The Case for a Four Day Week. Anna Coote

1 Introduction

      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.