I love this piece. Thank you.

As someone whose work-life balance is being “disrupted”, to borrow the faddish term back from the tech industry which is disrupting it, I have some suggestions.

1. Let’s shame people who earn, or own, too much. And, come on, there is a too much. I believe the wealth gap is a huge contributor to overwork, as it ultimately creates dynasties and individuals too far removed from the plight of the worker.

2. Let’s agree that a company is not a person. People who work for the company are people, and should be treated as such.

3. Let’s do make work life balance a key metric in performance evaluations for managers.

4. Let’s not be afraid of the socialism label when crafting worker friendly legistlation. I notice big business was not afraid of the socialism label when asking for handouts from the government to bail them out, or for essentially free loans to banks from taxpayers during the ZIRP time period so they could lend that money out to the home-buyers screwed by them — with interest.

5. I’d like us to apply continual improvement to work life balance, not just the products we make. So, for example, what are you [a big company] doing about overwork in the overseas shops you outsource to? Those folks deserve work-life balance, too, even if making me work that much would be protested and would be illegal. Also, what are you [a big company] doing about H1B visa abuses, of which there are tons, each abuse and each type of abuse specifically targeting not only the worker who is abused by the worker whose career was displaced so that the abuse could take place?

6. Politicians should tout the happiness and the health of their communities, not point to the Dow Jones Industrial Average as though it were a scoreboard of their success.

etc.

This is an environment rich with “low hanging fruit”, as the tech industry which disrupts our work-life balance more and more, likes to call them.