(In Sweden, where a recent law guaranteed all workers five weeks of paid vacation regardless of age or length of service, a normal work yearwas considered to be 1840 hours. In fact, absenteeism has run so high that a more realistic average per worker is 1600 hours per year.)
Large numbers of workers already do paid work for what averages out to only three or four days a week, or they take six months or a year off to pursue educational or recreational goals. This pattern may well grow stronger as two-paycheck households multiply. More people in the paid labor market—higher “labor participation rates,” as the economists put it—may very well go with reduced hours per worker.
This casts the whole question of leisure into a new light. Once we recognize that much of our so-called leisure time is, in fact, spent producing goods and services for our own use—presuming—then the old distinction between work and leisure falls apart. The question is not work versus leisure, but paid work for Sector B versus unpaid, self-directed, and self-monitored work for Sector A.
In the Third Wave context new life-styles based half on production for exchange, half on production for use, become practical. Such life-styles were, in fact, common in the early days of the industrial revolution among farm populations who were slowly being absorbed into the urban proletariat. For a long transitional period millions of people worked part-time in factories and part-time on the land, growing their own food, buying some of their necessities, making the rest. This pattern still prevails in many parts of the world—but usually on a technologically primitive basis.
Imagine this life pattern—but with twenty-first century technology for goods and food production, as well as immensely enhanced self-help methods for the production of many services. Instead of a dress pattern, for example, tomorrow’s prosumer might well buy a cassette with a program on it that will drive a “smart” electronic sewing machine. Even the clumsiest househusband, with such a cassette, could make his own custom-fitted shirts. Mechanically inclined tinkerers could do more than tune up their autos. They could actually half-build them.
We saw that it “may become possible some day for the customer to program his or her own specifications into the auto manufacturing process via computer and telephone. But there is another way in which the consumer, even now, can participate in producing an auto.
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