Future Fodder...the shorter work week

Don't mourn for me friends,

Don't weep for me never,

For I'm going to do nothing

Forever and ever.

Traditional epitaph

[source]

On January 11th 2012 there was a panel discussion and lecture at the London School of Economics called "About Time: Examining the case for a shorter working week".

It was run by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), who call themselves a 'think-and-do tank', and who published a preliminary report in 2010 suggesting a 21 hour work week would reap huge benefits.

Now their aim is to build the case in more depth, explore the evidence and think more about ways of overcoming practical and cultural obstacles.

A bit of background

The idea of a shorter working week is far from a new one. Here are some instances where it has come up in multiple ways in the past:

• In 1974, Prime Minister Ted Heath imposed an emergency 3-day work week on the nation in response to a nationwide coal miners’ strike. It lasted 3-4 months. [source]

• In the 19th Century the UK govt passed the Factory Acts. These were essentially to improve working conditions for factory workers. The first Factory Act in 1802 stated that children between 9 and 13 years old could work no more than 8 hours in a day. The 1856 Factory Act stated that women and children could only work from 6am - 6pm in the summer and 7am - 7pm in the winter.

• In his 1931 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, the eminent economist JM Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek for his grandkiddies generation. He also notes a distinction between two classes of human needs - absolute needs (food, shelter etc) and "those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above...our fellows." He does say that this latter grouping may be insatiable, but I think he would be flabberghasted to see quite how much those needs now rule the economy and society.

Keynes, who also promoted
acceptance of homosexuality

• Though still maintaining a 40 hour workweek, in 2008 the state of Utah, USA experimented with shortening the number of days worked: In August 2008, they redefined the workweek for more than 17,000 of its employees so that they worked 10 hours on 4 days a week and not at all on Fri, Sat and Sun. By May 2009, the state had saved $1.8million and 82% of workers involved said they would prefer to stick to the new routine. [source]

• The European Work Directive of 1993 made a maximum workweek of 48 hours for EU member states. However it also had an opt-out clause - and guess what, the UK opted out. Essentially, we have a law that no one can be forced to work more than 48 hours per week, unless they wish to do so. So yeah, we don't really have a maximum. [source] [source]

There are loads more examples of legislation and policy ideas on workweeks; those are just a handful.

Here's what the experts said...

On the panel were:

Juliet Schor - Professor of Economics at Boston University and author of these related tomes

Lord Skidelsky - Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University, he's way too impressive to reduce to a couple of lines - check out his site.

Tim Jackson - Professor of Sustainable Developtment at Surrey University and author of this book which I'll be doing a post on soon.

Anna Coote - chaired the panel, Head of Social Policy NEF

You can watch the event yourself at this webpage.

So, here's what NEF and the panel reckon about a shorter work week:

• "The time's right to think about time" - Coote: We need to start thinking about how we value time, money and products, and reassess those valuations. For example, by trading some money for some more time.

• Cutting working hours could: reap environmental benefits through less use of fuel in travel or powering work places; encourage more active participation in citizen affairs due to freed up time; improve health and stress levels; leave more time for relationships and family; reduce inequality and unemployment by redistribution of hours - less hours per person equals more people able to get some hours of work; potentially increase output in some fields.
•  Even if we could grow our way out of unemployment/recession, we don't want to: working hours are closely related to ecological issues and carbon footprints. Higher hours = higher footprint. The more you work, the more you degrade.

• Time-stressed households behave in a more carbon intensive way. (I don't have a stat for you proving this one, though I can imagine that it'd be accurate - most labour-saving home stuff requires electricity. You'd be more likely to drive or fly to places.) 

• To accumulate without end is pathological, i.e. to keep working more in order to make more money to buy more things that aren't necessities or above a certain low-level of comfort is an illness.

• We need to start thinking about our working experience qualitatively, not quantatively; i.e. about the quality of it, not how much of it we do.

• "Pathology of squeezing time through the frame of productivity growth to increase output in the economy" - Tim Jackson

•  Behavioural economics tells us that we have 'asymmetrical preferences': Applied here this means that people feel very differently about income that they already have compared to income that they don't yet have - we are resistant to giving up what we do have, yet not resistant to forgoing future earnings. That's why people like direct debits.

• The "delusive promise of more consumption" (Schor) perpetuates us passively taking on longer hours than necessary.

This is from www.getrichslowly.org

They ask us to consider what is Enough, what is Necessity, what is the Purpose of our working day, and how much do our unpaid activities (home life, leisure etc) become eroded by our working hours.

The problems with the idea

There are the general problems noted in the public domain about this idea.

The first is glaringly obvious: Some people barely earn enough to live off working over 40 hours/week on the minimum wage - how on earth could they live off 21 hours pay?

Prof. Juliet Schor
looking cheerful

Schor said in the panel discussion this: "the trajectory of progressive work time reduction in which you can use productivity growth to finance those changes [in work hours means that you don't] need to take income away from people."

So basically she's saying that somehow, people would still earn the same amount. She also said that minimum wage would need to go up. This is where the idea seems to turn into widespread income redistribution - which is a Good Thing in and of itself, but makes this whole 21 hour work week caboodle a lot more complex and unlikely.

Secondly, the argument that it would reduce carbon footprint slightly depends upon what people do with their extra day off. If Larry goes off and arsons a forest, it's not so helpful ecologically. Bad Larry.

For some reason this is what came
up when I image searched
'lump of labour'.

Thirdly and more technically, there's the lump-of-labour fallacy

This is basically the notion that there is not a finite amount of work available - i.e. that an economy can always generate enough work to employ its whole population.

This is what Schor has said here in response to someone bringing it up:

"Here’s a little bit of what’s wrong with that argument. It’s about a closed economy–not a set of wealthy countries in a global system with severe inequities and free movement of capital. There’s no reason that jobs are created in the wealthy (and declining) parts of the world. And second, climate change requirements act are a constraint on labor demand/job creation."

There's also the rather massive question of how we'd go about putting this new work week in place - would businesses start it? Would the govt regulate? Etc.

Parkinson's Law

Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the time available to do it in. It was first used in 1955 by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in an humourous essay for The Economist [read it here].

Combining that adage and the basic assumption that it is better for the environment and society to try to consume less, a shorter working week makes rather a lot of sense.

I'd love to see or hear about some companies in the UK trying this one out.

The 10-4 notion (see above about Utah; 4 days a week working 10 hours daily) is a really interesting one and surely one worth testing out over here. It doesn't affect pay as the total number of hours worked weekly remains the same, but it does free up a whole extra day. The 5 day 9-5 grind is as much a construct as imposing this new version of the work week would be.

The Commonsense Sniff-o-meter
on youcanarguewithstupid:
rotten haddock - eggy - pine fresh

However, the idea of a 21 hour work week rates Eggy on my Commonsense Sniff-o-meter. It is SUCH a vast reduction, that I don't see how it would ever come about (except over a huge number of years - which the environment doesn't really have). We live in a largely passive society and the 9-5 is so strongly ingrained that a smaller shift is far more likely to come into effect. So for me, the 4-10 model rates Pine Fresh, and could be a starting point for bigger changes.

But the point isn't really about the numbers - it's about starting to think properly about how we live, and how we can improve our wellbeing. This is all part of that.

Any move towards normalising shorter work hours (whilst having a living wage) has to be a good thing. The insatiable wish to consume, to accumulate and to compete in a 24 hour globalised world has led many people and industries to a point where they no longer consider how they use their time, they just use it. But time as a commodity needs consideration; what should the division of it between economic and social use be?

To wind up, here's Keynes again in the same essay as above:

The love of money as a possession as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

youcanarguewithstupid

Guardian's lovely photos from the 1974 shorter workweek here
Juliet Schor explaining her argument for here
Books that talk about subjects touched on here (other than the panel's books):
How to be Free - Tom Hodgkinson
The Age of Absurdity - Michael Foley
Affluenza - Oliver James
Small is Beautiful - E F Schumacher
Articles about a 4 day work week:
Guardian
Inc



Future Fodder... the Maximum Wage

Today the news is all about RBS Chief Exec Stephen Hester waiving his £963,000 shares-only bonus.

This comes after enormous media pressure and an impending Commons debate on whether he's worth such a rewards. In that face of villification and the unpicking of his abilities, Hester caved, saying he feared 'pariah' status.


The reality is that Hester's million pound present is not the problem. It's a drop in an oceon of zeros surfed by every Fat Cat in town. Bob Diamond of Barclays is in line for a cool £10 million. Note that Barclays signed up to the govt's Merlin Agreement - part of which was an agreement to curb bonuses.


Outside banking, these sorts of nine figure boons are par for the course.

Here's the thing. Let's not lynch one greedy man-is-an-island banking boss. Let's look at a culture that allows people to earn this sort of money for working no less hard than those on a fraction of the wage. Hester surely does not believe that his work is more essential or stressful than that of a paramedic in the UK, which is £29,284.

