Two of my regular correspondants alerted me to this piece in Scotland on Sunday - the Scottish Council Foundation is proposing that workers be allowed to take every seventh year off, paid for by a subvention from their salaries in the preceding six years (a similar scheme is operational in Canada).
The surface rhetoric is, of course, about staff retention, motivation, and long-term workplace performance - avoid burn-out of your best, by allowing them a bohemian year. Again, my wonder is whether this division (again!) between unfree work and free leisure, heteronomy and autonomy, is the kind of schizophrenic life we should be agreeing to.
In so many of these discussions, the very nature of the productive activity called 'work' itself is left unexamined. Might employers ever begin to address the spiralling spiritual and psychological crisis of our creative effectiveness in the world - which workplace ennui only faintly expresses? Other than Semler and his 'Seven Day Weekend' model, I see few in business who really 'get it'. We hope to keep developing our consultancy model of the 'player' and 'the play ethic' over 2005 - if only to try and come up with some more interesting proposals than this.
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