Don't mourn for me friends,
Don't weep for me never,
For I'm going to do nothing
Forever and ever.
Traditional epitaph
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.
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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:
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.)
- 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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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
The first napkins were made of dough or bread. From the Spartans onwards, people would wipe their mucky fingers on slices of granary. I'm not sure if they ate them afterwards. 
