[aurynn]

Charlie Stross brought this idea up on his blog recently; what does a post work-for-pay world look like? What would you do if you had a home, food, and health care as a basic right?

Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if you don't work, you have no value?

[jbert]

Large numbers of people have home, food and health care as a basic right (e.g. all inhabitants of the UK and also I assume many other countries).

I think the major problems are:

- People like nicer food/nicer homes. Some (most?) of this is social signalling, some not. Some of the signalling issues could perhaps be addressed by raising the level of the basic provision, I'm unsure. (Basically, there will always be scarcity of some things and they can be used for signalling).

- Advanced human interaction/daily interest. For many/most people, working from home is in some ways less satisfying than working in an office environment (it may be better in other ways). I mean lack of social interaction in etc. Similarly full time mothers/fathers bemoan the lack of grown up contact/use of their higher mental faculties etc.

Lots of the issues are fixable with culture changes, but I suspect we'd need to be closer to full abundance before we could make much progress there.

[Jare]

Yes we could: replace 'work' with 'contribute' and it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't believe in the mid- and long-term viability of a society that supports its members without requiring them to participate in its existence, development and improvement. Without some form of obligation, it would stagnate into a world of (so to speak) couch potatoes too easily.

If I had a home, food and health care as a basic right, what I would do? Raise my child with undivided attention, care and love. Try to make his environment a happy, safe and stimulating place. The kind of stuff that modern society apparently considers optional, or not valuable at all.

[femto]

The last paragraph suggests a new organisation for a company: one where people can job share high value jobs, in return for an average salary.

Here's an example. Let's say I am capable of earning $160,000 a year, if I work 5 days a week in a role that is optimally suited to my skills. The problem is that this role leaves me with little time for my family (or other projects) and an excess of money. What I really want is to work 2 days a week for a salary of $64,000.

The above is hard to do in the current employment system. The closest options seem to be:

1) Take part time work. Typically part time work pays a much lower hourly rate, so to get my $64,000, I'm having to work 5 days/week. No gain, only pain.

2) Go into contracting. Fine for a single person, but too unstable with dependents.

3) Work for some number of years, then quit for a number of years. Demolishes the CV, making it hard to return to work, and leads to an unbalanced all or nothing relationship with the family.

4) Doesn't seem to exist.

Option 4) might be a company that specialises in allowing high value people to work limited hours, at what they do best. It would require a new way of organising things.

a) Systems to eliminate the "fixed cost" of employing someone, allowing many people to be employed in place of one, at the same cost.

b) Systems to allow multiple people to efficiently time share on a task.

c) Systems to allow people to rapidly pick up where they left off on a task.

d) Systems to allow a person to remain up to speed on a discipline, even with restricted working hours (ie. reducing the fixed cost to the employee).

It would be interesting to see how such a company would go competing against traditional a company of full-time employees. Assuming the negatives a)-d), above, could be solved, the benefits would be:

i) A fresh, productive, low stress, "burn out free" workforce.

ii) With some flexability of hours by healthy workers, the elimination of holes in the workforce, due sickness or unexpected events.

iii) The ability to very rapidly bring extra resources to bear (eg. some people work 4 days/week) under special circumstances.

iv) A larger employment pool, by including people who would would normally be precluded from full-time work. (How to make the model work well while not eliminating those who want a full-time job.)

Points a)-d) would seem to be fodder for a start-up, which would dog food its own system. The selling point could a competitive advantage, delivered by points i)-iv).

EDIT: formatting + spelling

[nradov]

The problem with your proposal is that employee time does not scale down linearly. There is a certain fixed amount of time needed for each employee to do training and administration, whether that employee works part time or full time. Let's say that takes 2 hours per week. If you drop from 40 hours per week to 16 then your actual productive time is only 37% as much. Plus there is additional fixed overhead for HR, computing resources, software licenses, personal equipment, etc.

Also consider that adding more people to a team increases communication overhead, regardless of whether they are part time or full time: n*(n-1)/2. So there's a further loss of efficiency with replacing a small number of full time workers with a larger number of part time workers.

[devs1010]

I agree, its simply not possible to do this effectively in many situations, you can't just plug in a bunch of people for 2 days a week and expect to get the same output as the equivalent number of hours worked from a team of full-timers. I think companies could potentially adjust to this long-term, but projects and tasks have to become much more modular. With most companies I've worked with, their code base simply isn't set up for this sort of thing, theres often a lot of wasted time because of lack of documentation, refactoring that never was done, etc to where its often very hard to feel like you're working at maximum efficiency so IMO it would be hard to work in this sort of environment just 2 days a week, however on smaller scale projects, where its just one dev working on a new project, I think it would be more possible.

[femto]

And those are precisely the problems that the proposed start-up would have to solve: how to reduce the fixed cost of an employee to as close to zero as possible!

I think the problems are solvable and what's more, I think that whoever cracks the problem will be able to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage, and that is worth money.

[zeroonetwothree]

I'm sure this is possible. The fixed costs are lower than people think. Though you cheated a bit because you scaled down salary but not medical benefits (although for your hypothetical $160k example it's not a huge difference).

[delackner]

Contribute is right. People might talk about how many people experienced (listened,read,saw) their work this year, which is already happening, only people worry endlessly about how they will get paid today, and tomorrow they might just worry about how they will get seen.