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St Paul, Minnesota, presented candidate Leo Torres with his biggest crowd so far and one of his biggest headaches.
Literally tens of thousands were physically present when he made his stump speech. He found out later that none of them had gone to work that day.
“I’ve never seen so many people off work,” Leo remarked to the circle of youthful militia leaders who gathered after the public presentation.
“We only work twenty hours a week,” William LaFollette, spokesperson for the militia, told him proudly.
“Does that work out OK?” Leo asked incredulously.
“Actually,” LaFollette explained, “we wanted to start with ten hours a week. The productivity figures, going all the way back to World War II, show that one worker today can produce more than four did in 1945. In fact, our productivity had already risen that much back in 2010, so the scientific analysis of the work week indicates that we should be working less than ten hours a week, and we started to make that the ordinance, but we fudged because we figured that some of the infrastructure from before the bad times might be not as good. Another reason for setting the workweek so high was that we couldn’t find anybody else mandating reasonable work hours.
‘We’re kind of counting on you, Commissioner Torres, to spread the word on this and get the twenty-hour week, or less, a nationwide law.”
Leo found himself, once again, uneasily trying to develop a diplomatic response: “I’ll certainly report back about it. Maybe you can fill me in some more?”
LaFollette: “What do you want to know?”
Leo: “Ah, for example, what do people do with all their free time?”
LaFollette looked around at his group for input, but answered: “Hobbies. Creative work. We’re building labs, craft shops, hobby centers, as fast as we can. I guess, though, the major project so far, the one that most of them are doing, is gardening. Nobody wants to eat People Chow any more than they have to.”
Leo: “And does that work out for people?”
A strapping fellow wearing military-style camouflage stood up in the back and said, “Whether they like it or not is not the issue. What matters is that we’re not ever, never again, going to have an unemployment problem in the Twin Cities. If more people join the workforce, we’ll keep lowering the work week until everybody has a job. What matters is that people who are freed from drudgery are going to come up with new achievements in science and art that will make life better for everyone.”
Another militiaman rose and said, “We’re recognizing the scientific truth of rising productivity. Also, we expect productivity to rise through the ceiling now. The histories say that productivity rose with innovation – in machinery and in working arrangements – but the cause and the effect have been mixed up. We’ve always said that the innovations gave people more time off, but did you ever realize that having more time off gave people the ability to create more innovations?”
Still another militiaman chipped in: “We’ve mandated twenty hours a week and we won’t let anybody work more, but we don’t think that will even last a year. The ten hour week, even the five hour work week may be just around the corner!”
The second militiaman had remained standing. He threw in another comment: “Have you ever wondered why previous revolutions failed? It wasn’t for lack of good intentions. It was because the energy of the people was never released to resolve the problems as they came up. Everybody ended up working their asses off and didn’t contribute to the thinking.”
Leo had heard the term “devil’s advocate,” but he’d never tried to be one before: “Sounds amazing, truly amazing. I have to tell you, though, that I’ve been studying how things are developing here and there, and there’s still a lot of misery out there, I mean outside your Twin Cities. A lot of people are living at the hunter-gatherer stage. If they weren’t congregating around the railroads and ports to get People Chow, they’d still be starving. Those people aren’t thinking about shorter hours. They are thinking about surviving.”
LaFollette resumed control of the discussion: “That’s why they need a mandate. Somebody is going to have to stop them from overworking themselves and put them on the track of making breakthroughs.”
Leo: “Just to be clear, though, I expect there would be some resistance…”
LaFollette almost laughed: “Hell, we had resistance here!” Looking around, he added, “We still have some resistance! Bunch of fanatics, I call them fanatics, think they have some kind of revolutionary calling, some feverish driving motivation, to work all the time until the world looks good! They’re just wrong about that, and the St Paul method will be adopted everywhere whether you help us or not.”
Leo: “I didn’t mean to give the impression that I don’t approve. I’ll
report back and do what I can. Certainly, a shorter work week is desirable everywhere. It’s going to require a lot of diplomacy, a lot of top-level thinking, more than I can, just by myself, offer.”
LaFollette: “That’s all we can ask. Just work on it. And, as a special favor, we’d like you to remember where it came from. It’s the St Paul method.”
Leo: “You got it, for sure!”