9th March 2021 | Time | Sponsorship
Working shorter; Big oil’s sponsorships
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#1: Four day week is nudging closer
There are signs everywhere that people want to work less. Spain, the UK, Japan, for example, all have active campaigns for a four-day week. New Zealand is interested. Spain has recently announced a pilot. Alex Pang’s book, Shorter, was also published in the UK last week.
In an interview, Pang suggests that this movement was a response to a complicated set of trends:
As we all know, work has become increasingly fragmented, unstable, unsustainable, and unsatisfying. Mobile devices and the internet were supposed to let us more efficiently manage work across geographies and throughout the day, but instead they’ve thrown us into a purgatory of being always-on, never fully engaged with work but never fully able to disconnect from it… Working hours and pressures have grown, while opportunities for genuine detachment and rest have been eroded. All this has led to a world in which work-related stresses, depression, and chronic illnesses are as big a public health problem as smoking.
Although some of the recent interest has been prompted by the pandemic, it predates it. And one of the things that’s interesting about the four day week campaign is that it represents an ‘upframing’ of the way we see ourselves—beyond economic man or woman to a more holistic sense of self. Fout day week campaigners spelt this out in an open letter to political leaders late last year:
Shorter working hours would not only be good for the economy, but they are going to be crucial for boosting mental health and tackling climate change. A four day week would signal a critical shift in the design of our economies towards the wellbeing of people and nature, as we prioritise the urgent need to bring down carbon emissions to safe levels… Our world would be immeasurably better, fairer and happier with more free time and we urge you to seize the moment.
It’s a reminder of a couple of things: first, that trades unions, historically, didn’t just fight about pay and conditions. They were also a huge factor in driving down the length of the working week.
The second is that at the tail end of neoliberalism, a lot of politics turns out to be about time. The radical academic Mark Fisher, sadly no longer with us, has a comment about this in one of the articles in his k-punk anthology:
it is clear that most political struggles at the moment amount to a war over time. The generalised debt crisis that hangs over all areas of capitalist and culture—from banks to housing and student funding—is ultimately about time.
In his interview, Alex Pang talks about the ‘how’ as well as the ‘why’; it has be promoted by the organisation’s leaders, and a period of experimentation helps. His three early wins:
The most basic things knowledge-intensive companies do are 1) ruthlessly shorten meetings, 2) reduce technology distractions, and 3) redesign the workday to carve out hours-long periods of undistracted focus time. Studies show that in office environments we lose an average of 2-4 hours of productive time per day to meetings, interruptions, and multitasking. So just getting those under control will take you a long way to being able to work a 4-day week.
I interviewed Alex Pang in 2018, when he was starting out on research for Shorter, and also talked about his earlier books, Distraction and Rest. (21 minutes)
#2: Big oil’s sponsorships
The controversies over galleries taking money from oil companies isn’t going to go away any time soon. At the end of February the environmental writer and campaigner George Monbiot pulled out of an event at the London Science Museum when he realised that the Museum was still taking money from fossil fuel sponsors while at the same time talking about the dangers of global warming ahead of COP26 in Glasgow later this year.
The email exchanges between the Science Museum and the BP corporate affairs team, extracted by Culture Unstained through Freedom of Information requests, suggest some level of complicity—coupled with the completely unapologetic stance of the Museum’s Director.
While the Science Museum does operate at a larger scale, its name and reputation mean that it has got more choice than smaller organisations in whom it chooses to partner with. The National Portrait Gallery would be having a similar problem with its BP sponsorship of its annual Portrait Award, were it not currently closed for rebuilding. At least the NPG isn’t engaged in explaining the science of global warming.
More progressive cultural organisations have already realised that you need to be ahead of this wave, and not behind it.
For example, London’s Royal Court Theatre has “an environmental policy that incorporates fundraising into how it fulfils ‘the need to be responsible’ for its impact on the environment.” The policy says:
“We will aspire to take an ethical approach to fundraising whenever possible and appropriate, working with those who share our environmental and ethical values.”
And quite a lot of organisations—more than a hundred—have now signed up to Oil Sponsorship Free, and its declaration that,
We do not take any oil, coal, or gas corporate sponsorship for our cultural work. We call on our peers and institutional partners to refuse fossil fuel funding too.’
Put like that, it doesn’t seem so hard.
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