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 that the five-day week was impractical, uncompetitive and illogical, not only for steel workers, but for any other business. ‘The commandment says, “Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work.” The reason it didn’t say seven days is that the seventh day is a day of rest and that’s enough.’14
Judge Gary’s aversion to shorter hours drew on something much deeper than fear of commercial risk. He subscribed to a widely held belief that work was the God-given purpose of humankind. Where labour was brutal and coercive – as it so often was – it was helpful to distinguish between body and mind, as Descartes had suggested.15 For if humans were made ‘in the image of God’, then their Godlike essence could be safely located in the mind (or soul), which may be separate and immortal, leaving the mortal body to be honed and disciplined into a machine for the mines, mills and factories of industrial capitalism.
The mechanical clock was a vital component of that discipline. As clockwork became more reliable and widely used, it set the scene for what Marx identified as the commodification of time and what British historian E. P. Thompson described as the birth of ‘industrial time consciousness’.16 Industry required its human machines to operate predictably and reliably, in ways that could be measured, bought and sold.
According to time theorist Barbara Adam, the variable time of ‘seasons, ageing, growth and decay, joy and pain’ gave way to the ‘abstract time of the clock where one hour is the same irrespective of context and emotion’.17 We have since grown used to thinking about time in discrete, globally consistent units that can be counted uniformly – seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and so on. We live accordingly, staking out our lives by clock and calendar.
Clock time has served and strengthened a powerful work ethic that embraces the idea of hard work as a route to profit and success. This has deep roots in economic and cultural developments over several centuries. It has served modern capitalism well, but with increasingly toxic effects. For if long hours of paid work are the route to virtue and success, it follows that the main purpose and value of human existence is productive capacity. By this logic, those who are not ‘productive’ have no worth. Like wheat from chaff, hard-working ‘strivers’ are separated from lazy ‘skivers’.18 The former are rewarded, the latter punished – by increasingly ungenerous systems of ‘social protection’.
There are many politicians and business leaders who now seem keen to reverse the trend of reduced working time. They brag about sleep deprivation, while energy drinks, late-night gyms and self-help books propagate an ‘always on’ culture of relentless productivity. Tycoon Elon Musk of PayPal and SpaceX declares that ‘nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week’.19 Jack Ma, Chinese billionaire and CEO of the Alibaba Group, champions a ‘996’ routine of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.20 All these attitudes have contributed to a strong cultural bias in favour of long hours of work.
We can change what is ‘normal’
However, on both fronts – economic and cultural – there are some encouraging signs. Across advanced economies today, higher productivity is in fact associated with lower annual hours worked. Poorer countries such as Greece and Mexico are at one end of the spectrum, with higher annual hours and comparatively low productivity, while North European and Scandinavian countries sit at the other end, with higher productivity and lower annual hours. Countries such as the UK sit among high-productivity economies, but even here there are significant differences between countries. Consider the gap that exists between Germany and the UK, for example: in 2018 average annual hours worked per capita in Germany (1,363) were much lower than in the UK (1,538) while GDP per hour worked was much higher (109 compared with 103).21 No wonder people quip that German workers could lay down tools sometime around Thursday lunchtime and still get as much done as UK workers would by the end of Friday.
Comparing productivity across nations is problematic because it assumes a constant and comparable measure of price and value. But there is evidently no single set of rules for configuring an economy. There is no law for the number of working hours required to generate ‘success’. What matters is not just productivity, but who gains and how. The relationship between time spent working and other economic fundamentals may have significant path dependency, underpinned by culture and institutions. But history shows us that