Another world of work is possible. How a shorter working week can work for all

The last few years have exposed profound inequalities and a deep crisis in working life in this country and beyond. Alongside massive levels of impoverishment and insecurity, the UK is also plagued by overwork. The large majority of employees report being stressed and overworked. UK employees work an average of nearly eight hours a week of unpaid overtime, equating to some 400 hours a year. Alongside this, as the TUC has shown, poor mental health and safety in the UK now poses a major risk to workers.

The country’s workforce also works the third longest full-time hours in Europe, with levels of paid holiday also considerably lower than other countries in the region. According to data from 2018, UK employees do nearly two and half weeks’ extra work a year compared to our European counterparts. And there is growing evidence that lengthy hours are exacerbating the environmental crisis.

In light of this, delivering reductions in work hours would offer major benefits: helping us to bring about a fairer, freer and greener society. The demand for ‘good jobs’ should not just emphasise pay, pensions and security – but the need for good conditions, including in terms of working time. Moving toward a shorter working week without loss of pay would provide people with more time that’s truly their own, handing greater freedom to working people up and down the country. And reductions in working time would benefit public health and ensure people have more time to rest, spend with family and friends and prioritise social activities and creative endeavours.

With the UK emerging from the very worst of the pandemic, the need and appetite for far-reaching change is strong. While tackling the crisis in living standards, widespread insecurity and spiralling poverty must remain major priorities, fighting for the expansion of free time can and should be a key post-pandemic demand.

Demands for a four-day working week have long been derided as unworkable, yet recent events suggest the prospects of a shorter working week are growing rapidly. An array of pilot schemes, endorsements by international leaders and country-wide efforts to slash work hours without loss of pay suggest the dial is now shifting. The shorter working week pilots run in Iceland, rather than just being an experiment, have led to the country enacting permanent reductions in working time, with work hours falling from an average of 40 to a new standard of 35 to 36 hours. While this is hardly the much-vaunted four-day week, this does demonstrate that hours can be reduced rapidly, in significant increments and with positive results.

Pilot schemes of various kinds are ongoing in Scotland, UK-wide, Ireland and Spain. Together, these experiments raise the possibility of relatively widespread reductions in working hours. But, despite numerous pilots and evidence of public appetite for a four-day week, politicians and policymakers have largely avoided embracing the policy and the prospects of meaningful and lasting change remain unclear. In this context, there is a need to broaden and build-out efforts to achieve a shorter working week without loss of pay.

Firstly, campaigns for shorter working weeks have largely been seen to be focused primarily on full-time employees, especially those in salaried white-collar roles. While office workers on regular seven- to eight-hour shifts represent a major section of the workforce, focus needs to be redirected to the experiences of the millions of self-employed, part-time and blue-collar workers – many of whom don’t work the ‘standard’ working pattern.

To ensure no worker is left behind there is a need to centre the needs of all workers and to tackle overwork across the board. This would have the added benefit of helping to address the proliferation of four-day weeks based on ‘compressed’ hours, such as Belgium’s recent reforms, in which workers are granted an extra day off a week in exchange for making up the hours through longer days.

Secondly, changes in hours should be directly led by employees and trade unions. The success of the experiment in Iceland, in which trade unions were central to trials and then went on to negotiate shorter working weeks for their members, follows a long historical pattern of trade union activity and workplace struggles delivering reductions in work hours. Closer to home, the periods in which work hours saw the most substantial fall were periods of strong union power and industrial action – the interwar period, the late 1940s and the 1970s. They also largely correspond to periods in which economic inequality fell. Notably, the period in which falling work hours began to slow in the UK corresponds to the collapse of trade union power – from the 1980s onwards. History shows us that labour organising is the most consistent and effective way to deliver better labour standards, including giving workers more free time.

While the proliferation of four-day week pilots is promising, the attempt to demonstrate that an alternative to the status quo ‘works’ should not distract from the need for immediate changes. We know there are clear, concrete steps that could be taken by governments now to change this: including strengthening the working time directive, legislating for sectoral collective bargaining, requiring premium pay rates for longer work weeks (as in France) and using short-time working schemes (not unlike Germany’s) to incentivise reductions in the working week.

The rise of precarious work also poses a particular challenge for narratives which stress a traditional five-day week. Over successive decades zero and variable hours contracts, genuine and ‘bogus’ self-employment and agency work have become increasingly commonplace. Any way forward that builds broad support for reductions in work hours needs to ensure decent incomes and protections for those working in these sections of the economy, handing better rights and protections to those currently at the sharp end. One way of helping to achieve this is demanding a guarantee that part-time workers and those with varied work patterns are included in any and all reductions in hours – with the offer of higher pay for the same work hours for those who want or need it.

Finally, the fight for more free time needs to be understood as part of a break with the post-1980 settlement. For four decades the UK’s economic regime has prioritised the private sector and private power, the interests of finance capital, restrictions on trade unions and market logics. These priorities are wildly incompatible with the kind of economic model we need. A new settlement ought to be one in which strong and wide-ranging labour rights – including greater agency and increased leisure time – are central objectives.

In this sense, shorter working hours require bigger and broader changes than can be achieved from labour market policy alone. Situating demands for a shorter working week in a wider programme of popular policies, such as a green new deal, a major uplift in workplace rights, a genuine social safety net and universal public services. This must be located within a positive and coherent vision of what a more equitable, more equal future should look like.

Achieving a shorter working week will require centring workers and trade union organising and adopting an approach that is genuinely universalist – one that offers change for workers in the here and now, and addresses the precarity and poverty pay endemic in the labour market. To do that will require change on a scale not seen for decades. With that in mind, we can show that another world of work is possible.