest, but there’s no reason why we have to do them that way. And recapturing some of this for me seems to be giving enough of us enough understanding about the technology to be able to say ‘Hey, why don’t we do it this way? And then we will go fast when we need to go fast, but we’ll also go slow when we need to go slow.’
Robert Theobald: Well let’s imagine somebody listening to this program at the moment. Let’s assume they’re liking it, and they say, ‘All right, this is great stuff, what do I do?’ And the trouble is that you can’t answer it as we both know on a generic basis, but how does one go to that person, or how does one speak to that person besides saying in a sense, ‘Unfortunately we can’t answer that question, it’s a question you’ve got to answer for yourself because you are in a unique position, you have your unique issues, and you have to find what you can do.’ But is there another cut beyond that where we can say, ‘But there are nevertheless, some things that we can talk about with you, about right livelihood, or about companies needing to operate differently like for example, the Semmler Company in Brazil, which says ‘We can really involve all of our employees in this’ and that as you said in one of your notes to me, essentially the business is not more than the common purposes of the employees.
Charles Brass: Yes well you’re right, it is difficult to say to any one individual. And I think in addition to what you’ve just said, there’s another reason why it’s difficult, and that is that we are dividing our society into people who are seen as successful, the way we define success at the moment, and it’s very difficult for those people to give up that success. And then on the other hand we have people who are pretty well excluded from the system, and all they see is ‘Well just let me in there, let me in and give me some access to some of this and the world will be better.’ So it is difficult to talk to people.
But I think we can make some general statements about what the future will look like if we’re going to go down the road we’re talking compared to the present. At the moment, and it seems to me the language of economics helps here – at the moment the world seems consumed with the concept of a transaction, or the concept of transactions: everything is being done on a transactional basis and my understanding of a transaction is that first of all it’s done between relatively distant parties, parties who are probably coming together purely for the purposes of this particular transaction, and that the nature of the transaction and the value that’s created in it, is able in some sense to be objectively verified by a third party. So in this country, for example, we have Competition Commissions; we have Ombudspeople; we have all sorts of infrastructures in place which are supposed to protect the objectivity of the transactions that take place in the economic world.
And clearly, many of the things that happen in our world have to happen through that transactional basis. If we’re never going to have any future contact with each other, then we’ve got to have some mechanism in place that tries to restore a common base, and some equity between the partners so that things are done fairly. But most of what actually drives us as human beings, it seems to me, is much more about relationship than about transaction. And the essential differences in the context that I’m putting them here, are that first of all the relationship is between parties who intend to have some ongoing contact with each other. So protection from an imbalance can be restored or organised in the ongoing sequence of contact between people.
But most particularly that the value that is determined in a relationship is mixed up with the whole relationship concept. It’s not meant to be objectively seen; it’s not intended for example, that there be some objective measure of the amount of pocket money you give your children. That really is something that’s messed up with the whole business of family dynamics and your particular circumstance and relationship, and it makes little sense at all to talk about an international standard for pocket money.
Robert Theobald: Have we done that yet?
Charles Brass: Well no, I’m sure someone’s going to suggest it now that I’ve raised the idea.
And so it seems to me that if this is true, if there is a sense in which people want to recapture some sense of that relationship, then what that means for the future is that another word that you use enormously, the word ‘community’ is going to have to characterise much more of the way in which we behave than it does at the moment. And that instead of making ourselves hell-bent on coming up with internationally competitive standards for everything; we need those standards. Clearly the environment for example must be dealt with on a global basis, we can’t have separate standards. But at the opposite extreme there are a whole raft of things which if we’re going to regain them, the value that we’re creating, the work that we’re doing, it’s going to be done in concert with people with whom we have an enduring relationship in a community of some sort.
