Juliet Schor wants a four-day work week

The TED Interview

TED

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before labor unions fought for them, society didn’t have weekends as we know them. In the 13th century, the average male peasants in the UK only worked 135 days a year. In a post-pandemic and increasingly virtual world, what is the future of labor? Juliet Schor is an economist and sociologist whose research focuses on work and consumer society. In this episode, she shares her thoughts on modern working practices and how her current research on the four-day work week could help address society’s major problems–from burnout at work, to the effects of work on the climate crisis. Juliet also highlights the fascinating ways we have and might continue to reconfigure business in the 21st century, especially as it pertains to the dynamic–and at times predatory–sharing economy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Have you listened to Talk Radio recently?
0:03.0	Let's talk about this war on white people.
0:05.0	That's a pro-quiling, it's good for you.
0:07.0	Bill the Keystone pipeline, deport illegals, build the wall.
0:10.0	I'm Katie Thornton, host of the divided dial,
0:13.0	a new five-part series from WNMC's On the Media,
0:17.0	about how the American right came to dominate Talk Radio
0:21.0	and how one company is launching a conservative media empire
0:25.0	from the airwaves.
0:26.0	Listen every Tuesday and on the media feed.
0:34.0	Welcome to the Ted interview.
0:36.0	I'm Stephen Johnson.
0:38.0	One of the defining properties of a global pandemic
0:42.0	beyond the life and death struggles with disease itself
0:45.0	is the fact that it disrupts so many of the routines of everyday life.
0:50.0	Usually we're glad when the case counts drop
0:53.0	and we get to go back to normal life again,
0:56.0	attending in-person school or dining out in restaurants.
0:59.0	But in certain cases, the COVID disruptions
1:02.0	have left us wondering if some of our old routines
1:05.0	were really the optimal ones.
1:07.0	Nowhere is this rethinking of habit more pronounced
	...

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