Thinking Girl's Crumpet George
Monbiot

George Monbiot has written this excellent article on why now is the time for the introduction of a Maximum Wage.


Don't forget, we only got the Minimum Wage in 1999, with strong opposition from business and the Tories. It seems ludicrous now that only a few years ago you could be paid 50p/hour if your boss chose. It is equally ludicrous that there are people earning 1000 times the median national wage (Monbiot).

Dan Ariely and his colleagues have shown us that, above a certain level of income, more money doesn't actually improve performance [watch this video or have a look at this]. The notion that the promise of big financial rewards is causally linked to better output is a fallacy. We also know that the sort of inequality this high pay culture is contributing to has horrendous repercussions for society as a whole [read this book].

The Commonsense Sniff-o-meter
on youcanarguewithstupid:
rotten haddock - eggy - pine fresh

To me, the Maximum Wage scores pine-fresh on the Common Sense Sniff-o-meter. But let's take a quick tour of the arguments against.



In his 2009 essay for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Tom Papworth said this:

"It is based upon two related errors: that earning more than a certain amount is unnecessary, excessive and even obscene; and that there should be a certain proportion between individual earnings. At the root of these lies the belief that there is a decent amount that people should earn, above which one is earning too much. Its origins lie in a puritanical rejection of wealth. A rich man, as we all know, cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, and when one is seeking to make an egalitarian heaven on earth, there is no room for the rich. Basically, it is institutionalised envy."

This argument, which seems to be what's colloquially known as "you're all just haterrrrz" doesn't really deserve to be called an argument at all. He's neatly overlooked the idea that it might not be envy at all, but a truly held belief and reasoned opinion that the sort of wealth disparity we have today is morally/ethically unacceptable and that yes, there is an obscenity to it given the dire poverty some in the world live in. Swarovski-studded baby prams are pretty bloody obscene.

He gets worse:
"There is no reason, functionally or morally, why a person should not enjoy any amount of wealth. Wealth is not limited, after all. There is no lump of wealth than needs to be shared out. If you want more money you can make more money: work harder; take more successful risks; use information more efficiently and effectively than others."

Would some nice international volunteering project like to send Mr Pap-worth to Darfur for a month or two? Rural China? Ex-mining towns in the UK? Perhaps he forgot about the majority of the world in the 5 minutes he took to write this piece, and was only thinking of Western white people with full mobility based in one of the richest cities in the world who had the fortune of good education.

He goes on to mention the C-word... Communism... as the big bad poster boy of ideas like this one. But that's highly simplistic; it's not Stalin or the astronomical inequality we have now. Maximum wage policy isn't about equalising all wages, it's about narrowing the gap. It isn't about impoverishing and homogenising people; it's about saying let's spread all this wealth around a little, and you can keep your nice house, and probably your country cottage too, but possibly not all 3 Jags.

Mr Papworth wrote his article in response to the launch of a High Pay Commission. The Commission (set up by Compass, a democratic left pressure group) ended in late 2011 and recommended the following measures:

The commission calls for a number of reforms, including a "radical simplification" of executive pay, putting employees on remuneration committees and publishing the top 10 executive pay packages more widely. [sources below]

These ideas are very much in the public domain at the moment, but will any of them actually happen? And if they do happen, will they have any effect? One of the main arguments within this agenda is strategy; legislation or self-regulation and transparency? I know which I have the most faith in.

One of the other main objections is that the 'talent' will go elsewhere. This is basically your war-on-terrorism argument: create a bogeyman scenario and everyone will roll over and say ok. It is posturing. We would potentially lose some executives, but hardly all. These are people with millions in the bank and homes and families here, in the UK. Let's be realistic.

The cowardly lion from the Wizard
of Oz

My main question is what's happened to the ideal of being the vanguard? What's with all this lemming-like behaviour? We're terrified that if we make life a little less cushy for the wealthy here, they'll run off to where it's more cushy. But what if that haven changed its' laws too? It's called leadership.

Maybe one day the Maximum Wage will seem as much a part of common sense as the Minimum Wage.

youcanarguewithstupid

Sources:
BBC News on Hester's decision here
RBS performance under Hester here
Institute of Economic Affairs, Pap-worth against the maximum wage idea here
More on the Merlin Agreement, including why it's 'toothless' here
The Equality Trust, fighting for a more equal society here
High Pay Commission here
BBC report on HPC here