What Does It Mean To Be Free

Work-life balance has been a popular topic for employees across all age and occupations for years, representing a rising concern of contemporary human resource management and labor policies. This topic has attracted the attention from the millennium generation, who is stepping into the market and beginning to grow a career. Therefore considering the increasing demand, well-designed workforce planning with diverse scheduling options offered to employees appears to be extra credits for most companies. This research paper aims to communicate the positive effects of four-day workweek, and providing support for why employers should adopt this schedule for employees and themselves through 1) introducing background and history of four-day workweek as a work schedule option and 2) demonstrating benefits of four-day workweek from both employer and employees’ perspectives.

True freedom is not something that can be given. It is something that every single person must discover for themselves. If a person were set free, though still thought of themselves as a slave, they are a slave. America is a country that thrives on freedom. Though numerous people throughout the United States take this privilege for granted.

     One of the more interesting aspects that Peiss mentions about the change in the demographics of the labor force directly relates to the way leisure time is spent. Peiss mentions many statistics that show how the working woman was quickly refusing household work and moving to the factory or office position. More specifically, a study of 370 working mothers showed 70 percent of them to be employed in domestic and personal service while the vast majority of their daughters worked in stores, offices, and factories (Cheap Amusements, 39). The significance of this change lies in the resulting change in attitude about leisure time. Now, a clearer distinction between time spent at work and

When employed labor is involved, productivity in terms of time becomes important, because the employer generally pays the worker in terms of time. For many jobs, then a shift from task-orientation to timed labor occurs, as the laborer’s time becomes the employer’s money. Thus, a separation between work and leisure occurs, as

I see a “bullshit job” (as author David Graeber puts it) as one that adds nothing satisfying to a worker’s human needs and desire. The reason we don’t have more leisure time, and take note that most of us do want more, is because so many of us are caught up in busy work that doesn’t do anything to provide for the needs, or even the desires, of the worker. Most people who work in these “bullshit jobs” don’t really like them. I think that these people who don’t really like the work they do, would like more leisure time to be creative, relax, enjoy time with their families or friends, get into a hobby, or learn something new. When a person goes to work there should be two goals to accomplish from that work. It should satisfy one’s personal need to be creative and productive and it should also produce some real help to society and/or

Pieper describes work and leisure from a unique perspective. He believes that work is a necessary part of life, but one that should not consume our every waking moment. Piper challenges our modern definition of work to show us that time away can be beneficial. The leisure that he references is not a period of just not doing anything. He argues that our time not consumed by our work should be devoted to philosophy and theology that enriches our lives. What the modern world uses as leisure, which is not thinking at all, is what Pieper would call being sloth. The time away from work is meant for personal and spiritual growth. Idleness robs our time as much as work, but leisure allows us to expand our horizons. Comparing Huxley's Brave NEw World

The world of work and the world of wonder are two worlds that play a prominent role in the lives of humans. In that sense they are commensurable to one another, yet at the same there there is a clear distinction between how the two worlds worlds operate that make them incommensurable. The purpose of this paper is to to argue that the world of work is incommensurable with the world of wonder in certain senses, but commensurable in others. This will be done by providing evidence from Leisure, the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and works of Plato.

The United States is commonly known as “No-Vacation Nation” (Thompson, 2012) because Americans typically prioritize work over studies and family. (1)Although people in America take fewer vacations than any nation in the world, socioeconomics may be a reason for why employees focus more on work than research and relationships in the American culture. "There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a competitive advantage" (Pawlowski, 2011). (2)As a citizen of the United States and one who has often fallen prey to these ideals, the trend to overwork has been an affliction to overcome. Family and scholarly efforts have been sacrificed, but over the past year or two, I have made a conscious effort to alter my “live to work”

For this assignment I had the opportunity to interview Darcy Page and Brittney Stobbie on what exactly leisure means to them. Both Brittney and Darcy are juniors here at the University of Florida pursuing a degree in Recreation Tourism Event Management. When it comes to leisure, Darcy defines leisure as the time she spends doing things that help to relieve her stress. One of her biggest stress relievers is the gym because she loves the way she feels after a hard workout. Brittney describes leisure as free time to do the activities she enjoys. Both girls find leisure an important part of their lives and affiliate it with the feeling of happiness and being healthy. When it comes to leisurely activities Darcy enjoys reading, exercising, doing

This leads into the final point Carr makes in chapter one that automation is changing society’s perception of work and leisure. Many people would agree that work is not pleasurable and humans like leisure. However, Carr argues that, “thanks to our bias for leisure over work, ease over effort, we overestimate automation’s benefits” (19). Not only does he argue at the end of the chapter that most people are searching for a blend of life and work, but also he argues that people actually enjoy work over leisure because of the sense of accomplishment and productivity they feel afterwards. Carr argues that we overestimate the benefits of technology, when it may not even be what we really want as human beings. Furthermore, the his skeptical beliefs regarding automation, tacit knowledge, and work versus leisure are central to his argument throughout this entire book.

It is imperative that the employee can balance his/her working life against his/her personal life. With sufficient time off and rest periods, employees will feel “looked after” and be motivated to put in more effort. There will be a reduction of mistakes because the employee has had adequate rest which results in a more positive working environment. Employers who introduce such practices in the work place in order to help employees achieve a better and satisfactory work/life balance can expect to see an increase in motivation, enhanced performance/productivity and greater staff loyalty. By implementing a positive work/life balance, companies are successful, secure a good reputation and promote positive employee relations. The Working Time Regulations 1998 stipulates that employers should provide employees with the following basic rights:

Today we accept that freedom is a basic right human right but what exactly is freedom. 1On one hand, there is physical freedom. People who are not imprisoned or enslaved are free. On the other hand, there is freedom as a the right to act, speak or think what you want. People cannot reach their full potential if they are not free in both senses of the word.

According to Newman, Garth, and Milkovich, spillover theory is the theory where workers are thought to participate in leisure activities that have characteristics similar to their job-related activities and tasks (Singh & Selvarajan 2013). Respectively, those theories are similar and different depend on the situation. For instance, spillover theory can be a reflection of the positive correlations between types of activities engaged in at work. Also, there are positive correlations between subjective reactions to work and to leisure and family life. More importantly, there are exceptions to the spillover concern in retrospective to physical

There are two kinds of people in the work force. There are laborers and there are workers. The difference between these two types of people is that a worker enjoys his or her job while a laborer does not. To the laborer, his or her life is almost equivalent to a wage slave. For those laborers, there only escape is leisure time. This is essentially the opposite of their lives, a time where there is freedom and compulsion. To the worker, leisure time consist of enough rest so that they can do their jobs effectively. In the two ways that these two types of people enjoy their free time, how do we know which person spends their time better? I believe that a worker often spends his of her leisure time more productively than

At the beginning of this course leisure was a topic I did not give much thought to and I felt like I did not have the time to spare to put much thought into. To me, all leisure meant was having free time to do whatever it is that I wanted to do. But after analyzing my life I noticed that I had surrounded my life with solely work and school and my “free time” was anytime I spent watching television and anytime I slept. However, after taking this course I learned that leisure meant more much than that. Now leisure to me means, as Richard Kraus states, leisure is “time which is not devoted to work or work-connected responsibilities or to other forms of discretionary or unobligated time,” (Olson et al., 2003, 12). The “time” in which Kraus