In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that most of us would be working a fifteen hour week within a century. Sadly, unless something drastic happens in the next nine years, I think it’s safe to say he got that one wrong.
But according to Peter Cheese, chairman of the government’s Flexible Working Taskforce, we may be about to see a radical shake up in our working habits, one of which could include a notable cut in the time most of us spend working. Speaking to Politico, Mr Cheese said, ‘There are a variety of mechanisms by which you can support people in these more flexible ways of working, which can be helpful in terms of inclusion and wellbeing and balance of life.
‘What we refer to as the standard five-day working week, that's what will begin to change. And it could emerge in lots of different forms, one of which could be a four-day working week.’
It might not be quite as alluring as the prospect of working just fifteen hours a week but is the four day work week the step we need to take on the road to realising Keynes’ vision? Is it an idea whose time has finally come?
The background
The terms ‘midweek’, ‘work days’ and ‘weekend’ are so imbedded in our culture it’s easy to forget that the five-day week is a relatively modern invention. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word ‘weekend’ to 1879 when it was used in a British magazine called Notes and Queries. Even then, the term only referred to Saturday evening and Sunday.
The final day of the week has been established as a day of rest in most western countries for hundreds of years but Saturday used to be just another work day. While the exact details are sketchy, the move to a five day week in this country happened gradually throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century, with factory workers asking their employers for more time to rest from their excruciating psychical toil, and employers noticing the benefits of having a better-rested workforce.
As late as the 1930s most factory workers were still expected to work Saturday mornings. John Boot, chairman of the Boots corporation, made the five-day week company policy in 1934, in large part to prevent increased efficiency leading to mass redundancies. Many employers soon followed suit but, as we shall see later, there is nothing in UK law that mandates a five-day week.
Trials around the world
Japan is a country so renowned for its tireless work ethic it even has its own word, ‘karoshi’, for ‘death from overwork.’
Nevertheless, the government are currently encouraging Japanese firms to make the shift, with Martin Schulz, chief policy economist at Japanese firm Fujitsu, telling Deutsche Welle: ‘The government is really very keen for this change in attitude to take root at Japanese companies.
‘During the pandemic, companies have shifted to new ways of operating and they are seeing a gradual increase in productivity.
‘Companies are having their employees work from home or remotely, at satellite offices or at their customers’ locations, which can be far more convenient and productive for many.”
Spain is currently trialing the four-day week with 200 mid-size companies taking part over the next three years. The Spanish government is putting €50 million of the EU’s coronavirus recovery scheme towards the project.
A tech company in Southern Spain has already dipped its toe into the idea, by investing €400,000 to reduce working hours for its 190 employees last year. The results showed a 20% rise in sales and a 28% reduction in people missing work through illness.
Meanwhile, one firm in New Zealand tested the idea by reducing the working week to four days while keeping staff on full-pay. A staff survey showed that twenty-four percent of employees were happier with their work-life balance, seven per cent were less stressed and there was no negative impact on productivity.
However, one US company fared less well when they found the results were so poor they were faced with the option of switching back to five days or making some of their staff redundant. They chose the former. Likewise, a firm in Sweden discovered they would have to take on new staff to keep up their output.
Meanwhile Iceland will shortly be granting most workers the right to a shorter working week after a trial which reduced the average hours from 40 to 35 was deemed a success.
Notable advocates
Closer to home, the notion of a four day week was something that was championed by the Labour Party ahead of the last election, with chancellor John McDonnell saying ‘the link between increasing productivity and expanded free time has been broken.’
In May 2020, Mr McDonnell co-signed a letter with the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas and others, calling on the government to introduce a four-day week as a way of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. The letter argued that ‘shorter working time has been used throughout history as a way of responding to economic crises’, and that the change ‘would give many more opportunities to the growing list of unemployed people which already stands at 2.8 million people.’
Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, has come at the issue from a different angle, claiming that a four-day week would help the post-Covid recovery because it would ‘certainly’ boost tourism.
Notable critics
At the 2019 election, the Conservatives sought to paint a bleak picture of what the country would look like if Labour got its way and reduced the working week. They claimed that it would cost the NHS alone £6.1 billion a year.
But does the establishment of Peter Cheese’s Flexible Working Taskforce signal a change of heart from the government? Well, for the moment, probably not, with a Downing Street spokesman insisting: ’There are no plans to get to a four day working week in the UK. Employees and employers need to be able to make arrangements which work best in that particular circumstance. But we are committed to consulting on flexible working. That's why we are looking for suggestions from the chairman of the government's Working Taskforce.’
Despite his initial enthusiasm for the idea of a four-day week, Mr Cheese himself admitted ‘I don’t think we’re at that point.’
The columnist Rod Liddle has been heavily critical of the Flexible Working Taskforce’s recommendations, claiming that, while a four-day week might be fine for the public sector, it simply would not be possible in the private sector without salary cuts. ’An economy in which the public sector is growing and growing and the private sector shrinking is an economy that is on a one-way ticket to bankruptcy.’
So will it happen?
If we are trying to work out whether or not a slightly diluted version of John Maynard Keynes’ dream will come to pass, there are two different questions to bear in mind.
The first: Is the four day week a good idea?
The second: Should it be enforced by the government?
The first question is open for debate and, if you’re a business leader who is broadly in favour of the idea, there’s nothing to stop you trying it out within your own organisation. If, however, you’re hoping for the government to intervene and make the four-day week mandatory, well, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
While it’s true that the Labour Party did speak about a 32-hour work week in the run up to the last election, they were careful to say this was a ‘realistic ambition’ rather than a concrete plan.
The trouble is that while people in this country work an average of 35 hours per week, the law of the land actually allows us to work up to 48 hours, with nothing in law about only working five days out of seven. In other words, most of us are already working well below the legal maximum.
In addition, the TUC calculated in 2015 that more than three million people in the UK worked more than 48 hours a week.
For the government to introduce a 32 hour work week, they would have to decrease the current limit by a massive 33% and yet the average worker would only work three fewer hours than they do now. At the same time, the three million people who currently work more than the legal maximum would, in all likelihood, continue to work just as much as they are at the moment.
The law around the maximum hours we can work appears, therefore, to be largely irrelevant. Most of us have a five day week because that’s what we agree with our employers, not because it’s what the government orders from on high, while those of us who do work longer hours are similarly doing so without much consideration for the law of the land.
As Peter Cheese puts it, any move to a four-day week will almost certainly result from an ‘emergent practice’ with ‘organisations starting to do things like that, rather than government edicts.’
All in all, it looks like Keynes’ prophecy won’t be coming true any time soon. And, if we are to decrease the number of hours that we work, it is likely to require a cultural change rather than a legislative one.
