The condensed work week

I saw an article about how some NJ towns are considering making their workers work condensed work weeks to save both the town and the workers' fuel costs. Nice idea, saving money is always good. But I have a better idea to save money. How about combining all the various municipalities and eliminate duplicate services/ bureaucracies first? We have thousands of different government entities on the state, local and county levels for our 21 counties. I bet the savings there, especially if you can combine several towns municipal buildings into one, will save way more money. Even better, the towns that find some of their essential services compressed for space, like a fire or police department, where the members need to be somewhat local, even if management is not, would be able to reuse the now abandoned buildings in lieu of building new space from scratch. In any event, with the savings from consolidation, government offices would be able to stay open 5 days and I as a citizen, who occasionally needs to do business with the government, will still have 5 days available to conduct my business.

Another issue I have with the condensed work week for government offices is the choice of day. What day will the offices be closed? The consensus seems to be Friday. As many who work in private offices or commute already know, Friday is already a very quiet day in the office because many choose that day to telecommute, including me. I also use my telecommute day to run various errands around town I can't do during the week, including interacting with my local government. How convenient they might close their offices the same day I'm home. Almost as if it's defeating the purpose of my not having to take time off to do errands I need to be physically home for.

Now some offices might remain open 5 days a week, but give workers the option to work condensed weeks to save them money. Great for the citizen who wants that 5th day, and I suppose it would save government some money as people could share desks or offices use electricity by not having as many workers on one particular day, but I wonder how much money the workers, especially those with children, will really save. It sounds more like a feel good proposal to me. Though not really the state's concern, what will the longer/condensed work days do to childcare etc? Will the cost savings people think they are getting in gas equal what they will have to shell out in, perhaps, paying babysitters extra money, paying someone to take a child (or anyone who can't drive) to an after hours event, ordering takeout, because there are not enough hours to cook etc?

I tired a condensed work week for a time and hated it. Perhaps it would've been ok if I had a shorter commute, but it just made a long day even longer. I felt like, for 4 days a week, all I was doing was getting up, going to work, coming home, going to be, rinsing and repeating. If I was making double my salary, it might've been tolerable as I could hire people to do the mid week chores I was saving till the weekend, but I wasn't so things just piled up. Not a way to live. Fortunately, my office also offered telecommuting which, though lonely at times, I appreciated much more. It gives me a life during the week and I end up working a longer day at home as I use my commuting time for work.

Back in the day, when the 8 hour work day was established, the theory went that the day was divided into thirds: 8 hours for work, 8 hours for leisure (though some wouldn't count commuting time as leisure, my 2 hours or so of NJ Transit travel each commuting day are pretty much the only two hours I get read and listen to the radio in peace) and 8 hours to sleep. With a 2 hour and change commute, a 10 hour work day would entail me leaving my house at 6:30 and not returning home until around 8 PM. Forget Little league, the gym, meals withmy children, after school events and any weeknight activities I might want to partake in. What good is a 3 day workweek if I don't have the time to enjoy a few hours during the rest of the week? Obviously, rising fuel prices might make my argument moot, as will more services being made available online, as taxpayers are forced to accept either higher taxes or a 4 day week, or the global economy makes different demands that make it reasonable to have an office open many more hours than just 9-5, but for those thinking how great a 3 day weekend will be: be careful what you wish for.

To drill or not to drill?

I'm a child of the 1970s. One of my major memories of the end of that decade is waiting on long gas lines with my father on Saturday mornings so he could fill up his big old Ford. He would get me up at dawn's early light (well to me) and, around 7AM, we'd drive to a bagel shop about a block or two from the gas station. He would drop me off with some money and continue to drive to the gas station to await its opening at 8AM. At the bagel shop, I'd buy us a couple of bagels, coffee for him, milk for me, and the newspaper and then walk back to the gas station where he was already parked on line (and sometimes not the first driver). I think he liked it better when we were forced to wait on the street as he was able to have a smoke that way. Anyway, we'd eat our breakfast, fending myself from my dad trying to take part of my bagel (he was a big guy) and then I'd wait for him to finish the paper (if I remembered I brought a few comic books with me) and we sat. And sat. And sat. Sometimes we talked, but age 10 or 11 I wasn't a great conversationalist, aside from comic books, baseball cards or the Mets and Yankees. All for the privilege of paying an outrageous $1 or so per gallon of gas. By time we left, at around 8:10, the gas line was already circling the block, with cars burning up their gas just waiting to get more. This process repeated itself among the several gas stations in our neighborhood (my mother, a teacher, was able to fill up her big Oldsmobile during the middle of the day when the lines were shorter).

So, it is with that memory that I look at today's gas crisis with a "what's the big deal" attitude. Don't get me wrong, I hate paying $50 to fill up my mid sized family sedan that gets 22-25 MPG. Same for my ever rising grocery and electric bills. However, I can still drive right up to the station and fill 'er up. Aside from the high prices, the only similarity I see is the newspaper's sports pages discussing how bad the Mets are (yes, I'm still bitter about the way the Mets fired Willie, but that's another story). However, unlike that gas shortage, we should've seen this one coming years ago. We've seen the Chinese and India economies becoming more industrial over the last decade or so as they improved their standards of living to match ours. They've started consuming goods and food like we do; all that requires energy to produce. We've seen them using more and more oil. Yet, we continued to buy our gas guzzling SUVs and virtually ignored alternate energy research. Now we're paying for our shortsighted outlook at the pump. However, at least we still have something to buy.

I'm not a big fan of off-shore drilling, I sure don't want to go down to the shore and smell refineries. However, I realize it may become necessary one day. Not so much to keep fuel prices down, but because that is all that is left. Oil is used in many things aside from gas, such as plastic bags and vinyl siding. Unless someone invents a replacement for those products, we're going to need oil for the foreseeable future. We also need oil to be converted to gasoline to keep our cars and trucks running as, even if were to shift gears tomorrow, it will be decades until we can rebuild our rail lines or have all our cars be alternate fuel cars (at least those that would use little or no fuel). So, I'm in favor of it to keep our society together and running. However, I'm not in favor of it just to keep our addiction to cheap fuel alive for a few more years, putting off the inevitable to a time when we don't even have the off shore option.

One thing left out of this debate though, even if drilling were to start today, it would probably be 5-10 years until the new oil fields would be active and flowing into our fuel supply and even the, on the world market, the supply would be fairly small. Prices won't go down from that. And even if they did dip, we, or our children, will face a worse problem in a few more decades. So I'm not in favor of off shore drilling unless it is combined with true research into alternate fuels and conservation of non-renewable fuels.

We need to make what we have last. The days of cheap fuel are over. We (we I mean you, me and the economy) better adjust to that soon. With gas over $4 a gallon these days, the day in the mid 70s when my dad's cousin asked for $5 of gas to fill up his car seem quite quaint. Though prices may fall, we'd best get used to paying more -- or walking everywhere.