You’ll forgive me for thinking out loud here. But I’m in the process of trying to find a group to join that I can really get behind.
My focus is Workers’ Rights. But what does that mean exactly?
My interests in that area currently are all the middle class people churning away their hours at jobs that do nothing for them emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically. The job they are in is just a means to allow them to get on with the rest of their life.
The sad part is, it’s an extremely expensive means. It’s 1/3(if you’re lucky) of a person’s life. Another 1/3 is spent sleeping. The remaining hours – probably 6 to 8 of them – are your “free time”.
Think of what is involved in that “free time”. Consider dinner: buying dinner, making dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up after dinner. If you are fast and efficient, it’s probably 2 1/2 hours of your day. That now leaves you with between 5 1/2 and 3 1/2 hours left of “free time”.
And dinner is the easy part. You’ve got to pay bills, run errands, mow the grass, wash the car(s), take out the trash. If you have kids, forget about it. You’ve suddenly lost all of your free time. So say you are really on top of things. You get 2 hours to do whatever it is you want to do with your night. You likely are so tired, you just stare mindlessly at the TV. I was so tired last night, I just went to bed at 8:30. I couldn’t even muster the energy for TV.
The time where you can really shine is your weekend. That’s all your time. If you were really industrious, you got all your chores done on the week nights and now you get Saturday and Sunday all to yourself. In the best case scenario, where you get your entire weekend to yourself, you have now given away 5 days so you can get 2 in return. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you? You have paid 70%(5 days) in order to get 30%(2 days). It seems insane to me.
As a person who has some power in that area, I am really interested in trying to better those percentages. I’m not exactly sure what that means, though. Hence why I’m writing here now.
No one questions the 40 hour work week in this country. We at SageRock have a 37.5 hour work week and I get some questioning looks on that. I don’t think less hours is what I’m interested in here. I think I’m interested in what happens in those hours. Are those hours bettering your life in some way? Are those hours giving you more than a paycheck. If they aren’t, whether you realize it or not, your primary value is money. All other things being equal, I imagine, as long as you aren’t in some sort of physical or mental pain you would pretty much do anything for a higher paycheck.
Now I can’t fault anyone for that. It’s the basis of the American culture. And it is also extremely expensive to live in this country. A family of four making much less than $60,000 a year makes for surprisingly lean times.
So having said all of that, off the top of my head, here are the values and areas of life that I’m interested in helping people with:
flexible workplace
Making a difference in the community
Accomplishing goals
Defining an individual’s definition of success and helping them achieve it.
Respect for the individual
Being valued as an individual
Having a voice as an individual
Mental growth
Physical well being
Spiritual pursuits
Social interaction
How can I sum this up, exactly? I want to help companies and people have fulfilling work lives. Incidentally, I’m mostly interested in American workers at this point. The world workplace has so many more problems. I just want to help people have better, more fulfilled lives. I want people to get something more out of the 1/3 of their lives spent at work than just a paycheck. Is that group worthy? Is that a cause? I suppose it could be.
Ok, I think I might start something in this vein. There is nothing really pertaining to this as an orgainzation. I’m off to come up with an acronym.