How many hours is enough?

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It is a historical fact that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, working people have had to fight for each and every reduction in the working week, and every one of those reductions has initially been resisted by the owners of capital and their political representatives. It is an essential part of capitalist ideology that most of us exist only to serve the interests of capital, and the more input can be squeezed out of people, the more profitable output can be produced. They don’t phrase it in such terms, of course, preferring to say things such as 'work gives our lives meaning', with its whispered corollary that life without work would be meaningless. The philosophical difference between ‘work gives your life meaning’ and ‘work makes you free’, is smaller than many might think – the differences revolve around the degree of compulsion and the extent to which work is financially rewarded. Seen from this perspective, the individual exists primarily to serve ‘the economy’. Persuading people of the truth of the statement rather then employing outright physical coercion makes it easier to achieve the goal, but that’s a difference of tactics, not principle. If the slaves can be cajoled into volunteering to make their own chains, managing them requires much less time and effort.

It isn’t the only possible outlook on life, though (although looking at the current main political parties in the UK, and their obsession with the idea that everyone must work and if they can’t live on their wages then they should work more hours or get a second job) one might think that there is no real alternative. But the idea that there is an alternative is hardly a new one: one of the classic pieces of writing on the issue is “In praise of idleness” by Bertrand Russell from 1932. The alternative ideological take on work is that it’s something of a necessary evil. We need a productive economy to enable us to meet our needs, but over and above that, human society should be about giving people the time, space and resources to develop human potential. Or, in simpler terms, the goal of an economy which works in the interests of all is to maximise leisure and minimise work. That’s not a formulation which I’ve heard from many politicians. Rather than seeing the increased use of mechanisation and Artificial Intelligence as opportunities to advance the development of people, they are being used to divert ever more resources into the pockets of a small and extremely rich subset of humanity; not sharing the benefits more equally is a deliberate political choice. And the rest of us are told that the problem is with people who aren’t working, or who are not working hard enough.

The Welsh branch of the English Conservative Party has this week expressed concerns about the increasing moves to a four-day week. Nothing either new or surprising about that – if one starts from a belief that people having time to do things other than work is inherently a bad thing, it’s an entirely natural response. It wouldn’t even occur to them to ask why it would be such a bad thing if we could meet all our needs to the same extent as currently by working one day a week less. (That’s a significant ‘if’, of course, and beyond the scope of this post, although the employers moving to such a working pattern seem confident enough that it’s true.) What really took my breath away, though, was the reason that they seem to be giving for opposing it, which is that it is unfair that some people should only have to work 4 days whilst others still have to work 5 days. It’s tantamount to saying that ‘no-one should have their working week reduced until everyone can have the same’. This from the party which is usually quick to criticise what they call the ‘politics of envy’.

It overlooks the fact – presumably deliberately, since they can’t all be so ignorant as to not understand this – that every reduction in working hours has been enjoyed by some workers before others; had some groups not been able to set the pace (whether because of their industrial power or slightly more benign and enlightened employers), we would all still be working 12 hours a day 6 days a week from the age of 10 until we die. Although, on second thoughts, they probably regret that we aren’t.

Watching the clock

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Tonight, most of us will turn the clocks back by one hour; some will inevitably forget. Those who live their lives according to what the hands of the clock say will feel obliged to stay in bed an extra hour, whilst those who follow their body clocks will just get up an hour early. In the dark. Most will just be slightly confused for a day or two.

Living our lives according to the hands of the clock brings me to the PM’s father-in-law. He has argued this week that young Indians should be demanding to work 70 hour weeks in order to boost the wealth of Indian billionaires like Mr Murty the Indian economy. His call revolves around the need for an increase in productivity.

‘Productivity’ is an interesting concept, and there is more than one way of measuring it. At its simplest, it’s just output divided by input: a widget-maker who produces 15 widgets per hour is more productive than one who only produces 10 per hour. But whilst increasing the number of hours worked will increase the total number of widgets produced, it does not in itself increase the productivity of the widget-maker. Someone who produces 70 in a seven hour day may well produce 100 in a ten hour day, but he’s still only producing 10 per hour; output divided by input is unchanged. In monetary terms, though, things might look rather different. If someone is willing to work 10 hours a day for the same pay as he previously received for working 7 hours a day, then the owner of the widget factory has 30 extra widgets to sell at no extra labour cost to himself. On that measure of productivity (number of widgets per £ of labour cost), it has obviously increased. And extra wealth flows to the owner of the widget-making machine as a consequence.

