18 votes

One Year Off, Every Seven Years: How about this for a demand? You work for six years and you get a whole paid year off to do whatever the hell you want.

21 comments

  1. [7]
    Comment deleted by author
    Link
    1. [6]
      NaraVara
      Link Parent
      There are jobs that offer a 6 month to a 1 year sabbatical, but it's usually after something like 10-20 years of tenure. Sweden requires 480 days of parental leave (split between parents) for each...

      There are jobs that offer a 6 month to a 1 year sabbatical, but it's usually after something like 10-20 years of tenure. Sweden requires 480 days of parental leave (split between parents) for each kid. And they typically get 80% of their pay during this time. Things don't seem to have fallen apart, I expect business processes just adapt to accommodate, it just ends up costing extra. But if you decide the free time is worth more to society than greater economic output that might not be the worst trade-off.

      No business can survive if they're really so reliant on a single person and operations can't go on without them. That suggests deeper management issues, excessively silo'd operations, or poor on-the-job training. Like, what happens if you get a new job or get hit by a bus? Unless your job has taken out a "key man" insurance policy on you or you have clauses in your employment contract stipulating that you aren't allowed to go do adventure sports, odds are they'll be able to get along without you just fine.

      Is 1 year in every 6 realistic? Probably not. But I don't see that dispensing with the notion of a paid sabbatical altogether. You could just as easily finance it through a social insurance scheme, similar to a 401k, where part of the salary is earmarked into an interest bearing account for emergencies or sabbaticals.

      8 votes
      1. [6]
        Comment deleted by author
        Link Parent
        1. [2]
          NaraVara
          Link Parent
          Everything you've described sounds like a serious organizational failure. Failure to staff properly, failure to perform adequate business continuity planning, etc. It unfortunately happens a lot...

          Everything you've described sounds like a serious organizational failure. Failure to staff properly, failure to perform adequate business continuity planning, etc.

          It unfortunately happens a lot in tech. It's kind of why I think the obsession with finding "10x Engineers" is kind of bullshit. If your project needs superhuman engaged with it indefinitely to work it's not a well designed project. You need to staff and manage it better. Mechanisms for redundancy are critical for maintaining institutional knowledge. The issue's you're citing would be manifesting any time you take parental leave, bereavement leave, or any basic life thing. It's not a healthy way to run a team and I feel like too many organizations make up for shitty corporate strategy and bad management by just hiring smart, driven people to make up for the deficiencies.

          This is a completely different and significantly more realistic approach.

          You get the realistic approaches by listening to the crazy, inchoate demands and figure out how to make them make sense.

          8 votes
          1. [2]
            Comment deleted by author
            Link Parent
            1. NaraVara
              Link Parent
              I actually think co-determination is a great way to address this problem. Like I mentioned before, a lot of these problems are management failures that are being papered over by making undue...

              It's not as if the capitalists are uniquely moronic and when labour gains control these issues will just suddenly disappear.

              I actually think co-determination is a great way to address this problem. Like I mentioned before, a lot of these problems are management failures that are being papered over by making undue demands of their workers. If the people working had more of a say in strategic decisions like these, they'd be able to raise these concerns early. If senior management had to internalize the costs of things like unscheduled overtime borne by the workers, that's an incentive to manage it better.

              It's a great way to make labor/management negotiations less acrimonious too by making the union focus on the long-term viability of the company and work-force as a whole rather than just protecting the careers of their currently constituted membership.

              To be honest, and this may be a failure in my study of socialism, but I don't know how the system would address the cyclicity of the economy, and the boom and bust that occurs in certain industries. When the demand for a certain product craters critically, what happens under the socialist model?

              There is no one "socialist model," and socialism refers more to a general tendency to develop communal ownership of property or social functions. It's focused more on the value system they aim for rather than the methodology used to realize it. Fighting over how to do anything is basically all socialists do nowadays instead of actually organizing workers. The way to address things would depend based on how the economic system is actually constituted. For the most part, if demand craters you would just reallocate the factors of production to things that need it. Capitalist economies do the same thing, they just do reallocation via layoffs and bankruptcy rather than just reassigning people.

              In the Soviet model they decided what to produce through quota and, in theory, used the presence of lines or excess inventory as signals to increase or decrease production. They'd introduce new products in "test runs" and see whether people went for them. Of course, the official statistics would indicate that there are never lines, nor is there ever excess inventory, and every new thing you make is flying off the shelves like hot-cakes but worry not we always have exactly enough. So clearly everything was hunky dory.

              They would also do weird things like require a plant to produce "one hundred pounds of nails" so the plant will produce ten 10-pound nails that are completely useless for anything you'd need a nail for. The mathematics that went into their system were really genius, but the real world application was truly awful.

