The Case for a Four Day Week E-Book

Anna Coote

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 159

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Not so long ago, people thought that a ten-hour, six-day week was normal; now, it's the eight-hour, five-day week. Will that soon be history too? In this book, three leading experts argue why it should be. They map out a pragmatic pathway to a shorter working week that safeguards earnings for the lower-paid and keeps the economy flourishing. They argue that this radical vision will give workers time to be better parents and carers, allow men and women to share paid and unpaid work more equally, and help to save jobs - and create new ones - in the post-pandemic era. Not only that, but it will combat stress and illness caused by overwork and help to protect the environment. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever felt they could live and work a lot better if all weekends were three days long.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Epigraph

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

Where did ‘normal’ come from?

Economic developments

Cultural developments

We can change what is ‘normal’

Notes

2 Why We Need a Shorter Working Week

Health and wellbeing

Distributions of work and time

Paid and unpaid labour

Gender relations

Transforming childcare

Co-producing public services

Taking control and enriching democracy

Safeguarding the environment

Notes

3 Some Challenges

Will a shorter working week mean that people can’t choose?

Is leisure more sustainable?

What about pay?

Is a shorter working week bad for the economy?

Rethinking the goals of the economy

Notes

4 Learning from Practical Experience

State-led interventions

Negotiated agreements at sector and workplace levels

Employers’ initiatives

Learning from practical experience

Notes

5 A Road Map for Transition

Preparing the ground

Supporting innovation

Strengthening and extending existing entitlements

Changing the climate of opinion

Embedding change and building momentum

Notes

In Conclusion

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1

: Average annual hours actually worked per worker, 1950–2018, all G7 countries wit…

Chapter 4

Figure 2

: Average annual hours actually worked per worker, 1990–2018, selected countries a…

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PRAISE FORTHE CASE FOR A FOUR-DAY WEEK

‘A compelling argument for limiting working hours to the equivalent of a four day week, backed by a range of suggested policy initiatives. Particularly valuable is the demonstration of the beneficial effects of reduced hours on the morale and performance of employees, and the account of case studies in reduction from round the world.’

ROBERT SKIDELSKY, British economic historian, member of UK House of Lords, biographer of John Maynard Keynes

‘Timely and important. A punchy, persuasive analysis of how a shorter working week can boost our collective health and wealth. A must-read for anyone who wants real change at work.’

FRANCES O’GRADY, General Secretary, UK Trades Union Congress

‘Amid the threat of COVID-19, a powerful idea is emerging: the four day workweek. It promotes quality of life, employment, de-carbonization and public health. Based on the latest research and compelling stories of companies and countries that have reduced worktime, this is the go-to book for understanding why it’s time to reject austerity and commit to true sharing – of work, income and planet.’

JULIET SCHOR, Professor of Sociology, Boston College, author ofThe Overworked American

‘This is a hugely timely and important book. Working long hours takes a heavy toll on people’s mental and physical health, and it’s clearly time to turn our focus towards people’s health and well-being, rather than the relentless pursuit of GDP growth. A shorter working week is a vital step in that process. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, now is the time to re-think how we live our lives and care for our planet – this book sets out, clearly and powerfully, a compelling agenda for change.’

CAROLINE LUCAS, MP, UK Green Party

The Case For series

Sam Pizzigati, The Case for a Maximum Wage

Louise Haagh, The Case for Universal Basic Income

James K. Boyce, The Case for Carbon Dividends

Frances Coppola, The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing

Joe Guinan & Martin O’Neill, The Case for Community Wealth Building

Anna Coote & Andrew Percy, The Case for Universal Basic Services

Gerald Friedman, The Case for Medicare for All

Pavlina R. Tcherneva, The Case for a Job Guarantee

Anna Coote, Aidan Harper & Alfie Stirling, The Case for a Four-Day Week

The Case for a Four-Day Week

Anna Coote

Aidan Harper

Alfie Stirling

polity

Copyright © Anna Coote, Aidan Harper and Alfie Stirling 2021

The right of Anna Coote, Aidan Harper and Alfie Stirling to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3966-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Coote, Anna, author. | Harper, Aidan, author. | Stirling, Alfie, author.Title: The case for a four-day week / Anna Coote, Aidan Harper, Alfie Stirling.Other titles: Case for a 4 day weekDescription: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: The case for | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “How a longer weekend can make us happier, healthier and greener”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020026325 (print) | LCCN 2020026326 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509539642 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509539659 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509539666 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Workweek. | Quality of work life. | Work-life balance. | Time management.Classification: LCC HD5106 .C666 2021 (print) | LCC HD5106 (ebook) | DDC 331.25/722--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026325LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026326

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Eda Yazıcı for her extremely helpful additional research.

