A Swedish art project is offering the
ultimate dream job for slackers: It will pay someone about $2,280 a month to do
whatever their heart desires.
The successful candidate will be required to
clock in and out every day at the new Korsvägen train station in Gothenburg,
Sweden. Other than that, the position has
no set responsibilities or duties.
The employee will have free rein to move
around -- and they won't even need to stay in the station once they've checked
in for work, as long as they return at the end of the day.
The idea, titled "Eternal
Employment," is the brainchild of Swedish art duo Simon Goldin and Jakob
Senneby. The conceptual performance has been designed to offer political
commentary and insight into the labor market.
"Eternal Employment" was a winning
entry in the Chronotopia
competition, which sought public art ideas for two new train
stations in Gothenburg.
Construction work on Korsvägen station is
expected to finish in 2026, which is also the anticipated start date for the
"Eternal Employment" job. Applications will open in 2025.
The purpose of labor
The train station will offer a changing room
for its new employee, and a clock used to check in and out of work.
The clock will be connected to fluorescent
lights above the platform. These "working lights," which will be
designed to resemble archetypical office lights, will signal whenever the
employee is "at work," according to the artists' proposal.
"Although almost invisible at first,
over time 'Eternal Employment' has the potential to amass a rich history of
rumors, jokes, news stories and other secondary mediation, making its way into
the oral history of Gothenburg," the proposal reads.
The project seeks to explore the role of
labor at a time when growing numbers of people take on nontraditional jobs in a
post-industrial society, the artists said.
Goldin and Senneby acknowledge that an
employee without specific duties may become bored. But their proposal also
suggests that the successful candidate may come up with their own creative
projects or "simply embrace a state of perpetual leisure."
"Eternal Employment not only offers a
different understanding of work and the worker," the proposal continues,
"but questions the very notions of growth, productivity and progress which
are at the core of modernity."
"In the face of mass automation and
artificial intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all
become productively superfluous," the artists added. "We will all be
'employed at Korsvägen', as it were."
Commentary on inequality
The artists were inspired by economist
Thomas Piketty, who argued that return on capital grows faster than average
wage increases in developed countries. In effect, the rich get richer while the
poor continue to struggle.
Goldin and Senneby said the project is
financially feasible because we live in a society where "money pays better
than work." As such, the artists plan to set up a foundation to oversee
the long-term investment of 6 million Swedish krona (about $633,000) -- the sum
of the prize money provided by the Public Art Agency Sweden and the Swedish
Transport Administration as part of the competition.
Capital gains from the investment will fund
the employee's salary for at least 120 years, according to the artists' estimates.
The pay, pension and holidays offered with
the position match those of an average public sector employee, according to the
proposal. If the money runs out, the employment would stop and the lights would
never turn on again, it said.
"That would imply an historical shift
in the relation between return on capital and wages," the artists wrote.
"A sustained period in which work pays better than money."
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