The day is dawning on a four-day work week

1930 IWW.ORG

June 4, 2020 3.07pm EDT

Like any crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to rethink how we do things.

As we near the 100-day mark since the pandemic was declared, one area getting a significant attention is the workplace, where a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream.

For example, when millions more Canadians started working from home, many businesses were forced to experiment with telecommuting. Interestingly, many now say they’ll continue after the pandemic passes, because it benefits employers and employees alike.

Another idea, less widely tested than telecommuting, is generating buzz: the four-day work week. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the possibility of a shortened work week as a way to divvy up jobs, encourage local tourism, help with work-life balance and increase productivity.

As a sociologist who teaches about work and wrote a book about productivity, I believe she’s right.
Not a compressed schedule

A four-day work week must not be confused with a compressed schedule that has workers squeeze 37.5 to 40 hours of work into four days instead of five. For reasons that should be clearer below, that won’t help us now.



A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40. There are many reasons why this is appealing today: families are struggling to cover child care in the absence of daycares and schools; workplaces are trying to reduce the number of employees congregating in offices each day; and millions of people have lost their jobs.

A shorter work week could allow parents to cobble together child care, allow workplaces to stagger attendance and, theoretically, allow the available work to be divided among more people who need employment.

Read more: A four-day working week could be the shot in the arm post-coronavirus tourism needs

The most progressive shorter work week entails no salary reductions. This sounds crazy, but it rests on peer-reviewed research into shorter work weeks, which finds workers can be as productive in 30 hours as they are in 40, because they waste less time and are better-rested.Most employees probably wouldn’t mind spending their own money on essentials provided at the office in exchange for a four-day work week. (Jasmin Sessler/Unsplash)

Shorter work weeks reduce the number of sick days taken, and on their extra day off, employees don’t use the office’s toilet paper or utilities, reducing their employer’s costs. Therefore, while it is counter-intuitive, it’s possible for people to work less at the same salary while improving their employer’s bottom line. That people might have to spend more of their own money on toilet paper is a concession most workers would probably accept.

The same body of research also has more predictable findings: people like working less.
Entrenched morality of work

If it makes this much sense, why don’t we have a four-day week already? It turns out this question is more than 150 years old.

Some of the answer pertains to the logistics involved in transforming our whole system of work, that’s not the entire answer. After all, the work week has been reduced before, so it can technically be done again.

The rest of the reason is rooted in capitalism and class struggle.

Thinkers from Paul Lafargue (“The Right to Be Lazy,” first published in 1883) to Bertrand Russell (“In Praise of Idleness,” from 1932) and Kathi Weeks (“The Problem with Work,” from 2012) have concluded we resist worktime reductions in the face of supportive evidence — and our own desires for more leisure — because of the entrenched morality of work and the resistance on the part of “the rich” to “the idea that the poor should have leisure,” in Russell’s words.

We are extremely attached to the idea that hard work is virtuous, idle hands are dangerous and people with more free time can’t be trusted.
Four-day work weeks floated in the 1930s

Nobody is suggesting evil governments conspire with evil bosses to keep powerless people busy. As historian Benjamin Hunnicutt has shown, there was significant interest in shorter work hours in the 1920s and 30s, when the 30-hour week was touted as a way to “share” the work among the Great Depression’s unemployed and underemployed citizens
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Henry Ford is seen in this 1919 photo. United States Library of Congress, CC BY

Even industrialists W. K. Kellogg and Henry Ford supported a six-hour day because they believed more rest would make for more productive workers. But Hunnicutt’s research in Work Without End reveals that some employers cut wages when they cut work hours, and when employees fought back, they dropped their demands for shorter work hours and focused instead on wage increases.

In the complex push and pull of capitalism, eventually even the New Deal, which influenced policy and discourse in Canada, shifted away from its early demands for more leisure toward demands for more work.

It’s quite possible we will do the same in our COVID-19 moment, and beg to be put back to work five days a week when this is all over.

But we have new reasons for considering shorter work weeks, and they might be more widely persuasive. It is also possible that we have finally given up on the false promise that working longer will translate into better lives. The four-day work week could be another wild idea that makes it through the pandemic’s open policy window.


