Ghana, like many countries in the modern world, has an unemployment problem, and the situation is particularly serious in relation to the provision of employment for an increasing number of school leavers. In modern society, a job implies employment for seven or eight hours a day, five days a week, with a work week of 35 to 40 hours. Many people dislike work, or at least dislike jobs that economic necessity forces them to do. Wouldn’t most people be happy if the hours were shorter and the available work was shared more equally?
In his book ‘The Affluent Society’ published in 1958, the famous American economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed that, according to anthropologists, when humanity lived by hunting and gathering, the work required to maintain life amounted to about four hours a day. day. Many more hours were needed to work after the invention of agriculture and it was certainly during the long millennia that followed that the idea of a life dominated by work became widely accepted. However, Galbraith suggests that with modern labour-saving machines, the available work, spread out among willing and able 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 provides apprenticeships and employment for thousands of young people, work nominally runs through most of the day, six days a week. However, it was noted that a lot of time was spent idly waiting for a client to bring in a job, and when a job was taken, there was one man working and four watching. Work done in this friendly and relaxed social setting 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 make a living as hunters. One of his 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 right, these hunters earned a living by working about four hours a day, though more hours were spent wandering around socially with their peers. According to Galbraith’s theory, it would seem that his descendants who worked in the informal workshops of Revista Suame had weathered the agricultural and industrial revolutions in a few generations, while the artisans themselves would claim to have simply preserved their traditional way of working.
Perhaps part of the answer to providing 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 a fair distribution of profits is another problem to which even Galbraith could not give a definitive answer, although he did make some useful suggestions and warned of dire consequences if no solution was found.