              There are other schools of socialism that haven't really been attempted though, or are usually attempted under more capitalist economies. In some cases they focus on only nationalizing some strategic industries like railroads, steel, fossil fuel, timber, etc. Another option is market socialists, who are fine with maintaining market forces for most things and focus on creating baseline quality of life programs through things like land value taxes and universal basic income. The New Deal was mostly influenced by this tendency, they just created federal job guarantees and transfer payments, but primarily focused on fostering entrepreneurship and capital accumulation.

              2 votes
        2. [3]
          Algernon_Asimov
          Link Parent
          That's demonstrably wrong, because your employer is still operating "years later" (your own words). That "truly indispensable" person was replaced and life went on.

          That person who trained me was truly indispensable

          That's demonstrably wrong, because your employer is still operating "years later" (your own words). That "truly indispensable" person was replaced and life went on.

          1. [3]
            Comment deleted by author
            Link Parent
            1. [2]
              Algernon_Asimov
              Link Parent
              I don't know what this means, but I assume from context it's a bad thing.

              We also declared chapter 11 last Friday

              I don't know what this means, but I assume from context it's a bad thing.

              1. [2]
                Comment deleted by author
                Link Parent
                1. Algernon_Asimov
                  Link Parent
                  Thanks. I'm not familiar with American accounting law.

                  It's essentially bankruptcy

                  Thanks. I'm not familiar with American accounting law.

                  1 vote
  2. [11]
    Somebody
    Link
    The author seems to think "socialism" is a magic fairy that can fix all of our problems if only we'd all believe.

    The author seems to think "socialism" is a magic fairy that can fix all of our problems if only we'd all believe.

    5 votes
    1. [8]
      alyaza
      Link Parent
      well... yeah? i assume you're not familiar with jacobin if you're saying this, because their whole thing is being "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on...

      well... yeah? i assume you're not familiar with jacobin if you're saying this, because their whole thing is being "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture." like, their entire point as an outlet is advancing and espousing support of left-wing viewpoints.

      5 votes
      1. [5]
        NaraVara
        Link Parent
        I think the criticism isn't the perspective they're coming from here so much as handwaving away all the interesting questions about how to accomplish this by just wiggling their fingers and saying...

        I think the criticism isn't the perspective they're coming from here so much as handwaving away all the interesting questions about how to accomplish this by just wiggling their fingers and saying "socialism." As a Leftist myself, Jacobin exhibits one of the most annoying tendencies on the Left to just wish away every substantive point of discussion.

        8 votes
        1. [4]
          alyaza
          Link Parent
          i mean, this is probably because jacobin is a fairly small magazine with no institutional power, and even most people with actual institutional power aren't out here explaining in nitty, gritty...

          i mean, this is probably because jacobin is a fairly small magazine with no institutional power, and even most people with actual institutional power aren't out here explaining in nitty, gritty detail how they'd accomplish policies they put forward. it's not like jacobin is miraculously alone in doing this--all politics and all politicians are vague like this to varying extent--but in any case ideas like this are more often about getting the idea on the table to begin with than about making the idea a reality in the very specific image put forward, so i think this criticism of them not explaining falls flat and is kinda pointless as a whole.

          4 votes
          1. NaraVara
            Link Parent
            You don't need nitty gritty detail, but some basic research and thought shouldn't be too much to ask. They're a small magazine, but so is Lapham's Quarterly. You can find policy experts to...

            You don't need nitty gritty detail, but some basic research and thought shouldn't be too much to ask. They're a small magazine, but so is Lapham's Quarterly. You can find policy experts to interview. It's not like political science adjuncts would say "no" to the opportunity to earn some extra scratch writing something coherent or well thought out.

            6 votes
          2. [2]
            Archimedes
            Link Parent
            Can we not get more realistic ideas on the table lest others rightfully dismiss us as divorced from reality?

            Can we not get more realistic ideas on the table lest others rightfully dismiss us as divorced from reality?

            1 vote
            1. alyaza
              Link Parent
              no, because people will do that regardless of what you do (see nearly every progressive issue in the history of humanity), and leading with the ideas you consider realistic in negotiations of any...

              Can we not get more realistic ideas on the table lest others rightfully dismiss us as divorced from reality?

              no, because people will do that regardless of what you do (see nearly every progressive issue in the history of humanity), and leading with the ideas you consider realistic in negotiations of any kind are a great way to not actually get what you want (or get a worse version of what you want). do you think it'd be any different if you proposed a paid year off at any point in your career instead of tying it to an arbitrary length of time? probably not, but you might get that if you lead with the idea in the title; comparatively, if you led with just that or some other more realistic idea you're probably not going to get much of anything. (to say nothing of the fact that introducing the idea in the first place ensures that you can actually steer the conversation toward similar ideas. it was literally three years ago that shit like M4A was introduced into the political discourse and was dismissed as unrealistic--and now half of the 2020 candidates have an M4A plan, support M4A, or have a similar plan to M4A)

              5 votes
      2. [2]
        papasquat
        Link Parent
        There's no information about how viable such a thing would be, or even how it could be enacted though. The article just spends its time fantasizing about how great it would be to have a year off....