That in turn goes to the heart of why capitalists have always opposed reductions in working hours: they make most profit by keeping people chained to their machines (or their desks for many of us in the modern age). It’s the same attitude behind SirJake’s demand to see civil servants back at their desks, or Gove’s instructions to English local authorities to drop any thought of a four-day week. It should be obvious to them that what matters is output, not input, but their thought processes haven’t really advanced much since the days of the mill owners of the eighteenth century. Billionaires who have a great deal of agency over what they do, where, and when, and who see a direct financial return for their efforts, may well see 70 hour weeks as normal (although some of the activities which they class as ‘work’ may not look very much like work to the man or woman pulling the lever on the widget machine) but it is a demand which, in essence, sees working people as a resource to be exploited, as people who should only ever expect to live for their work rather than work to enjoy life.

There’s no doubt that Sunak’s household would benefit directly if Indian workers were to accede to the exhortations of their capitalist masters. That wouldn’t make Sunak the first PM to benefit from overseas slavery or something akin thereto, but that’s not much of an excuse. It wasn’t that, though, so much as the impact of the corollary (all economic dictums seem to have corollaries of some sort) on Sunak which struck me. If increasing the hours spent on producing things means that more things are produced, then decreasing the time spent on destroying things means that fewer things are destroyed. I don’t doubt that Sunak ‘works’ a large number of hours, but much of his work seems to be about enriching the few by impoverishing the many. Reducing the length of his working week would therefore have some clear advantages for the many in UK society. Preferably reducing his hours to zero. He should heed the unintended lesson of his father-in-law.

No time for leisure

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Governments govern, oppositions oppose. It’s a simple enough rule, and one which the Conservatives in Cardiff Bay follow with gusto. The point, though, is that opposition is supposed to demonstrate to the electorate that there is an alternative to what the government is doing and, in purely electoral terms, to do so in a way which wins votes for the opposition party. Their enthusiasm for opposing anything and everything sometimes seems to blind the Tories to the second part of what opposition is about.

Take their opposition to the proposed trial of a reduction in the working week. The alternative proposition that they are putting forward seems to be that the working week should be maintained at its current level, and people should not be allowed more leisure time. It’s not at all clear to whom that proposition is supposed to appeal – given a choice between working four days a week and working five days a week for the same pay, what exactly drives the Tories to believe that people will vote for the party offering them the longer week? Or are they really so wedded to the idea of selfishness as the only driver of all human activity that they believe that those who don’t get the chance to work reduced hours will vote enthusiastically against the idea that anyone else should get that opportunity?

There is nothing special or magic about the idea of a five day week. Indeed, it’s not even that long-established as a concept. When I was a child, my father was in an office job with a five-and-a-half-day week; Saturday mornings were a normal part of the working week, and the ‘weekend’ was one and a half days long (or one and a bit by the time he got home). The reduction from five and a half didn’t happen for everyone at the same time – some employers acted before others. That will always be the case, but is hardly a reason for no-one to make the change. The same is true for all reductions in the number of hours worked per week; between 35 and 37 looks more or less normal today, but it hasn’t always been that way. It was 40 when I started work, and it’s not so long since 45 to 48 was much more common.

It's not irrelevant that the fastest and largest reductions in the working week happened during the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when prosperity overall was rising, and where the increases in prosperity were, to a degree at least, shared between capital and labour. From the 1980s onwards, not only has the rate of increase in prosperity slowed, but the way it is shared out has changed too – more and more ends up in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Both are the direct result of a failed economic experiment which started from the assumption that allowing the rich to get richer would make everyone better off in the end.

Different cultures rule in different workplaces. I’ve worked for one company where presenteeism was the norm: managers worked long hours and staff who arrived after their managers or left before them were definitely frowned upon, to put it mildly. Failing to respond to emails for some pathetic excuse such as being on holiday or off sick was another big no-no. The contracts of employment might have referred to a 35 hour week, but anyone who actually worked only 35 hours didn’t last long. Whether the staff were more productive as a result is another question entirely. Bad employers have a tendency to confuse productivity with hours worked, whereas it’s really about what is achieved within those hours. There is some evidence that shorter hours do not reduce output, although that is likely to vary between different contexts. An employee minding a widget-making machine will find that the number of widgets he can make depends on the capacity of the machine: shorter hours = fewer widgets. But that doesn’t necessarily follow for an office environment where the output is, in many cases, difficult to measure anyway. Improving morale – by, for instance, reducing hours worked – can obviously have an impact.

The problem that the Tories have is that they are wedded to an ideology under which most of us exist only to serve the needs of employers, to which end we should devote all our time and energy. From that perspective, any request for more leisure time is as preposterous as Oliver’s request for a little more gruel. It challenges their understanding of what humanity is all about. The alternative view, that society should be about facilitating the growth and development of humans as individuals outside the workplace is anathema to them. “Keep your noses to the grindstone” is the limit of their understanding. It may have some ideological validity from their perspective, but it still puzzles me why they think that proposition will appeal to the electorate more than the prospect of more leisure time.