The case for progressive policies such as working time reduction and universal basic income is often narrowly built on their potential for increased productivity. Yet maximising output is not what people and the planet need. How do we shift the narrative?
The four-day working week as standard with no less of pay (and without longer hours each day) is an idea that is both gaining popularity and being implemented around Europe and beyond. Trials are discovering (unsurprisingly) that the four-day week delivers greater health and wellbeing of employees, better ability to meet care responsibilities, enjoy a social life and participate in community activities, and higher employee retention rates. These findings were confirmed by the world’s largest four-day working week trial to date, held in the UK in 2022.
The pausing of the long-term redistribution of time away from the slogging, endless labour of the 19th century towards John Maynard Keynes’ vision of a 15-hour working week (or a 21-hour week, put forward more than a decade ago by the New Economics Foundation) was a measure of the failure of late 20th-century politics and economics: it delivered profits for the few at massive cost to people and planet. Indeed the end of the 20th-century “Great Equalisation” of wealth in the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was also accompanied by a massive increase in the amount of household time spent in paid work. This was largely due to the drawing of many women into paid employment. Today, the two-income family is essential for basic quality of life in many parts of the world.
Not what I meant
While the benefits of working time reduction are obvious, there’s one element that should make us think carefully about exactly what we are aiming for. As an article for the World Economic Forum trumpets, the four-day week actually increases productivity (my italics). The article adds: “Work smarter not harder has been the mantra of management consultants for decades.”
I’ve long argued that this is a trade-off we politicians have to be offering in a post-growth world: less stuff in your life, but more life.
That starts to look slightly less idyllic, as it associates working time reduction to the model of hyper-efficient, mind-always-on-the-job Stakhanovism, as opposed to a more companionable, relaxed, chat-at-the-water-cooler environment of friendships and social support. Indeed the 4-Day Week Global campaign, which has organised pilot programmes across the world, has trademarked the “100:80:100” principle (100 per cent pay, 80 per cent of the time, 100 per cent productivity). They say: “It is crucial that the output is maintained to successfully implement a 4-day week”.1
We have not escaped from the cultural problem identified by environmental anthropologist Marie-Monique Franssen: “We glorify those who are ultra-productive and ultra-active”. And as she notes, this is making us ill, as well as helping to trash the planet.
From a post-growth perspective, we can respond to this productivist version of the four-day week in the words of T.S. Elliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock: “That is not what I meant at all”. One of the degrowth movement’s luminaries, Jason Hickel, explains in Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World that “as far as capital is concerned, the purpose of increasing production is not primarily to meet specific human needs, or to improve social outcomes. Rather, the purpose is to extract and accumulate an ever-rising quantity of profit. That is the overriding objective… every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.” And since the carbon intensity (and other environmental damage) of growth can be reduced, but the two factors not decoupled, as Tim Jackson demonstrated in Prosperity Without Growth, increased productivity is more than the planet can bear. Or, to go back to Hickel: “‘green growth’ is not a thing”.
Time for UBI
But does that mean post-growth and the four-day, or three-day, working week can’t go together? Clearly not. The 40-hour week is past its use-by date, as is evident in the UK, where long working hours (and commuting times) are linked to poor public health and wellbeing.
Reducing working hours is a public goal, one that is eminently politically “saleable”. No one lies on their deathbed and groans: “I wish I had spent more time in the office.” Indeed, I’ve long argued that this is a trade-off we politicians have to be offering in a post-growth world: less stuff in your life, but more life. Couldn’t we say that rather than chasing growth in GDP, we chase reduction in working hours? A reduction of, say, 15 minutes each year in the standard working week would mean gaining an extra hour per week every four years to do what you like – or to do politics, to “work” with others on reshaping your community and society to fit within the physical limits of this fragile planet while looking after human needs. (Yes, you might call it doughnut economics.)
Perhaps we need to come at this from the other end, looking at where the power lies, who decides what paid work looks like, and who takes part in it and for how long. We have ageing populations in the Global North (and increasingly in the Global South), heading towards – or already seeing – declining numbers of people of “working age”, however much that is extended. The UK is just an extreme outlier of governments seeking to get more people working, for longer. There is no choice but to “get a job” for nearly everyone – no matter how ill or burdened with caring responsibilities.
What if there was a choice? What if there was a universal basic income (UBI), a payment, guaranteed as a right once you are accepted as a member of society, that is enough to meet basic needs? No one could then tell you “get a job, any job”, with the threat of penury if you refuse to comply.
When asked about the drawbacks of a UBI society, I answer that you’d get a lot of bad poetry written.
That does not mean – to take a classic kneejerk rightwing response – lots of people will choose to sit on the sofa. This was not the result of the grandmother of UBI trials, in Manitoba, Canada, in the 1970s, where employment levels were maintained even though more young people stayed in education for longer. More recently, Finland’s UBI trial has added further evidence to the fact that those now excluded from the labour market by poverty and ill health, when -given a chance to spend cash, energy, and time getting “work-ready”, are more likely to be in employment or work longer hours.
Bad poets, free citizens
Again, you might ask how this fits with post-growth.
Well, the benefits of UBI are currently being measured in the world of the five-day week, a world in which basic income trials are time-limited (their major flaw in understanding all the potential benefits), and in which “a full-time job” is valorised. That’s not to say there is any doubt that paid work has positive effects beyond the financial. But it doesn’t have to be a lot of paid work. A fascinating and important study found that the minimum “dosage” of work needed for maximum health and wellbeing benefits was eight hours per week.2
When asked about the drawbacks of a UBI society, I answer that you’d get a lot of bad poetry written. This points to another issue that would need to be addressed – even in a society with UBI and a three-day working week as standard. It is the deeply ingrained notion that time has to be productively used, even when no payment is involved. Learn a language, develop a side hustle (when I talk to people today about a three-day week they often raise this issue – having several jobs is so essential to their survival today that it is hard to imagine a life without them), read an improving book. In a world in which competing to get ahead is taken as a necessary every-waking-moment endeavour, many children are raised in this frame from their earliest days. The individual is a product that has to be constantly improved, ultimately for the purpose of paid (maybe better-paid) work.
This is very much an artefact of the 21st-century post-industrial work ethic, as James A. Chamberlain has dubbed it. Yet even back in 1930, Keynes thought that one of the problems of the 15-hour week would be that people would not know what to do with all of that “spare” time. Is that any wonder though, when, as Kathi Weeks notes in The Problem with Work Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, “successful” family raising of children, schooling, medical treatment, welfare systems, and criminal justice systems are all judged by whether their products are “work-ready”? Paid work “is not only the primary mechanism by which income is distributed, it is also the basic means by which status is allocated,” and “often the most important, if not sole, source of sociality for millions”.
Yet this has not been the reality of human life for the vast bulk of human history. Hunter-gatherer societies, it seems, often worked an average of three hours a day; medieval European peasants enjoyed four or five months holiday a year, which more than made up for six-day weeks (with days no longer than now). It was capitalism, combined with the Protestant work ethic, that robbed the working woman and man of their time, energy, and other sources of identity.
So if we’re thinking about time and post-growth together, freeing our bodies from the demands of the bosses, and our minds from the run-away work ethic, are essential companions. That means stopping competing with each other, being, living, thriving.
- My first boss, the lovely late Barry Clarke at the Cootamundra Herald newspaper in Australia 35 years ago, used to insist that everyone downed tools for a communal morning tea break, and that they didn’t talk work in that time. It helped make the workplace a community for a disparate mixture of office, printroom and journalistic staff. If it still survived today, would it make the 100:80:100 cut? ↩︎
- When we are talking post-growth, we are of course talking about the Global North, where nations are collectively consuming between five (the US) and three times (UK and Europe) their share of the planet’s resources every year. In the Global South, outcomes of UBI such as increased productivity (as shown by a large study in Kenya) can postively contribute to meeting society’s needs. ↩︎