Ghana, like many countries in the modern world, has an unemployment problem and the situation is particularly dire in relation to the creation of jobs for an increasing number of students dropping out of school. In modern society, a job involves employment for seven or eight hours a day, five days a week, with the work week being 35 to 40 hours. Many people dislike work, or at least dislike the jobs they are forced to do by financial need. Wouldn’t most people be happier if hours were shorter and available work was shared more equitably?
In his book ‘The Affluent Society’ published in 1958, the famous American economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed that, according to anthropologists, when mankind lived by hunting and gathering, the work required to sustain life amounted to about four hours a year. day. It took many more hours to work after the invention of agriculture and it was certainly during the long millennia that followed that the idea of life dominated by work was widely accepted. However, Galbraith suggested that with modern labor-saving machines the available work, spread over healthy and willing workers, was likely to be reduced again to about four hours a day.
In Ghana in the last decades of the 20th century, there was much evidence to suggest that although working hours were long, actual work activity took up only a fraction of the time. At Suame magazine in Kumasi, which offers internships and employment to thousands of young people, the work is nominally spread out for most hours of the day, six days a week. However, it was observed that a lot of time was spent idly waiting for a customer to bring a job, and when an assignment was taken, there was one man working and four men watching. Work done in this friendly and relaxed social environment is close to Galbraith’s vision of the four-hour workday, except that the worker is tied to the workplace during leisure hours.
Within the span of recorded history, and almost within living memory, many Ashantis chose to earn a living as hunters. One of their main hunting grounds was in the south of what is now the Brong-Ahafo region; ahafo which means hunters in the Twi language. If Galbraith’s anthropologists were correct, these hunters made a living by working about four hours a day, even if they spent more hours wandering in social relationships with their peers. By Galbraith’s theory, it might appear that his descendants working in Suame Magazine’s informal workshops had overlooked the agricultural and industrial revolutions in just a few generations, while the artisans themselves would claim to have simply retained their traditional way of working.
Perhaps part of the answer to the provision of work for all lies in preserving and extending the traditional social organization of work. Let everyone who is willing and able join the team and share the work as it comes along. The problem of equitable sharing of profits is another problem to which even Galbraith could not give a final answer, although he made some helpful suggestions and warned of dire consequences if no solution was found.