Author

Karen Foster

Associate Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Rural Futures for Atlantic Canada, Dalhousie University
Disclosure statement

Karen Foster receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and funding from the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship program supported some of the research mentioned in this article.
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What's the science on deep-sea mining for rare metals?

Some of the most sought-after metals and minerals on Earth lie deep — and largely untouched — in our oceans. Science and industry have been exploring those depths for decades. Here's an overview of what we know.

   

Relicanthus sp.— a new species from a new order of Cnidaria collected at 4,100 meters in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone

Here's a simple fact to start: The oceans are huge. Oceans make up about 96.5% of all Earth's water. There's fresh water in the planet, in the ground or elsewhere on land in rivers and lakes — more than 70% of the planet is covered in water — and there's more all around us in the atmosphere. But the oceans are simply huge.

Our oceans remain some of the most under-researched parts of the planet. That's one reason why there's so much interest from both non-commercial scientists and those working in industry.

And when it comes to deep-sea research, there are two main areas of interest: conservation and mining.

Grown over millions of years: manganese nodules scattered on the deep seabed of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific

That's conservation of the many known and unknown species living at depths of up to about 5,500 meters in the Abyssal zone, which is predominantly in darkness.

That makes for some very unusual creatures that scientists would like to study out of pure interest. But because of this lack of knowledge it is also virtually impossible to know how species down there will react or survive once commercial mining begins.   

Read more: Gemstones, precious metals hold all this useful beauty

That's mining for metals and minerals, such as nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, which are found in polymetallic nodules on the same seabed that's home to those unknown creatures.

In fact, some deep-sea creatures live on those very nodules, which some people think are just waiting to be scooped up and turned into phones. 

Why are we mining for these rare elements in the deep ocean?

We need (or want) them for a range of things, including the production of rechargeable batteries and touchscreens. And we're running low of these resources on land. That's also why there's an interest in mining asteroids — they hold important metals and minerals, too.

Sticking with the oceans, though, some estimates suggest there are greater deposits of manganese, cobalt and nickel on the deep-seabed than on land. Plus, there's more besides manganese nodules. There are polymetallic sulphides and cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts.

Watch video01:02

Creatures of the deep

Since when has this been going on?

The International Seabed Authority (ISA) says it all began in 1873, and almost by chance, on an oceanography voyage conducted by a ship called HMS Challenger. The ISA says the ship's dredge hauled up "several peculiar black oval bodies which were composed of almost pure manganese oxide."

Those peculiar objects are now known as polymetallic or manganese nodules. They are often also referred to as potatoes — between 3 and 10 centimeters (1 and 4 inches) in diameter, and black. 

It wasn't until the 1960s, however, when an American mining engineer, John L. Mero, brought manganese nodules to a "broader scientific readership" with his book "The Mineral Resources of the Sea."

A manganese nodule — the size of a large potatoes, but far more valuable to industry

That's according to Dr. Ole Sparenberg, a science historian at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Sparenberg says Mero's book "drew the picture of an easy-to-harvest, vast, and virtually unlimited resource, which he even imagined as inexhaustible as the resource was allegedly growing faster than it could be exploited."

Mero may have been wrong about the latter notion, as more recent science suggests that areas that have been harvested for nodules show little sign of recovery even after 30 and 40 years. The nodules grow at a rate of millimeters per million years.

Sorry, what's the International Seabed Authority? 

The ISA describes itself as "an autonomous international organization established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1994 Agreement relating to the Implementation of Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea."

Basically, its role is divided between encouraging and supporting both industry and science, mining and conservation.

Where are we mining?

Well, commercial deep-sea mining has yet to really get off the ground. The ISA is still working on a mining code and other regulations, which some hope will be agreed at the body's next annual meeting (which has been postponed until October 2020).

A cobalt crust collected by German researchers from a seemount off the coast of West Africa

But the ISA has entered into a number of 15-year exploration contracts. At time of writing, the ISA says that includes 30 contractors, which are often companies sponsored by their national governments.

There are deposits all around the world. But a lot of the current interest is focused on the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific.

Eighteen of those contracts are for exploration for polymetallic nodules in the CCZ. Other contracts are for exploration in the Central Indian Ocean Basin and Western Pacific Ocean, and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Who are the main players?

Germany, for instance, has an exploration contract for polymetallic sulphides.