        There's no information about how viable such a thing would be, or even how it could be enacted though. The article just spends its time fantasizing about how great it would be to have a year off. Which is... fine I guess, but who knows if that would even be possible? If we're not considering the downsides or looking at actual data to determine the realism, why would you stop at every six years? I'd rather have a year off every other year, that would be a way better idea.

        3 votes
        1. alyaza
          Link Parent
          again, welcome to literally half of politics. this is a criticism you can hold against just about everybody who has ever and will ever have a political career, so it's basically a useless one as...

          There's no information about how viable such a thing would be, or even how it could be enacted though.

          again, welcome to literally half of politics. this is a criticism you can hold against just about everybody who has ever and will ever have a political career, so it's basically a useless one as far as ideas to throw out there go. there's no information on how viable a lot of proposals 2020 presidential candidates are putting up are and many of them give vagueities on what their proposals even do or how they'd ever hope to get them passed; that doesn't stop them, because half the battle is getting the idea in the fucking door to begin with, much less actually hashing out what it'd look like in practice as a law or what a passable version of it is which is a whole other can of worms.

          2 votes
    2. mbc
      Link Parent
      Yeah, this article was a bit light on how to accomplish this "one year off" thing. If you're going to suggest an idea that radical, I'd like to see a lot more substance about how it would work....

      Yeah, this article was a bit light on how to accomplish this "one year off" thing. If you're going to suggest an idea that radical, I'd like to see a lot more substance about how it would work. I'm particularly skeptical about how it would work for small business owners with few employees. That seventh year would be rough. And what's to stop people from getting laid off in years five or six? It seems like businesses would be encouraged to get rid of their dead weight early.

      1 vote
    3. NaraVara
      Link Parent
      That's Jacobin in a nutshell.

      The author seems to think "socialism" is a magic fairy that can fix all of our problems if only we'd all believe.

      That's Jacobin in a nutshell.

      1 vote
  3. xstresedg
    Link
    It was an interesting read, for sure. I don't necessarily see it as being viable or practical, as it would leave the workforce a bit wonky all the time, with the company either underemployed or...

    It was an interesting read, for sure. I don't necessarily see it as being viable or practical, as it would leave the workforce a bit wonky all the time, with the company either underemployed or overemployed, due to the one year leave, paid, with guaranteed job after the one year.

    In terms of the socialism part in general, I agree that we need more family and community time and less work time. We just need to find that balance between it all. Hopefully, one day, this can be achieved.

    4 votes
  4. Algernon_Asimov
    Link
    It took me a while to parse this, because the earliest Labour Party in Australia was formed in the 1890s, and the similarity between "1890s" and "1990s" is strong enough that it took me a while to...

    In the 1990s, trade unionists and socialists in the United States formed a Labor Party.

    It took me a while to parse this, because the earliest Labour Party in Australia was formed in the 1890s, and the similarity between "1890s" and "1990s" is strong enough that it took me a while to realise that this was actually saying the American version was created only 20 years ago, not 120 years ago.

    Anyway, back on topic.

    We have something in Australia called long service leave. It varies from state to state, but the basic idea is that you get a few months off at full pay after working for a number of years. It's a watered-down version of this proposal for a sabbatical year.

    I've never taken long service leave (although I did have the appropriate length of service in one job), but I have taken a sabbatical between jobs, and I do not regret that at all. Everyone needs a few months off occasionally, just to properly relax and forget about work.

    3 votes
  5. junya
    Link
    My company offers 2 months of sabbatical after working there for 7 years (though I've heard stories of people who have extended it to nearly six months by adding parental leave and vacation). I...

    My company offers 2 months of sabbatical after working there for 7 years (though I've heard stories of people who have extended it to nearly six months by adding parental leave and vacation).

    I haven't yet taken one, but the people I know who have love it. Some people spend the time travelling, others use it to start their own businesses, others use it to just spend time with their families. I don't know what I'll do on my eventual sabbatical, but it's a nice perk that if nothing else will give me time to think.

    1 vote
  6. bobsledboy
    Link
    We have a similar system to this in Australia (and I think New Zealand too). We've done a really bad job of standardising it over different industries but essentially most people get 8+2/3 weeks...

    We have a similar system to this in Australia (and I think New Zealand too). We've done a really bad job of standardising it over different industries but essentially most people get 8+2/3 weeks paid leave after serving in a job for 10 years and an additional 4+1/3 weeks for every 5 years thereafter. If you leave a job after 7 years of service you'll also get paid out for your accumulated service pro-rata.

    I don't think anybody would openly criticise our system without getting a lot of flak. But it has definitely become a problem with the changing economy that people are much less likely to serve in a single company for such a long period of time these days, so younger people especially are much less able to take advantage.

    1 vote