The dark cynic in me says that in a country with a for-profit health system all these effects are considered good features of the workplace.
The arguments against it are entirely abstract and ungrounded.
What natural law says it's better to spend time with/live only with people who are related to by blood? The only necessity for reproduction is sexual intercourse. A family is susceptible to the same abuse and corruption as any other arbitrary power structure.
The arguments against it are the divorce rates, and they are not abstract or ungrounded.
Yes some marriages end in divorce and families disconnect in some cases, with various outcomes. The family still exists even if no-one participates in it. The guy is being overworked and unable to see his kids, I'm all for that guy seeing his kids. It can have huge knock on effects if it's ignored. You aren't forced to participate in family.
Family is built from natural impulses, biological connections and installs in the children an inheritance of values, schooling and relationships. There are reasons from first principles for families and the surrounding neighbourhood, city and country benefits from families. You can't hand-wave away the meaning of family as 'power' and 'arbitrary'.
And we are trying to move into the future, not the past.
Are nuclear families really so important and successful that we need more of it? Is this really an undebatable absolute truth that should be forced on people? Let people decide on their own if they want to spend their new found free time on families or something else.
Edit: the "special status" is loyalty, and loyalty is bad if we are trying to live in a meritocracy.
What says that the parent will necessarily be the "best" person for their child through their whole life, and not someone else? That's arbitrary.
You see no issues with swearing life long loyalty to blood relations? That's just going to be the optimal solution in every case? That's making it a little bit too easy don't you think?
It's also just as natural for people to branch out and leave their families, as it is to stay close to their families.
And I think it's irrelevant to the discussion of shortening working hours, and a bad example because it's another oppressive construct.
It's like arguing for shortening working hours so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned and has seen decreasing success.
How about just shortening the working hours so that people can be more, free? And do what they want?
This one is so debatable because the definition and theological implications of Church 'healthiness' depend upon many different variables and can differ subtly across all Churches.
Church isn't a 'power structure' though. It relies on voluntary participation. You can walk out of Church whenever you want.
Doing what you want tends to be quite narrow, hedonistic and unsatisfying in the end. It's easier to make the argument for free time from higher principles.
Well I guess we can say that we have a fundamentally different view on what constitutes development and improvement of life and society.
Freedom is the ability to swim in any direction you want, so go ahead. Do whatever you want. The map of your possible options already exists and the institutions are just one or many worthwhile places to visit. When people do whatever they want it quite often ends up on a place on the map where there is a lot of hedonism and not much in the way of higher meaning or valuable aims.
As a dispassionate observer it is my inclination to suggest that people will take the argument for more free time off work in the favour of church and family as an easier argument to make, given it's connection to a higher meaning and relatable values. A boss will likely see anything connected to 'wants' as room for more work.
Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure.
""" She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support.
You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """
""" t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases.
Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress.
And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """