In A Part-time Job in the Country, Luke Lea has penned a popular manifesto in behalf of the tens of millions of ordinary Americans for whom happiness would be an abundance of well-paying, part-time employment opportunities in rural areas where land is inexpensive and families would have time to build their own houses, garden, properly care for their children and grandchildren, and for hobbies and other outside interests.
To bring this about, he proposes the idea of factories in the countryside that run on part-time jobs, looking not only at the new lifestyle such factories would make possible, but at the new kinds of local neighborhood communities and country towns that might develop around them. The result is an American Eutopia* for the 21st century.
Of crucial importance, the author devotes an entire chapter to showing why, with the right kind of wage bargain between labor and management, such factories can be expected to run faster and more efficiently than when manned by full-time workers, generating higher hourly wages and rates of return on investment in the process.
But even so, Lea acknowledges that we are unlikely to see many part-time factory jobs in the countryside anytime soon unless Congress passes new protective trade legislation that will cause American manufacturers to locate their most labor-intensive facilities in the US once again.
To this end, he advocates the founding of a revolutionary new type of national membership organization to represent the interests of every dues-paying American wishing to live this new way, a major goal of which will be to compel Congress to pass the necessary legislation to make it all possible.
This pragmatic, shrewdly realistic guide is intended for a new generation of social activists from across the US who would like nothing better than to launch such a democratic mass movement for change.