We are also grateful to the Communication Workers’ Union for supporting the New Economics Foundation’s work on a four-day week.

1Introduction

It is often said that ‘time is money’, but time is far more precious than that. Even if we don’t have money, we always have time. It’s a finite resource because we don’t live forever – and in that sense it’s all we’ve got, or all we can be sure of. How we experience our time and how much control we have over it are of the utmost importance to all of us.

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: ‘Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.’ But what is ‘reasonable’ and how much ‘rest and leisure’ is enough? In this book we set out arguments for a four-day week because we think the world would be a better place – and our lives would be much improved – if we spent less time working for money and had more time at our own disposal.

Would that appeal to you? Here are just a few of the answers we might expect:

Yes, please! I’m totally worn out working five days a week.

Four days would be a lot better than no days at all. No thanks. I need more work, not less, to make ends meet.

I’d love more time off work, but not if it means less pay. I want more money to live a better life.

The boss wouldn’t stand for it. I’d end up trying to squeeze five days’ work into four.

So it’s not a simple proposition. And therefore the ‘four-day week’ in our title is shorthand for a more nuanced set of proposals. Our aim is to reduce the hours that anyone is obliged to work to earn a decent living – to four days or around 30 hours a week or the equivalent across a year. How people allocate their paid working time should be as flexible as possible to suit their own requirements. We don’t envisage a compulsory four-day week for all, but the gradual introduction of a range of measures to reduce working time in ways that benefit everyone by improving the quality of their lives. Throughout the following pages, we use the terms ‘a shorter working week’ or ‘reduced working time’ interchangeably to convey this idea.

It may mean a year’s worth of three-day weekends, or five ‘spare’ afternoons every week, or even a longer break if the extra hours can be banked and redeemed for a week or more at a time. You can spend this in any number of ways. You can look after your kids, visit your mum, hang out with your friends, study a course, run round the park, put up shelves, paint pictures, invent a new app, join a band or a campaign group, learn to dance, play the bazooka – you name it.

Most people like the idea of spending less time in paid work. UK surveys published in 2019 showed that 70 per cent of employees believe a four-day week would improve their mental wellbeing,1 and 64 per cent of businesses supported the idea of adopting a four-day week.2 Understandably, there’s more enthusiasm among employees if they anticipate no cut in take-home pay.3 But according to the Trades Union Congress, more than 3 million people in the UK would like to work fewer hours even if it would result in less pay, and 10 million people would like to work fewer hours overall.4 It’s not that people are work-shy. On the contrary, having access to decent work is closely linked to wellbeing and happiness.5 However, people want more time to use as they wish. You won’t find many who are longing to spend more hours at work, unless it’s to earn extra money (and we’ll come to that). Some have regrets about how they have led their life, but it’s rare to find someone who says ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’.

Yet there is a kind of collective addiction to long hours of hard graft, a belief that it’s good for us all and the only way to keep the show on the road. In a letter to The Times in November 2019, a retired consultant radiologist deplored the UK Labour Party’s pledge to introduce a four-day working week. The NHS had already been ‘brought to its knees’, she declared, by limiting the hours of junior doctors to 56 a week. A four-day week would seriously damage their education ‘and possibly sink the health service’.6 This may be an extreme case, but it illustrates the point that many of us have found it hard to imagine a satisfactory alternative to the status quo. Whether the working week lasts for 40 hours or much longer, what is ‘normal’ has usually been perceived as natural or inevitable and, by implication, right and irreversible. That’s a long way from the truth – and if anyone doubts that, just think how far the 2020 COVID-19 crisis disrupted everyday normalities in countries across the world.

Where did ‘normal’ come from?

So let’s take a closer look at how our current ideas about ‘normal’ took shape. In nineteenth-century Britain, a regular working day ranged from 10 to 16 hours, typically for six days a week. From the midnineteenth century onwards, workers on both sides of the Atlantic campaigned for a ‘just and sufficient’ limit to their hours of labour. The eight-hour movement gathered strength, and workers came out in their thousands to demand ‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will’.7 Karl Marx maintained that shortening the working day was a ‘basic prerequisite’ of what he described as the ‘true realm of freedom’,8 and this became a central issue for socialist and labour movements in industrialized countries across the world.

