Capitalism and the Material Realities of People with Disabilities Today
Disability is socially constructed. You are marked as disabled by society when the category of people associated with your “abnormality” cannot access things the rest of society can readily access and take for granted.Capitalism and the Material Realities of People with Disabilities Today | Anti-Imperialism.com
The long days of course exclude a lot of people from work, the point of failure in the formula is not far away as those considered healthy are actively pretending they can work that many hours.
8 hours of work plus break would be something like 8 to 9.5 hours.
add 0.5 – 1.5 hour commute and we are at 8.5 to 11 hours.
add 7 – 9 hours of sleep and we are at 15.5 – 20 hours.
add 0.5 – 1.5 hours for hygiene, getting dressed, shopping and eating adds up to 15 – 21.5
Now there are between 2.5 and 9 hours left in the day(!?!?)
One has to divide those over recreation, physical fitness, mental fitness, raising kids, a partner, relatives, friends, pets etc
If you work a desk some physical activity should not be considered optional. If you work some physical active job a properly designed system should account for some intellectual activities. Many jobs are neither intellectually or physically challenging.
With only 2.5 to 9 hours in their day healthy people may be expected to neglect sustaining their fitness, cognitive abilities, kids, family and friends.
Those who need little sleep, live close to work, eat, dress and manage to run the household in 30 min do get to spend up to 9 whole hours on sports, reading, social activities and raising a family – it seems enough.
Those who have a less fortunate time table may have to give up on their kids, their mental and their physical health.
But note that we are still talking about average healthy competitive people.
If, rather than stabilize, you’d want to improve your physical condition you would need to sleep more than 7 – 9 hours. If people spend 30 min per day with their kids they cant be considered good parents, they are simply not there the whole day. If one wants to be an athlete are these the 30 min of extra sleep one can get?
For failure to occur we only need to add a little bit of Injury, stress or depression to the mix and the whole scheme stops working. Life already stops working when one is suffering from the smallest things that would go away or be bearable with a bit more rest.
Even from a purely utilitarian perspective it makes no sense.
Clearly the solution would be to aim for shorter days, perhaps with more overwork. Make a normal work day last for 5 hours with one short break or non at all.
The employer can ask you to work for 3 extra hours if he really needs you to be there for 8 hours. The only difference is that this (now called overtime) it is not considered normal or expected and that it should cost extra money.
I imagine this would quickly start feeding into the solution.