Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s literary giants, once proposed that people should work one day a week and rest on the other six, instead of the work-six, rest-one arrangement commanded in the Holy Bible.
Maybe Thoreau did not consider his prodigious reading and 2 million words of printed literature to be work, but his was not the output of a lazy man.
A young former National Public Radio news producer named Cassady Rosenblum wrote an essay for the New York Times, however, which describes a world-wide movement called “lie flat,” in which workers drop out of the career rat-race and work only when they need to.
Rosenblum is a part of that movement, she confessed. The grind of 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week news got the better of her.
The 24/7 news routine means shifts are rotated so one could work days, evenings or midnights, and weekend work is a given. Also, to meet chronic deadlines, you don’t go by the clock.
The movement as she described it, however, is a protest against any kind of hard work that leads only to more hard work, without incentivizing rewards like advancement, a change in duties or pay that rewards extra effort or creativity applied to the job. Or more time off.
I think it’s especially the lack of enough time off to recover and restore that has led to what amounts to a general, unorganized strike among laborers and even overworked investment bankers worldwide in recent months. “Lie flat,” like antifa, is a mindset, not an organization.
“Lie-flat” coincides with the forced inactivity of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, helped along in the U.S. at least, by generous government benefits to the unemployed.
When work went away long enough for people to get used to being unemployed, I think they began to realize that most of their jobs were tedious, taxing and were taking them nowhere. It’s hard to get motivated to return to joyless fatigue after you’ve seen even a fraction of your former pay coming regularly without having to descend again into a soul-killing rut.
Rosenblum, who seems to have spent much of her self-imposed downtime researching the “lie flat” phenomenon, insists money is not the problem.
She notes “lie flat” action — rather, inaction — has attracted even investment bankers who earn $150,000 a year. They earn those salaries, she wrote, by putting in 98-hour weeks - only 14 hours short of every waking minute, including weekends.
We have all seen the consequences. Grocery stores now see usually well-stacked shelves empty. Restaurants now must limit their offerings due to late-arriving or non-arriving supplies. Shipping times and due dates have been stretched out, sometimes by weeks or months.
The jobs that make the supply chain functional, like lifting, loading and driving a truck you live in more than your home, all under merciless deadlines, are finding no applicants. But it’s work that must be done.
It may be time to re-consider how we design jobs and work.
We might even consider shorter shifts for the same or higher pay, which would mean more employees and higher prices, but also more people who can comfortably pay the higher costs.
Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: