Dean Parker: Wage slaves denied right to relaxation

Workers should take more sick days, not fewer. Photo / APN

Nature is on the side of the lie-in, not the 10-hour day. To sleep is to be human. The philosopher Schopenhauer proposed that if being awake is so enjoyable then everyone would reluctantly approach sleep and gladly rise from it again. What happens? Exact opposite.

Paul Lafargue, French socialist and son-in-law of Karl Marx, reminds us that the ancient philosophers taught contempt of work, "this derogation of the free man".

In his radiant essay, The Right to be Lazy, Lafargue drags in the big guns: "Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: 'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."'

And Jehovah? After six days of work he took a sickie - for eternity. Sure, the National Party and the Employers' Federation will scold us that we must work harder to increase the national wealth.

"O, idiots!" exclaims Lafargue. "It is because you work too much that industrial equipment develops slowly!"

And hard work merely precipitates the whole of society into crises of over-production, like the slump of the 1930s.

"Industrial crises follow periods of over-work as night follows day, bringing after them lockouts and poverty without end."

Finally, we are used up long before our time. "Absorbed and brutalised by the single vice of work we are no longer men but pieces of men ... We kill within ourselves all beautiful faculties and nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work."

Exactly. Workers successfully fought through the 20th century for fewer work hours and more leisure time to spend with their families. Those gains have been clawed back by the Employers' Federation.

Annual holidays are now an option. With wages so low, workers will be forced to trade off family time against mortgage repayments and food bills.

More work is being squeezed out of fewer and fewer. Workers now submit to some of the longest hours among OECD nations.

Lafargue's arguments have been picked up this century by another French writer, Corinne Maier. Her book, Bonjour Paresse (Hello Laziness) has a simple message.

"You are a modern-day slave; there is no scope for personal fulfilment; what you do is pointless; you can be replaced from one day to the next by anyone sitting next to you; work as little as possible."

Take a sickie.