Mike's Minute: Work more, not less

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Another of the small gems to come out of the Census is that we are working less.

Does that surprise you? It doesn’t remotely surprise me.

I still connect work with success in the sense that attitude in life is everything and people with the right attitude tend to be successful and work hard.

They tend to get stuff done, they tend to have ideas, and they tend to be more upbeat, more into life, and more active.

The malaise that this country has gone through as a result of Covid is reflected in the various approaches to work that have come out of it. We don’t like work, we want four-day weeks, we want to not come to the office, we like the unemployment benefit, and we like quiet quitting.

There are in fact only 2.6 million of us in work. Think about that. Half the country works, half don’t. That’s not a lot of people to raise the money to pay for all the stuff we want.

Upon finding out that we work less, good old Radio New Zealand (who else) went straight to the sort of person you would expect to seize upon our approach to work to have them espouse the idea that we should, in fact, work less!

Yes, they rang some academics. People cloistered away from the real world, to tell us we should be working less.

Not only did they want us to work less, they proffered the idea that if we worked less our productivity might go up.

Productivity is the age old debate. The simple truth is we know we are not very productive as a country and we want to improve that, so we have talked about it for literally decades, and yet, have we improved it? No we have not.

I can tell you for nothing that working less does not productivity improve.

There are of course smarter ways to work. Set the task and get it done, less mucking around, fewer road cones and smokos and more digging the hole. That sort of thing.

I was going to say I actually like work. Work is good. You have to enjoy your work of course, and for many I think that is probably part of the productivity issue. If you don't like your job, it's hard to do more of it.

But enjoyment is a choice and, certainly for most, what you do for a crust is a choice.

From personal experience, if you love what you do it's not actually work. And maybe if we broke the mindset that work is a problem and work is bad then we wouldn’t be as unproductive, and they might be able to find an academic who says we should work more because it's good for you.

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