Robert Theobald: You’ve raised at least three ones for me on this one. The first one’s nice and short. I was talking to a group of pastors, and I was bemoaning exactly the same pattern, that everything was becoming transactional and you didn’t pass things back and forth over the fence any more, and you know, everything in the community was becoming well, ‘I buy from you’, we don’t have pot lucks, we don’t do things just because they’re nice to do and money doesn’t get into it. We don’t have as much community fairs where everybody mucks in and you can’t possibly calculate. And I said, ‘You know, sooner or later we’re going to have catered church suppers.’ And they said, ‘That’s a great idea.’
Charles Brass: It take all the pressure off the pastor’s wife.
Robert Theobald: I don’t think that was the point I was trying to make.
The second point though, is the point about the Japanese culture, because westerners find doing business in Japan very difficult because it is a relationship business, it is not primarily a transactional business. And there’s a covenant more than a contract. And they say, ‘Well there’s no way we can cover everything in this contract; there’s no way we can get everything transactional, but we want to continue to work with each other, and as things change we will try to remain in a system that feels fair to all of us.’ That’s how to work. But it makes sense, it seems to me, of exactly what you’re saying, and of course westerners, (at least, I haven’t tried to do business in Japan) but from everything I hear, westerners go crazy because they can’t understand the framework in which that discussion is taking place.
But let me come to the third one, because it’s the one that I have just become particularly fascinated about because of some new learnings. And that is that I am finding that people in communities in sub neighbourhoods are just beginning to say ‘You will either give us more ability to make decisions about our lives, or we are going to make life very difficult for you. That we’re no longer willing to have city governments say “We make a decision for all of Melbourne, or all of LA, or all of even Spokane”, which is a much smaller city which is where I’m now living. And a friend of mine rang me up in great excitement from LA because he’d been reading my book, and he then fell across a very long article in The LA Times just the other day, which said neighbourhoods are threatening to secede from Los Angeles because they’re saying ‘We are not being given any freedom to make sense of our neighbourhoods.’
And when I worked in Spokane and had a long conversation in Spokane, we were amazed to find out how much is already happening to bring things down from the city level to the neighbourhood, to the family and to challenge what I think is core to this, which is that we’ve run on experts and professionals who have said, ‘We will do the work and we will tell you how to live your lives.’ And it seems to me that what we’re talking about is that people are going to have to learn to live their own lives, and that that’s a whole different set, and in a sense the whole piece we’ve done on education and health in these programs, and community, all ties in to that extraordinary issue that if it’s not going to be run from the top down, not going to be run by experts and professionals, people are going to have to know what their choices are and you don’t do that transactional.
Charles Brass: No, and since I know the other programs have focused on other things, if we concentrate on the work aspect of this: your comment about experts. Once upon a time, and it’s not that long ago, most of the knowledge in the world did reside with experts. That has changed. As we now see in the newspapers regularly, you can now build and buy almost anything across the Internet, whether it be good, bad or indifferent. So if you are a neighbourhood or a local community or even a group of people who don’t necessarily live near one another but who have some other bond, you’re no longer as reliant on those experts. Provided you can gain control over some significant parts of your life, because what most of us in cities have done is give away our capacity to provide almost anything for ourselves. We’ve become almost totally dependant on someone else to provide everything. To provide our food, to provide our electricity, to provide just about everything we use. And somewhere we’re going to need to use that knowledge to recapture a sense of ourselves but also some of the critical things, some of the work that we need to do, to be done in a way that we can provide for ourselves rather than relying on other people to provide for us.
Robert Theobald: Are things like well first of all, as you know of course, technology is making all of that more feasible, the potential of bringing things home again is very real. Do you see local currencies, the in a sense, the currency for a neighbourhood for example, as a way to do this, as a way to say, ‘Look we have things which we can create for each other and which because we’re using a local currency, will be in a sense, cheaper because we don’t have to buy national currency to do this.’ The other side of that of course is transactions, and we need to remember this. For busy people, transactions are wonderful. And that’s our problem. It’s easier to do transactions than relationships at one level.
Charles Brass: Absolutely.
Robert Theobald: It’s also destructive. And we have to recognise that their benefits to the relational model, and the relational work model, which go beyond the efficiency of the transactional model.
Charles Brass: Yes, like you said, we’re raising a lot of things in this conversation. It’s a very wide one.
Robert Theobald: Well that’s the purpose of these ones, I hope they’re going to like them.
Charles Brass: Oh good. With respect to currencies, I think the issue here is this question of the creation of value. One of the things that we’ve given away through this employment model, is any sense in which we as human beings, can create value. The only way we know how to create value, at least in theory, is that we start a business, and then you enter into economic transactions. And one of the reasons for that is that the representation of value that we use in our society is a national or an international currency. And one of the characteristics of that currency is that only a select group of people are able to make this stuff. You can’t just create it yourself, that’s called forgery, you go to jail. And so we’ve taken away from ourselves any belief that we can actually create value. And one of the things that local currencies do, (and I’m involved in some, and there are many examples in Australia and around the world), is they allow people in relationships with one another, to say ‘Hey, we think we’ve created some value here and that we can represent that value in some way.’ And then it is exchanged and traded among themselves. And it’s that capacity to create something that you can then eat. You don’t necessarily have to create your own food.
We talked earlier about at what point in the conversation do people feel good. Well it’s at about this point in the conversation, when people stop and they say, ‘Ah, you want us all to live on kibbutzes.’ Or, ‘You’re a closet Socialist.’ Well neither of those things are necessarily true. You don’t necessarily have to go back to the point where everybody’s creating their own food, but you need to be able to create something that allows you to eat. You can’t do that with Australian dollars. They’re created somewhere else, and there’s another whole hour-long program about how that stuff is created and distributed.
But because the economic world is ignoring so much of the real work that is done, and work that we believe is valuable, I think there is a huge opportunity here for people and communities and neighbourhoods to reclaim some of that, if you like under the very nose of the economic system, through local currencies.
Robert Theobald: And you know, you mentioned it doesn’t have to be food, but there is a profound sense I think in which shifting the food patterns is a part of this puzzle, that the neighbourhood garden – I have a friend who wanted to create a garden in New Orleans, and what that did to that neighbourhood was extraordinary. I mean first it produced food, but it produced a different sense of relationship to people, and it’s not a very good neighbourhood, it’s the sort of place where you would expect somebody to come in and rip off the garden, climb over the fence. I mean the fence isn’t unclimbable, and you know, one morning you’re going to wake up and find all the stuff’s gone.
Charles Brass: Nothing there.
Robert Theobald: But it doesn’t happen because something occurs in that neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood decides that they’re going to protect it. It’s the same thing with Block Watch, which is one of the most extraordinary phenomena to me, because it’s interesting who supports different models. The police might have said, ‘Well we don’t want our power to control the neighbourhoods taken away’, and what they said instead was, ‘We can’t police this place, and the only way this is going to happen is if you as a neighbourhood become part of the process by which you control your own neighbourhood.’
And it’s an incredibly subtle shift, but it seems to me to have gone a long way, and I like the way you’re talking about ‘if we can begin to say that relationships do create value and not everything’s transactional’ and a lot of the things that go on in the garden really, in a sense you can do that more efficiently, you can probably do it probably with less money, but making sense of your life is very different.
Charles Brass: That’s it. That’s it, it seems to me. I mean your phrase, a phrase I use almost every day of my life, for which I’m eternally grateful to you, the phrase ‘right livelihood’. Making sense of why it is we’re here, and certainly for me, it seemed to make little sense, much of what I was doing in the past. It only made sense if I believed that the money I was getting was going to get me something. And increasingly I and my colleagues were finding that yes we were getting money, but we weren’t able to do anything meaningful with it. And the things you’re describing around community gardens and all sorts of community programs, seem to me to go a long way towards not only getting work done, but providing that sense of why am I here? what’s my real purpose on this earth?
Robert Theobald: You know, one of the interesting things that one of the books suggests, is that if you think about money in terms of how long it takes you to make it, an awful lot of purchases suddenly seem pretty nonsensical. In other words, instead of saying ‘It’s going to cost me this amount of dollars’, you say ‘It’s going to take this amount of my life.’ Is it really worth that amount of my life to buy a hat, or to buy this new gimmick? And of course there’s all the other data which shows that consumption gives you a very short satisfaction hit. You know, you say, ‘It doesn’t last very long’. You buy the thing, and maybe you feel good about it for a couple of days or a week or a month, but for most people those things don’t really make their life better it seems to me. And that’s of course what advertising keeps on saying, ‘Well if you do this, your life will be complete’, but I don’t think many people really – and I think that’s the point you’re making, that money doesn’t buy happiness, and there’s all sorts of data beginning to come out about lots of money not doing much for you. Yes, you need a certain amount, but when people say, ‘Well you’re saying we’re going to do without money’ of course we’re not saying you can do without money, we’re saying that beyond a certain amount of money, you have to ask what it’s bringing you and what you’re paying for it.
Charles Brass: Yes. I’ll give you a small personal example. My Saturday afternoons used to involve starting up a lawnmower, mowing the lawn, and then when I’d finished because I was all hot and sweaty and because I was worried about becoming overweight, I’d go for a run, and take the dogs for a run.
Then the lawnmower broke down and we wandered in to the lawnmower buying shop and looked at various lawnmowers and saw a modern technologically developed push-pull lawnmower. And I went to a colleague I know who’s a personal trainer and I said, ‘Listen, do you reckon if I used a push-pull lawnmower on my lawn, and you gave me a couple of things to think about while I was doing it, I could get the same exercise as I would while I was running?’
He said, ‘Not only that, you’d do less damage to your body.’
So I now have a push-pull lawnmower, and as I’m mowing the lawn, I’m doing my exercise. I don’t need the $150 Nike runners to go running, I wear a grotty old pair that get green and dirty; I’m out in my yard mowing the lawn. Technology’s a significant part of this. The lawnmower that I use today would not have been able to have been bought in the 1950s, and push-pull lawnmowers weren’t capable of mowing the lawn. They now are. And instead of the typical economic world saying ‘You buy the biggest and the best lawnmower’, and maybe if I was being creative, I share it with my neighbour, I’m actually, I believe using technology to actually make my life more meaningful rather than just going through a series of tasks during the day.
Robert Theobald: I was actually going to push it out where you didn’t push it out, which is to say: And, if it’s that simple, maybe you can share it with your neighbour, with much less risk that it’s going to come back in a totally non-usable state. Because I mean, if you’ve got a very high tech thing, you’re not about to lend that because if it gets broken then where are you.
Charles Brass: That’s a good thought.
Robert Theobald: And then that opens up the whole question of how many lawnmowers do you need on a block, and one of the interesting things that’s happening in certain cities is how many cars do you need on a block. And people are beginning to find out that you can own cars jointly instead of everybody having a car which sits in the garage most of the time. Now it’s not simple, but again if you start thinking about what technology allows us to do and how far ahead we can book, and how much better we can get it using the time we have and the equipment so it’s used well. Let me give you one other crazy idea, which is we live with the concept of the weekend. We were talking about the whole 9 to 5 idea, but we still sort of keep the concept of the weekend. So we have the weekend, when everything is busy, all the recreation stuff. And you have the week when all the offices are full. Well supposing we said ‘That’s an outdated idea and we want to use our facilities much more evenly.’ Now everybody says ‘You can’t do that’. And I say, ‘Well, why not? Why can’t you rethink this and say “We have 365 days in the year, and it’s really stupid that some days everything is crowded, and some days things aren’t being used very much”.’
So it’s those sorts of conceptual leaps, it seems to me which then would allow you to think about work, and some people like working at night. I mean, it’s a nightmare for me, but some people actually enjoy working at night, and I couldn’t do that if you paid me. Well it paid me a lot.
Charles Brass: Well I’m glad you do. I’ll give you a real example Robert, again from my own neighbourhood, and I’m sure many of our listeners are suffering from the same problems that our local primary school is, and that is that the governments which have traditionally been responsible for education, are increasingly saying, ‘We’re going to put less and less resources in, and make you more and more responsible yourself for what goes on in the school.’
Now there are lots of protests, and I don’t for one minute want to suggest that I’m endorsing what the governments are doing, and certainly lots of people are complaining, and there probably is room for more resources to go in. But the other side of this is that what the governments have done in our school for example, is they have given the school community a million-dollar asset, and said, ‘It’s yours. Do with it what you like.’ And that million-dollar asset is utilised, as you’ve just pointed out, about 18% or 20% of the time. Now we’re just beginning to explore, given that they’ve said to us ‘It’s yours, do with it what you want’, what it might mean to utilise that asset. It’s a million dollars they’ve given us, and the school is slowly starting to think about some of the things you’ve just talked about, as a way of capturing our ability to take advantage of what the government thinks is a reduction, but for us it’s a bonus.
Robert Theobald: I love that, and in fact when we talked in Spokane just the other week, people were saying the schools are the natural organising process for the neighbourhood. That’s still typically the people there are within a geographical area, and they have some commonalities. They may have forgotten those commonalities, but they have them. I’ve done a lot of work with something called the Mott Foundation in this country, which has talked about how community schools could revolutionise the way we move if we recognise that you don’t use the schools for six hours a day only in school terms, etc. And as you say, it’s a huge facility.
Now if you started looking at churches. How often are they used? We don’t need more facilities, we just need to stop having boundaries which say work takes place in this sort of place, not in that sort of place etc. Now I think we’ve got about four minutes left: how do we? I think what we need to remind people of is that we have sort of broadened the issue out from work and we’ve said, ‘If you talk about employment all of these issues are sort of trivia’. Once you start getting it around and saying ‘We’re really interested in how the work of the culture takes place’ then there are all of these openings, and I think maybe we answer the question I asked earlier but not quite in the way I expected, which was what could we say to people who wanted to do something? We said, ‘Here are some ways we’ve begun to think about it. Probably you thought about it, but you haven’t thought it was feasible. Why don’t you get serious about what you’re thinking and your action is?’
Charles Brass: Yes, and I think before we finish, we ought to come back to something you raised along the same line, and that was the concept of retirement. The concept of retirement is a purely economic concept, and in fact it’s even an outdated economic concept because it arose at a time when people’s bodies were so badly abused by the work they were doing that they weren’t able to continue it in later life. Even that’s changed. Most of the work that people do now, they’re perfectly capable even in an economic sense, perfectly capable of doing it into the latter years of their life. But the real thing here, and it’s at the core of everything we’ve said, is that it’s people who have the capacity to make a contribution. It’s people who create the value, it’s the relationships between people that makes up a society, and there’s absolutely no reason why that has to stop on someone’s 65th birthday, and particularly in a community sense.
It seems to me crazy. One thing we haven’t learnt from our indigenous populations, and you know this is in your country as well, is that they have respect for their elders. They actually don’t think you’ve learnt anything until you’re 65. We think once you’ve hit 50 you’ve got nothing to contribute, it’s crazy.
Robert Theobald: You know, as we close this as it runs down, what fascinates me about our conversation is I think people would say, ‘Well, that’s not what we think the conversation about work is.’ That’s nice. Now I’ve got a different cut on maybe what people are saying when they say, ‘We need a new work vision.’ Does that make sense to you?
Charles Brass: Yes, I understand. You start talking about statistics like how many women there are in the workforce, and telecommuting, and working hours, and then you end up talking about education and community and lawnmowers. We seem to have come a long way. But it does seem to me it is about what we want done, together and collectively and individually. And that’s what work is. We’ve got a particular way of organising that called economic employment; are there some other ways we can organise it to give it a bit more meaning? The answer is yes, and the only question is, when are we going to do it?
Robert Theobald: And so let me leave you all with a question. How can each of you engage in changing the work patterns of our culture so that they provide satisfaction to you and also give access to a reasonable level of resources?