Let The People Sing Is It Allowed? How Does It Work? About the Author The Article return to top page JOB SHARING FOR BEGINNERS What's The Big Idea?
The policy of the Swedish Green Party is to encourage a reduction in working hours. The arithmetic is not complicated. If six people working 40 hours a week cut their hours to 30 hours a week, then two more people can have a job. The 240 hours of work are done by 8 people instead of 6.
Reduce the hours to 20 a week instead of 40 or 30 and the policy is no longer 'reducing Working Hours' but 'Sharing A Job'. Each of the original 6 jobs is being done by 2 people and 12 people have jobs instead of 6.
There are many ways to Job Share. The hours do not have to be shared equally. Those 12 people with 6 jobs could decide to get 50% more work done one week by working 30 hours that week instead of 20 hours a week. That way 360 hours of work would get done (12 people x 30 hours) instead or 240 hours (6x40, 8x30 or 12x20).
Economists talk glibly of scarcity. Knowledge obeys the new economic laws of increasing returns unlike the diminishing returns of industrial production. The most wide-spread scarce commodity is the individual's life time. There are 112 waking hours in a living week (7x16)...and 96 (6x16) with a Biblical day of rest. There is considerable competition for this scarce resource. What do people do all week with their 100 hours of God-given time?
Conventional thinking sees job sharing in terms of two similar people doing the same job but at different times of the day, week, month or year...one middle-aged mother replacing another on a Volvo 'production area' at the end of a shift, for instance. But with just 20 or 30 hours a week of job-work would take on a broader richer meaning within the job-work-world.
Time-freedoms would find themselves being used profitably to transfer skills, knowledge and experience by way of apprenticeship; to improve effectiveness by devoting time to developing consensus for policies and ideas; and to enhance the mood and environment in the job-work-place by being there to provide kindness and mutual support when another person needed it.
A 52 year-old grandfather job-sharing as a Euro MP with a 25-year old pregnant mother is a fundamentally different idea to two strangers passing in a rest room between shifts. These two unique individuals would each devote their skills, knowledge, experience and dedicate their people networks to achieving the ends their shared job was created for.
Some will argue that job sharing will result in the work expanding to meet the time available for it...the famous Parkinson's Law...with more filing, more paper shuffling and more memos for everybody else to reply to.
But Professor Parkinson studied large bureaucratic organisations. His real point was that size matters, as the good professor's close friend Professor Leopold Kohr, had been pointing out throughout his academic life with such concepts as 'circles of leisure' and 'skyscraper economics'. Two people are not a large organisation. In groups of a dozen or less there are increasing and not diminishing returns to time.
Two good, conscientious, hard-working Euro job-sharing MPs would choose to use their new time-freedoms to produce good work for the benefit of their constituents, their party colleagues and their fellow Euro MPs. Here are some examples of how:
Constituents: talking to constituents and finding out what they really want instead of what you think they want and improving the efficiency of your dialogues by taking the trouble to do such things as learning HTML so you can build your own web site and produce a regular 3-weekly interactive web-publication for them.
Party Colleagues: researching the issues being voted on so that interested members of the party can involve themselves and develop consensus positions or identify areas and subjects where there are divergent points of view.
Fellow Euro MPs: working within the parliament to create coalitions with other parties and with other Euro MPs and improving the implementation of policy.
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