TimeWork Web Resources

These resource pages contain approximately 30 links to articles, organizations, events and directories related to work and working time. Each entry contains a brief descriptive note - usually a quote from the source.
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Iowa City Declaration

From the Our Time Famine conference, University of Iowa, March 8-10, 1996. "This conference will bring together leading historians, economists, educators, labor leaders, and politicians to explore the phenomenon of work's expansion, the problems overwork has caused, and possible ways to address them."

Lead Articles

The Case for Shorter Work Time (Bruce O'Hara)
"New technology offers us a wonderful opportunity to have more time for our families, more time for friendships and hobbies, more time to be involved in our communities. But if we continue to try to combine the technology of the 1990s and the family structure of the 1990s with the workweek of the 1940s, the result will be not leisure, but more and more unemployment, and an economy which staggers from one recession to the next."

TimeWork Web Research Prospectus (Tom Walker - knoW Ware Communications)
Social critics and government task forces alike have suggested that reducing the working hours of full-time employees and redistributing work could be at least a partial solution to chronic widespread unemployment and employment imbalances. How such a reduction of work time could occur and whether it is feasible remain topics of considerable controversy, however. This research prospectus outlines a plan for conducting a narrative analysis of the working time issue and for developing viable policy options that can be undertaken on a small scale as pilot projects.

The Implications of Changes in the Nature of Work (Sally Lerner)
"Rapid technological change and the globalization of economic activity are re-structuring the North American economy, and with it the nature and future of work... With much of the service sector now in the process of being automated and computerized, there is a clear question as to whether secure, full-time, adequately-waged employment will be available to the Canadian workforce... or whether 'jobless growth' will become the norm." By the same author: The Future of Work "This article offers an overview and evaluation of various policy options for dealing with changing patterns of work in North America. It flags two fundamental societal tasks that urgently require redesign to address these changes..."

Time, Work, and Civic Values (Carmen Sirianni and Andrea Walsh)
"American society is currently in the midst of profound changes, and many of these are reflected in the ways in which we organize time. There are new forms of time scarcity, even as new technologies appear to lessen the temporal burdens of toil. New forms of flexibility in working time (and space) enhance individual choice and equity for some, even as others experience these as more insidious forms of control and social marginalization." (This link also leads to other essays on working time innovation, employee participation and union organizing from the Civic Practices Network.)

High-Tech Populism in the Information Age (Jeremy Rifkin)
"Sensing that an enormous shift is taking place in the economy, millions of Americans are beginning to worry that there may not be a place for them in the new high-tech Information Age. Talk of balancing budgets, imposing term limits on Congress, and ending unfunded mandates does little to address the underlying concerns of a workforce plagued by declining real wages, dead-end jobs, part-time temporary employment, and long-term structural unemployment." Also by Rifkin: Vanishing Jobs "Some business leaders are concerned, but politicians seem strangely deaf to what is likely to be the most explosive issue of the decade."

AntiWork (J. Hughes)
"Every morning I wake up and think about how I'm hurtling towards a certain death. I might die today, mangled on the highway, or I might die in fifty years, run over by a robot servant, but death is certain. And with that cheery thought, I make a special effort not to do anything I'd regret spending these precious minutes of my life on. Like working at a job I don't believe in, for people I dislike, for purposes I disagree with, and so on. Above all, not to work too much."

The Abolition Of Work (Bob Black)
"No one should ever work.

"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working."

>On The Edge of the Digital Age
"We may well need another New Deal in the early decades of the next century. And this New Deal may not just redistribute money -- it might also redistribute time, in the form of shorter workweeks for everyone.

"The Industrial Age's technological advances have steadily reduced the hours of the workweek. The advances of the 19th century cut the average laborer's workweek from 80 hours to 60; the advances of the first half of the 20th century cut them again to 40.

"But the 40-hour workweek has remained standard in the United States throughout the second half of the 20th century, despite productivity gains more than doubling. That could change in the coming decades of increased productivity, as we have less work to go around. We may see the 20-hour workweek."

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This directory is a production of knoW Ware Communications
Prepared June 29, 1995. Revised January 26, 1996
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