Polymetallic sulphides are a source of base metals, including copper, zinc, lead, and tin. They also include precious and special metals like gold, silver bismuth, selenium, tellurium, gallium or indium, which are used to make electronic components, like solar panels, and in telecommunication and other computer industries.

Other players include China, South Korea, Brazil, Russia, Japan — they have exploration contracts for cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts. Cobalt is a vital component in batteries, including car batteries. It is a rare mineral and considered dangerous to mine on land.

Deep-sea mining presents an advantage on that score as the ocean-based resources would be "harvested" by remotely-controlled machines that suck up the nodules or scrape crusts from underwater ridges.

One of many strange and wonderful deep-seabed creatures: Sea Cucumber Amperima sp. on the seabed in the eastern Clarion-Clipperton Zone

Poland, India, France, the UK, Belgian, Singapore, and, significantly, the Pacific islands of Kiribati, Cook Islands, Tonga, and Nauru have interests as well. It's significant because historically, it's been other countries, such as Australia, that have wanted to benefit from resources owned by the Pacific islander states.

Sounds great. What's the catch?

The problem is that the science seems to be lagging behind the more commercial interests in deep-seabed research. But it is catching up. And the concerns — while yet to be fully verified — have long existed.

A now nine-year-old study led by Dmitry M. Miljutin in France suggested that "about 1 square kilometers of sea floor will be mined daily, or about 6,000 square kilometers over the 20-year life of a mine site. […] Thus, the vast deep-sea seafloor will be seriously disturbed during the mining operations."

More recently, a study published this year by James Hein, Andrea Koschinsky and Thomas Kuhn suggests nodule collectors "will crush any organisms that are unable to escape and compact the sediment, reducing its habitability for sediment infauna."

Just waiting to be scooped up? Manganese nodules provide a habitat for many deep-seabed creatures

Additionally, the authors write that nodule mining could alter the geochemical composition of the sediment and water and cause "a short-term release of potentially toxic metals."

It's all "ifs and conditionals" at this point, but that's precisely why scientists want more time research the impact of deep-sea mining.

Watch video01:21

The big space treasure hunt

For instance, it's unclear how sediment will disperse when it's disturbed by a nodule harvester. The harvester may create so-called plumes — clouds — of sediment that could move unevenly across the seabed. Some creatures in the ocean's Abyssal zone live on the nodules and others, such as single-celled creatures called xenophyophores, use the sediment as covering, a safe habitat.

There are also concerns that ships above the harvesters will dump waste sediment and that that could suffocate plankton.   

Read more: World Oceans Day: Beach cleanups held worldwide

The ISA has designated Areas of Particular Environmental Interest (APEIs).

In the US, the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research says that the "APEIs were placed across the CCZ to protect and represent the full range of biodiversity and habitats in the region."

But the APEIs directly border those mining "claim areas." And some research suggests the sediment could resettle up to 10 kilometers away from a harvesting site, with unknown consequences.

Watch video02:55

Student mission: Saving the sea

One such area of concern is out in the Atlantic: the Lost City Hydrothermal Field. 

Engineers are working on harvester technology that may reduce those plumes of sediment, but that's also a work in progress.

What we do know for certain is that areas where harvesting has been tested have so far shown little sign of recovery. There are two examples:

One test was conducted in 1989 — the DISCOL experiment led by Hjalmar Thiel, a scientist based in Hamburg. And the other was done by the Ocean Minerals Company out of the USA in the area of a French mining claim in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone.

Decades later, the tracks of the dredgers could still clearly be seen.

• 
  SPLASHING ABOUT IN THE COAL PIT

  From mining to tourism

  In the days of the former East Germany, more than 65,000 miners were employed in Lausatia's coal mining sector. Thousands lost their jobs when mines shut down in the 1990s. To compensate, the region decided to boost its tourism sector, and the transformation has been ongoing ever since. Almost 37,000 acres of land ravaged by mining will eventually become Europe's biggest water

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• Date 05.06.2020
• Author Zulfikar Abbany
• Related Subjects Conservation, Oceans
• Keywords deep-sea mining, DSM, deep-seabed mining, fauna, batteries, metals, minerals, Clarion-Clipperton Zone, exploration, exploitation, conservation, oceans, World Oceans Day
• Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/3dGBx

Germans are 'waking up' to anti-Black racism after George Floyd protest

GERMAN CULTURE RACIST SAY IT AIN'T SO AFTER ALL THEY INVENTED ARYAN ARCHAEOLOGY 

Ann-Kathrin Pohlers,NBC News•August 16, 2020

Malick Gohou says it’s happened when he has dressed in a suit on his way to work. It’s happened as he walks on the street of his hometown in Heidelberg, Germany, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It’s happened when he’s out on the town with friends.

Gohou, 26, says he’s lost count of how many times the police have stopped him to check his ID or ask what he’s doing, but he estimates it’s somewhere from 20 to 30. Last month, he had to have pictures taken of his face and hands because “a guy who fit his description” had gotten into a brawl somewhere.

“I’m being stopped in situations where I’m like, ‘This can’t have anything to do with my behavior,’” said Gohou, whose father is from the Ivory Coast and whose mother is half-German and half-Polish. “This happens one time, two times – OK, fine – but after that, you’re like, this can’t be a coincidence anymore.”

Image: Malick Gohou with his father Deme Gohou who came to Germany from the Ivory Coast in 1980. (Courtesy Malick Gohou)

Though officially banned in Germany, where there are estimated to be around a million people of Black descent in Germany, racial profiling is regularly experienced by people of color, according to activists and residents. Protests held in the wake of George Floyd’s death have helped the issue gain prominence and even resulted in a change to the laws in two cities. Now, activists are hoping that these changes will come into force around the country.


The cities of Berlin and Bremen both passed new anti-discrimination legislation in June. In Berlin, people who believe they are victims of racial profiling can now more easily file a complaint against law enforcement with the police needing to prove that they didn’t rely on racial profiling. Previously, the person filing the complaint needed to prove they were profiled.

In Bremen, the city’s local politicians have incorporated a ban on racial profiling into the law governing the police. It includes a proviso that identity checks are only allowed in limited form even in areas considered by police to be “places of danger” like train stations where it is legal to check anyone for ID even without cause.

For Alioune Sall these changes can’t come soon enough. Sall, 26, son of a German mother and a Senegalese father, said he has been stopped and even searched on some occasions by police around 15 times in the past eight years. He often feels singled out by police, especially when with a group of white friends.
Image: Protest Against Racism and Police Brutality In Berlin (Emmanuele Contini / NurPhoto via Getty Images file)

At a music festival several years ago in Mannheim, next to Heidelberg, he described how police officers asked him for ID, then took him to the side to question and search him.

“My friends were allowed to stay back,” Sall said. “I endure it but I don’t understand why it is that way. When you challenge the officers over it they simply deny it and then that’s that. What else is there you can do?”

When contacted for comment on these incidents, the Mannheim Police Department said in a statement to NBC News that “skin color, ethnicity or descent are principally irrelevant for police action.”

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German organizations don’t collect ethnic data due to the country’s history with the persecution of minorities. Because of that, police departments do not keep statistics on the ethnicity of the people they stop and there are no reliable numbers on how many people of color are stopped by police.

However, the Justice Ministry announced in June plans to probe the scale of racial profiling in policing “to give this phenomenon a factual basis.” Several weeks later, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer called the study off, saying that racial profiling is already illegal and can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

“Policing starts with stops and ID’ing but can also end in death as in the case of Oury Jalloh,” said Tahir Della, a spokesperson for the Initiative for Black People in Germany, an activist organization which acted as advisers to Berlin’s lawmakers during the process to pass the new anti-profiling law.

Jalloh, a 36-year-old asylum seeker from Sierra Leone, died in police custody in 2005 and his death is often pointed to by activists as an example of racism in law enforcement. Jalloh burned to death in a police cell in Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, and his body was found with his hands and feet tied to a mattress.

His name was often printed on signs held aloft during the demonstrations in June.

 George Floyd protest in Berlin (Abdulhamid Hosbas / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images file)

“There is still a very narrow understanding of racism in Germany,” Della said. “It is, so to speak, only racism when an intention can be proven. That is not how institutional racism works.”

He would like future laws to be made with the understanding that racist action is possible even without intent.

Around 33 percent of people surveyed in Germany as part of a “Being Black in the E.U.” study, conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, said they have experienced discrimination based on their ethnic background.

