Change and disruption to everyday life is something every human experiences. This change can be for good, bad and everything in between. Its the essential way of growing, self-developing and experiencing life. Change also allows to not only grow as individuals and learn from these experiences, but it also allows us to tell stories centring around certain perspectives. In telling these stories, its quite often we find ourselves discovering something new, not only through the stories we tell, but the stories others tell us. They help us to better understand ourselves and find commonality with others.
When thinking about change or disruption at work, I think there’s been no impact larger on the workplace than COVID-19. The pandemic has caused an absolute catastrophe in not only the global economy, but the global workforce. People have lost their jobs and in turn their livelihood and wellbeing, and now governments have had to implement systems to support the now unemployed. I was one of these people at the beginning of the pandemic. I was working for about 3 months at a casual warehouse job from the start of January 2020 till the end of march, when the first lockdown started. The workplace let off all of the casual workers, me being one of them and I was out of work for over 6 months. I wasn’t eligible for any support from the government as I lived at home, so I had no source of income and found it very difficult to get any response from job applications I had been applying for.
These 6 months of unemployment I spent very little as I didn’t have much in savings. In September this all changed after I was lucky enough to be hired by a company I had previously worked for. A warehouse job were I stage computer and register equipment for companies like Woolworths, Auspost, and Super Retail Group (Rebel, BCF, Supercheap Auto). Mind you this isn’t a job that relates in any way to my University degree nor do I see myself working here for an extended period of time, but its a job I enjoy and feel comfortable in. This new job allowed me to feel comfortable spending money again. Where I use to be extremely cautious about my spending, I was now spending money on things I didn’t particularly need. I feel I related heavily to a blogpost titled “Your lifestyle has already been designed”. There the writer talks about their new habits after “returning to the normal consumer mentality after having spent some time away from it” and how their spending was not ” big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life”. This is something I found myself doing on almost a daily basis after earning money again. Buying snacks or take away when I didn’t really have a good reason too other than I had the money. Buying books or movies from Amazon when I had a stack to read/watch already.
In the Blog post, they also talk about the 35-40 hour work week. They state “I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life”. This is something I’ve come to learn has happened in my life as well. Going from having all the free time in the world to do things I enjoyed like read, watch movies, go for a skate, sit outside with my dogs, writing, and spending time with family and friends quickly turned into napping after a long day at work. The 5 day work week ruined my free time and study time. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been working from 6am-2am, and all I wanted to do when I got home was sleep. I found a big difference happened when Uni started back up at the end of February though. I was lucky enough (and my workplace was kind enough) to drop down from a 5 day working week to a 3 day working so I could attend Uni and study in some of spare time. Only having Uni on my two days gave me more free time to do these things I’d been missing doing and study without feeling stressed all the time. This isn’t exactly new news that dropping down to shorter working hours meant an overall better wellbeing for workers (See ABCs article on Icelands trial), but actually experiencing it made me realize just how important these things were in my life. I was still earning enough money to live happily and put money into savings, as well as progressing with university comfortably, and having the free time I needed to actually do things I wanted to do.
When reflecting on what I’ve written and how much I value this change in my working hours, I’m going to ask my workplace if I can work 4 days a week once this Uni semester is over to manage study for future subjects and keep stress to a minimum.
REFERENCES
Cain, D 2010, ‘Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed’ https://www.raptitude.com/2010/07/your-lifestyle-has-already-been-designed/ [20th August 2021]
ABC NEWS, 2021, ‘Iceland’s four-day working week trials an overwhelming success, reports find’ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-06/iceland-four-day-working-week-trial-success-report-finds/100270388 [24th August 2021]
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