The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Aaron Newton, who is working with coauthor Sharon Astyk on the forthcoming book, A Nation of Farmers. Aaron contributes at Groovy Green; he also blogs at Powering Down. Aaron is a land planner and garden farmer in suburban North Carolina, seeking ways to transform the current course of human land use development in an effort to prepare for the effects of global oil production peak and its outcome on automotive suburban America.

The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week. Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.

The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970's. It should be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers about 16 miles each way.

So let's stop and do some math...and I'll try to argue for 16 reasons why a four day work week is a good idea.

The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week. Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.

The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970's. It should be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers about 16 miles each way.

So let's stop and do some math...and I'll try to argue for 16 reasons why a four day work week is a good idea.

One of the benefits of a full English Breakfast in a hotel is that it gives you time to explore more of the Telegraph, and so I found David Millward's piece on Roman travel, which turns out to be quite on topic. It appears, according to a study by Andreas Schäfer, that we spend as much time traveling on average, as they did in Roman times, about 5% (or 1.2 hours a day). And apparently this is an almost Universal truth. Which seemed somewhat relevant to note on a day that took me some 3 hours to return to the ancestral village in Scotland this morning, a total distance of not much more than a hundred miles.

A quick hello - I will be contributing to help cover the Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma Conference.  I am excited to post, after hanging out in the blogroll and lurking since shortly after the inception of the site.  I look forward to bringing you an additional perspective of the conference and speakers.

The reason for the pre-conference post follows:

I announced that I was travelling to the conference on my personal blog a couple of weeks ago, and was promptly called-out by one of my readers.

I wonder how many people will drive 200 miles there in an SUV.

Just some lighthearted overnight reading:

Limiting the Toll of Gas Prices

The price of economy gasoline in and around Huntsville, Ala., is at about $3 a gallon, a little above the national average. As it climbed to that level in recent weeks, faculty and staff members at Calhoun Community College heard increasing griping from students about the toll that commuting to class was putting on their already tight budgets.
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Calhoun administrators brainstormed to "see if there were any alternatives we could come up with that would make it easier on their pocketbooks."
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They decided to alter the Decatur campus's class schedule for the spring term so that all courses that now meet for 50 minutes each Monday, Wednesday and Friday will instead be held just Mondays and Wednesdays, for an hour and 15 minutes each.

Commuting to campus in New York is a different beast altogether, so these kinds of complaints aren't really relevant at schools around here. But it's interesting to see the earliest signs of how large organizations respond to an energy crunch.

Update [2005-10-13 9:28:49 by ianqui]: In the previous thread, DuncanK pointed us to this pretty interesting Business Week article called "Living Too Large in Exurbia". I believe these articles now seem to be increasingly more common...