According to Rafael Behr, a professor at the Police Academy in Hamburg, the problem with law enforcement is that it is a dominant culture, as he calls it.

“The police assume they define what is normal and what is not, who belongs and who doesn’t belong,” he said.

“When police officers rely on their empirical values or gut feeling during stops, it can be problematic because, of course, they sometimes create a bad experience, which can then lead to bias” in future interactions, said Behr, a former police officer.

In addition to the changes to the law in Berlin and Bremen, there are other small signs that the protests this spring, and the subsequent renewed emphasis on anti-racism, is having an impact.
Image: Black Lives Matter protest Germany (Maja Hitij / Getty Images)

In Berlin, demonstrators in June revived a 20-year controversy surrounding the name of the Mohrenstraße subway station. “Mohr”, or moor in English, is a dated and offensive term for a person of color. Protesters tampered with the subway sign so it read “George Floyd Street.”

On July 3, Berlin’s BVG transit authority announced that the station would be renamed.

“We wanted to get rid of the current name as it is discriminating towards all nonwhite people,” their spokesperson told NBC News.

Politicians are now debating whether to rename the entire street in Berlin-Mitte, the city’s Senate Department for the Environment, Transport, and Climate Protection told NBC News.

For Gohou, even these small changes are giving him a sense of hope.

“The protests are the first step and we have to start somewhere,” he said. “Many white people are now waking up to what’s been going wrong. Before it was black people advocating for black people and now you see white people protesting for civil rights everywhere. It does feel like our generation is changing something.

200 000 years ago, humans preferred to kip cozy

Humans prepared beds to sleep on right at the dawn of our species -- over 200 000 years ago

UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND

IMAGE: BORDER CAVE IN THE LEBOMBO MOUNTAINS. PANORAMA FROM DRONE IMAGES. A. KRUGER view more 

CREDIT: A. KRUGER

Researchers in South Africa's Border Cave, a well-known archaeological site perched on a cliff between eSwatini (Swaziland) and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, have found evidence that people have been using grass bedding to create comfortable areas for sleeping and working on at least 200 000 years ago.

These beds, consisting of sheaves of grass of the broad-leafed Panicoideae subfamily were placed near the back of the cave on ash layers. The layers of ash was used to protect the people against crawling insects while sleeping. Today, the bedding layers are visually ephemeral traces of silicified grass, but they can be identified using high magnification and chemical characterisation.

The Border Cave study was conducted by a multidisciplinary team from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, the CNRS (University of Bordeaux), and Université Côte d'Azur, France, the Instituto Superior de Estudios Sociales, Tucumán, Argentina, and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Belgium. The research was published in the high impact journal Science.

"We speculate that laying grass bedding on ash was a deliberate strategy, not only to create a dirt-free, insulated base for the bedding, but also to repel crawling insects," says Professor Lyn Wadley, principal researcher and lead author.

"Sometimes the ashy foundation of the bedding was a remnant of older grass bedding that had been burned to clean the cave and destroy pests. On other occasions, wood ash from fireplaces was also used as the clean surface for a new bedding layer."

Several cultures have used ash as an insect repellent because insects cannot easily move through fine powder. Ash blocks insects' breathing and biting apparatus, and eventually dehydrates them. Tarchonanthus (camphor bush) remains were identified on the top of the grass from the oldest bedding in the cave. This plant is still used to deter insects in rural parts of East Africa.

"We know that people worked as well as slept on the grass surface because the debris from stone tool manufacture is mixed with the grass remains. Also, many tiny, rounded grains of red and orange ochre were found in the bedding where they may have rubbed off human skin or coloured objects," says Wadley.

Modern hunter-gatherer camps have fires as focal points; people regularly sleep alongside them and perform domestic tasks in social contexts. People at Border Cave also lit fires regularly, as seen by stacked fireplaces throughout the sequence dated between about 200 000 and 38 000 years ago.

"Our research shows that before 200 000 years ago, close to the origin of our species, people could produce fire at will, and they used fire, ash, and medicinal plants to maintain clean, pest-free camps. Such strategies would have had health benefits that advantaged these early communities."

Although hunter-gatherers tend to be mobile and seldom stay in one place for more than a few weeks, cleansing camps had the potential to extend potential occupancy.