In 1856, stonemasons in Melbourne, Australia, fought successfully for an eight-hour working day – a global first.9 In 1889, gas workers in East London became the first to do so in Britain. In 1919, the nascent International Labour Organization (ILO) set out its Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, establishing the principle of an eight-hour day, or 40-hour week, which has since been ratified by 52 countries.10

In 1926 the US Ford Motor Company was one of the first major employers to adopt a five-day, 40-hour week for workers in their factories – with no reduction in pay. Productivity increased and the corporation went from strength to strength.11 In 1930, the cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg replaced three daily eight-hour shifts at his plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, with four six-hour shifts. Results included big cuts in absenteeism, turnover and labour costs, and a 41 per cent reduction in workplace accidents.12

Franklin D. Roosevelt launched his ‘President’s Re-employment Agreement’ in 1933, urging US employers to raise hourly wages and cut the length of the working week to 35 hours. Roosevelt shared the view of UK economist John Maynard Keynes that government spending could stimulate the economy and that there was a strong relationship between higher productivity and shorter hours of work. He hoped to get more people back into work and – by raising wages at the same time – boost consumption and growth. Firms readily signed up, and between 1.5 million and 2 million new jobs were created.

A combination of industrial struggles and government initiatives ensured that the two-day weekend and the 40-hour week were widely adopted as standard by the middle of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. Average working hours continued to fall, as Figure 1 indicates, but less steeply from the 1980s. After that, the trend flattened in many countries and in some went into reverse.

In 1930, Keynes famously predicted that a 15-hour week would be the norm by the twenty-first century – how wrong he was! What happened to put a brake on progress towards reduced working time? A combination of economic and cultural developments have locked us into the eight-hour day norm.

Figure 1: Average annual hours actually worked per worker, 1950–2018, all G7 countries with data pre-1971 and the OECD average.

Source: OECD https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AVE_HRS

Economic developments

When Keynes made his ill-fated prediction, he assumed that economy-wide labour productivity – that is, gross domestic product (GDP) per hour worked – would rise to a level that enabled society’s needs to be met while everyone spent far fewer hours in paid employment. He anticipated an era of ‘material abundance’, bringing with it a challenge to ensure that it would ‘yield up the fruits of a good life’.

For three decades following the Second World War, productivity did indeed rise quickly. At the same time, collective bargaining played a prominent role in the wider economy; so too did public sector coordination. Partly as a result of this, gains from productivity growth were more evenly distributed across society, in terms of both rising pay and falling average working hours.

But from the 1980s, the rules governing advanced economies began to change. Rates of growth in labour productivity started to fall as overall levels of investment by firms and governments receded. The composition of industry also started to shift, with a decline in manufacturing and a rise of the service sector. Information and communications-based technology became increasingly dominant, but appeared to have lower marginal gains for measurable GDP growth than the improvements in manufacturing and production seen in earlier decades.

The economic pie was increasing more slowly overall. More crucially still, a larger share of it started to shift towards property owners and shareholders at the expense of workers. The capacity of trade unions to bargain for better pay and conditions was undermined, most notably in the UK during the 1980s but in other countries and decades as well. Overall, pay increased at even slower rates compared with returns on wealth. The average level of unemployment rose significantly. Income inequality rose to unprecedented post-war heights across Europe and North America, and then stubbornly remained high through various manifestations of both ‘left’ and ‘right’ governments across different countries. The rate of progress towards more leisure time slowed down conspicuously.

The 2008 financial crisis fired the starting gun for a third major post-war evolution in power and reward across advanced economies. In the UK, for example, the long-run rate of productivity growth has dropped by two-thirds since 2008. This has been both cause and effect of a marked increase in low-paid, insecure work and a period of weak pay increases without precedent in modern records. One in six workers in the UK (more than five million people) are experiencing low pay alongside some form of insecurity at work;13 many are trapped in a revolving door between low pay and no pay at all. Meanwhile, in many other countries – notably in Southern Europe – unemployment remains very high. Alongside these disturbing trends, reductions in the average working week have stalled since 2008 for the longest period since before the Second World War.

Cultural developments

Behind all this, a powerful confluence of ideas has shaped prevailing attitudes about what is ‘right’ as well as ‘normal’. In 1926 – the same year Ford Motor Company introduced the five-day 40-hour week – Judge Elbert H. Gary, board chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, told the New York Times