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The Guardian view on a four-day week: policies needed to make it a reality
Currently, the financial logic that governs the rules of employment is inimical to reducing workloads
After the first world war, workers wanted a peace dividend for their sacrifices. Within three years they got it. Almost every industrialised nation – with the exception of Japan – accepted the newly established International Labour Organization’s call to limit working hours to eight a day and 48 a week. While most developed countries enacted legislation to achieve these aims, Britain, along with the United States and Italy, did so through collective agreements.
Today, the triple crises of Covid, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Brexit will create job-altering shocks. Employers are already implementing remote working. Some workers, perhaps those with comfortable homes, prefer online messaging to water cooler chats and web conference calls to in-person ones. Others, meanwhile, are opting out of work altogether. From Monday, thousands of workers in 70 UK companies will be paid the same wages for a four-day working week as a five-day one. Like an eight-hour day in 1919, workers are demanding changes once regarded as fringe, eccentric ideas.
There are good arguments for a four-day week. Studies suggest improvements in workers’ happiness and improvements in productivity. The UK has for too long fostered a working culture that encourages long hours and employee exhaustion. About 10 million people – almost one in three people in work – would work fewer hours if they could. Remarkably, 3 million of them would take fewer hours even with a loss in pay.
Having to work less hard for a desired income is obviously welcome. But such a desirable outcome is complicated by factors such as the pressure to consume, security of employment and inequalities of power and income. Given the prevalence of in-work poverty, and with inflation hitting those on lowest incomes the hardest, many British workers cannot afford to cut their hours.
In 2019, the economist Lord Skidelsky considered the problem in detail for the Labour party. His report compared how European countries had managed to make employment more compatible with wellbeing. He noted, with approval, how collective bargaining in Germany had seen workers receive real wage increases and reductions in working hours in return for improved productivity. He rejected a French-style legislated national limit, noting that it broke down within a few years.
The peer’s insight was that the economic security and rights of UK workers had to be improved so that they were in “a position to decrease their working hours voluntarily should they wish to”. In the modern age, it is clear that the market cannot provide continuous full employment. That is why Lord Skidelsky advocated for a new role for the government as an “employer of last resort”, by guaranteeing jobs paying the living wage to the unemployed who cannot find work in the private sector.
By providing an alternative to the market, argued the peer, the state would gain a powerful lever to push down the average number of hours worked. Lord Skidelsky thought that a 35-hour working week in the public sector over 10 years was achievable with the right policies. Britain’s experience a century ago is worth recalling. The loss in output from cutting working time was largely offset by increased hourly productivity. The shorter day led to the growth of leisure and consumer industries. Currently, the financial logic that governs the rules of employment is inimical to reducing workloads. What is needed are countervailing institutions to push society in the technologically possible direction desired by most people.
Thousands of UK workers begin world’s biggest trial of four-day week
With work changed for ever by the pandemic, businesses are testing whether pilot represents a recognition that ‘the new frontier for competition is quality of life’
More than 3,300 workers at 70 UK companies, ranging from a local chippy to large financial firms, start working a four-day week from Monday with no loss of pay in the world’s biggest trial of the new working pattern.
The pilot is running for six months and is being organised by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with the thinktank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week Campaign, and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.
The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity.
Platten’s Fish and Chips in Wells-next-the-Sea on the north Norfolk coast is participating, along with the Sheffield software firm Rivelin Robotics, the London-based inheritance tax specialists Stellar Asset Management, and Charity Bank in Tonbridge, Kent.
Joe O’Connor, chief executive of the not-for-profit group 4 Day Week Global, said the UK was at the crest of the four-day week wave: “As we emerge from the pandemic, more and more companies are recognising that the new frontier for competition is quality of life, and that reduced-hour, output-focused working is the vehicle to give them a competitive edge.”
Some of the other companies involved provide education, workplace consultancy, housing, skincare, building and construction recruitment services, food and beverages, and digital marketing.
Researchers will work with each participating organisation to measure the impact on productivity in the business and the wellbeing of its workers, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality.
Government-backed four-day week trials are also due to begin later this year in Spain and Scotland.
Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College and lead researcher on the pilot, described it as a “historic trial”. “We’ll be analysing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life,” she said.
“The four-day week is generally considered to be a triple-dividend policy – helping employees, companies, and the climate. Our research efforts will be digging into all of this.”
Wyatt Watts, 25, team leader at Platten’s Fish and Chips, said: “When I first heard we were going to be working less hours with the same pay, I thought to myself, ‘What’s the catch?’ Usually I’m so exhausted from work I don’t have the energy, so hopefully having that extra time to rest will boost my energy levels.”
He said the decision to join the pilot was already having an impact. “Morale has improved and we’re hoping that our productivity at work is going to be higher.”
Ed Siegel, chief executive of Charity Bank, said it was proud to be one of the first banks in the UK to embrace the four-day week. “We have long been a champion of flexible working, but the pandemic really moved the goalposts in this regard. For Charity Bank, the move to a four-day week seems a natural next step.
“The 20th-century concept of a five-day working week is no longer the best fit for 21st-century business. We firmly believe that a four-day week with no change to salary or benefits will create a happier workforce and will have an equally positive impact on business productivity, customer experience and our social mission.”
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