Recently, for the first time in my life, I heard someone simply say, “I don’t work.” It was a woman my age who said it, a little older perhaps, but still far from retirement and not apparently incapacitated for work. Usually you ask a few standard questions when you first meet. Where are you from, how do you know the host, do you have children and then he comes: what do you do? The last question may provide the most information. At least if you assume that people identify with what they do. And ‘doing’ something is in my head: work. Do you have a boss or a company. Are you self-employed or do you have a job? For all I care you are in-between jobs and even if you answer that you are in a burnout, I assume that you have or are an employer.
But that is not necessary at all. I find out now, after a short week of work after the holidays and already exhausted. This woman said: “I don’t have to work for the money, so why should I?” I didn’t have an answer to that rhetorical question, so the documentary After work Thursday came as called. Its Swedish-Italian director, Erik Gandini, asked people in four countries what work meant to them.
In South Korea, work is life and vice versa. Former ministers of employment say that employees start quietly at seven o’clock in the morning and only go home after the boss, even though it is eleven o’clock in the evening. And again the next day. Koreans have an above average rate of stomach cancer or a neck hernia and the suicide rate among working people is high. To curb the overtime society – towards a 52-hour week – there is a government campaign urging employers to turn off all computers at six.
American research agency Gallup calculated that worldwide one billion people are employed. A job-job, so to speak, with a contract, job description, an income. Fifteen percent of workers feel involved in their job. That is not the same as liking your job. Finding your job enjoyable or even meaningful is something few can do. Feeling something of satisfaction or satisfaction after work is done is also nice. Just for a while; that means that 85 percent of the working people work for the money, but don’t enjoy it.
Goldsmith
The woman I spoke to made jewelry herself, but she wouldn’t call herself a goldsmith. Which raises the question of whether work is only work if you are paid for it. The reverse is the case in Kuwait, where twenty people sometimes hold one position – after all, it is laid down in law that everyone has the right to a job. You get a salary, but you sit in an office all day doing nothing. Is that still work? “It seems like a dream, but it’s a nightmare,” says a Kuwaiti who was a ‘civil servant’ for six years. “I had no desk and no computer. In the basement, a room was set up for redundant employees like me.” There he read a book, watched two or three films a day, and was almost literally dead bored.
It’s in Italy voluntary unemployment a phenomenon, according to sociologist Luca Ricolfi. One in three Italian young people is not in employment, education or training. They don’t work because there is no need to. An Italian family owns an average of 400,000 euros in houses and goods, and the number of children is around 1.2. Matter of waiting for the inheritance and relaxing and partying in the meantime.
I’m not quite done with myself yet, but After work gives enough to think about. Basic income for everyone? Enough money, and see how you use your time meaningfully? The always busy American and the overworked South Korean remained silent for a very long time on that question.