The Case for a Four Day Week. Anna Coote

socially constructed – and therefore we can change it.

There is nothing ‘normal’ or ‘inevitable’ about doing paid work for five days or 40 hours a week. Nor should the process of selling our time control and shape all other aspects of our experience. We reject the assumption that we live to work, work to earn, and strive to earn more in order to buy more things because that’s supposed to be good for the economy. After all, the whole point of economic activity is to serve the interests of people and the planet – not the other way around.

      Too much work can ruin our health. Beyond a certain level, having more money doesn’t make us any happier. Buying increasingly resource-intensive stuff risks breaching the limits of our finite planet and tipping the whole world towards catastrophe. Time is an asset to be nurtured and cherished. Unpaid time is far too valuable to be squeezed and shunted into small corners of our lives.

      So these are strong reasons for moving towards a shorter working week, and they have been thrown into sharp relief by the social and economic effects of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

In the next chapter we explore these reasons in more detail, in particular how reduced hours of paid work can bring benefits to society and the environment. In Chapter 3, we consider and respond to a range of challenges to our proposal, including questions about choice, leisure and pay, and whether reduced hours will be bad for the economy. In Chapter 4, we describe how it’s done in practice – from government interventions and trade union negotiations to initiatives by individual employers and cross-sectoral campaigning. In Chapter 5, we set out a route map for the transition to a shorter working week.

Notes

      1 1. J. Walker and R. Fontinha (2019), Four Better or Four Worse? Research White Paper. Reading: Henley Business School, p. 8. https://assets.henley.ac.uk/defaultUploads/Journalists-Regatta-2019-White-Paper-FINAL.pdf?

      2 2. C. Ibbetson (2019), ‘Business backs a four-day working week’, Yougov. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/finance/articles-reports/2019/09/23/business-backs-four-day-working-week.

      3 3. R. Skidelsky and E. Skidelsky (2013), How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life. London: Penguin, pp. 29–30.

      4 4. TUC (2019), A Future that Works for Working People. London: TUC. https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/FutureofWorkReport1.pdf.

      5 5. D. Sage (2019), ‘Unemployment, wellbeing and the power of the work ethic: Implications for social policy’, Critical Social Policy 39(2): 205–228.

      6 6. Letters to the Editor (2019), ‘Future of the NHS and Labour’s four-day week’, The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/future-of-the-nhs-and-labour-s-four-day-week-hs0f6qknj.

      7 7. See E. Aveling (1890), ‘The eight-hour working day’, Time, pp. 632–638. https://www.marxists.org/history/interna-tional/social-democracy/time/aveling-june.htm.

      8 8. K. Marx (1894), Capital, Volume 3. London: Penguin, ch. 48.

      9 9. The Green Institute (2016), Can Less Work Be More Fair? A Discussion Paper on Universal Basic Income and Shorter Working Week. https://www.greeninstitute.org.au/publications/less-work-more-fair/.

      10 10. ‘C001 – Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919’. https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C001.

      11 11. B. K. Hunnicutt (1984), ‘The end of shorter hours’, Labor History 25(3): 373–404.

      12 12. B. K. Hunnicutt (1996), Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

      13 13. A. Martin (2019) ‘Insecure work: Are we at the tipping point?’. https://neweconomics.org/2019/06/insecure-work-are-we-at-tipping-point.

      14 14. E. H. Gary, quoted in (1926), ‘Attitude of certain employers to 5-day week’, Monthly Labor Review 23(6): 16–17.

      15 15. T. Messer-Kruse (2011), The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terror and Justice in the Gilded Age. New York: Springer.

      16 16. E. P. Thompson (1967), ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’, Past & Present 38: 56–97.

      17 17. B. Adam (2013), ‘Clock time: Tyrannies and alternatives’, in A. Coote and J. Franklin, Time on Our Side. London: New Economics Foundation, pp. 35–36.

      18 18. A. Coote and S. Lyall (2013), Strivers v. Skivers: The Workless Are Worthless. London: New Economics Foundation. https://libcom.org/files/Strivers_vs._skivers_full-publication.pdf.

      19 19. E. Musk (2018), Tweet, 26 November. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1067173497909141504.

      20 20.20 J. Ma (2019), ‘Jack Ma endorses China’s controversial 12 hours a day, 6 days a week work culture’, CNN Business. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/15/business/jack-ma-996-china/index.html.

      21 21. OECD data (2018). https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm.