Four-Day Week Gains Momentum

The four-day week campaign is finally being taken seriously in the corridors of power, reports Tom Hodgkinson

The four-day week has been in the news and it’s thanks in large part to my pal Professor Brendan Burchell of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who has been studying the workplace for the last 30 years. Brendan is part of a group of think tanks and researchers who carried out the UK’s Four-Day Week pilot scheme. Some of you may have seen the prof at Idler Festivals: he is to be seen dancing to hip-hop in his Hawaiian shirt after his event.

The study looked at over 60 companies and involved roughly 2,900 staff. Staff were paid a full-time wage for a reduced working week. The results were positive: 92% of the companies have decided to carry on with a four-day week. They said that just as much work got done, and that staff were happier and healthier.

The results were reported widely, generally with great enthusiasm. The BBC, the FT, the Times, the Guardian and even the MailOnline gave the study a good showing.

The Mail’s headline was perhaps less than enthusiastic: “Bosses warn four-day working week has become a ‘middle class obsession’, won’t cater for shift workers and will increase stress and reduce profits.”

However the piece itself went on to outline the myriad benefits a reduced workweek brings: “Levels of anxiety, difficulty sleeping, and burnout decreased substantially, while more staff reported that balancing care responsibilities had become easier,” reported the Mail, adding: “The results even found that company revenue increased slightly by 1.4 per cent on average over the trial period, and by a much higher 35 per cent when compared to the same six-month period in 2021.”

As I write, the Mail piece had attracted over 900 comments, including this one: “I certainly wasn’t put on this earth to work 5 days a week until im [sic] 70. Not happening.”

We’ve been reading about the four-day week for years, of course. It’s an old idea: as Idler readers will know, both Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes argued for a reduced workweek in the 1930s. Further back, Diogenes refused to work at all and Aristotle recommended that we devote plenty of time to idling.

It’s something we’ve been banging on about in this magazine, too: here’s a piece I wrote on the subject in 2014.

But until now the four-day week has remained on the margins of civilised discourse. What’s different about this new study is that it’s being looked at quite seriously in the corridors of power. And I witnessed the new respectability of the four-day week first hand on Tuesday. Professor Burchell invited me to a presentation that he and his colleagues at the think tank Autonomy, along with The 4 Day Week campaign, and an organisation called Four Day Week Global, were giving in Committee Room Five at the Houses of Parliament.

Committee Room Five is one of around 20 or so grand meeting rooms all leading off a long corridor in the House of Commons. Important-looking people dash past you holding clipboards and sheaves of notes, or sit on the benches that line the corridor, called “the Committee Corridor”, tapping their mobiles or laptops. Everywhere you look there are policemen and gigantic paintings of bewigged gentlemen.

In the committee room, green leather chairs are arranged around a horseshoe-shaped meeting table, and there are windows looking out on to the Thames. Our meeting was chaired by Peter Dowd, Labour MP for Bootle in Merseyside, who is pushing a new four-day week bill. Also in attendance was Green MP Caroline Lucas.

After Brendan’s presentation, Caroline Lucas said: “This is music to my ears. It’s been Green Party policy for many years.”

The meeting came to an end and we moved into the corridor. Waiting outside for their turn in Committee Room Five were some familiar-looking MPs. I spotted Iain Duncan Smith, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and that strange one with the blond thatch (not Boris, Michael Fabricant).

“It’s the ERG,” said the young man standing next to me, a research fellow of Brendan’s. “The European Reform Group. You couldn’t get two more opposing groups bumping into each other.”

He’s quite right. Iain Duncan Smith, or IDS, is probably best known for his savage promotion of the work ethic. In 2010, as Work and Pensions Secretary, he introduced what the Guardian called “the most severe welfare sanctions ever imposed by a British government”. Not working when offered a job, said IDS at the time, was “a sin”.

Still, the ERG lot looked like yesterday’s men by comparison with the four-day week crew. They’re getting old. A friend who works in parliament, when I emailed him to ask for more info, called them “semi-retired”.

It was certainly a thrill to be there, and to see idling, at last, being taken seriously by MPs. I immediately attached myself to Brendan’s entourage. We walked back out of the corridor of power, and it felt good to be part of Brendan’s gang. I felt like I was following Jay-Z.

So congratulations to Brendan and to the teams who helped him compile the research. Out with the old guard and in with the new. Idling is not a crime, comrades!

Write to me with your views.

SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts.

Sir: Jay-Z indeed, I laughed out loud! Terrific piece and loved a glimpse of insider life in the Houses of Parliament, a perfect Idler subject.
Lindsey Bareham

Sir: I am old enough to remember my father working at the old LCC in County Hall a five and a half day week. Commuting from Henley (on the old steam trains), home in time for a late lunch on Saturday. I can’t remember the date that was binned, but it was obvious nonsense.
Joanna Cary

Sir: This is interesting reading – I think there is, deep down in the psyche, a subconscious desire to “punish” oneself by working until you drop. People work for lots of reasons and I think some work to escape the reality of their life, which they may not like.
A shorter working week has been in place (informally) for many years as far as I can see. Over the past 15 or so years I have observed how colleagues have considered “Friday working from home” a day off, and in one high-profile London-based public sector organisation, many staff were out of the door by 4pm every day. They did arrive at 8am, but they mostly did personal admin until meetings started. I always wondered how any of their services ever ran and then I realised it was the unionised front line that was keeping London moving.
If we had visionary and better trained management then work would not feel so much like work and we would not try to escape it. The digital infrastructure has tried to replace effective management and we are weary of a faceless computer that cannot grasp an individual’s talents and enable them to flourish in an organisation. The gig economy working remotely means we have to justify a working day by packing in as many video calls as is possible, thus eliminating any real thinking or reflective time to think creatively and produce.
Having been an interim contractor I have worked for several organisations where specialist contractors were essential, as managers had spent so long working out how they could embed themselves in an organisation, they did not have the expertise to carry out what needed to be done. As soon as the knowledge has been transferred, the contract is ended with a limp excuse of no more budget. No wonder we are all trying to work less.
How many contracts have I worked in where individuals are working against each other, not as teams, to protect their job, where nothing gets done anyway.
I haven’t mentioned ageism which is rife. When I started work three decades ago, we made friends, went out for drinks after work, we were all ages and complemented each other. We baked cakes on birthdays, bought birthday cards and had a canteen where we would sit and chat at lunchtimes.
Observe France, which went the way of reduced hours. Now you can’t get a job if you are over 40 in France, let alone 50, just look at the average age of the politicians.
I admire your entrepreneurship with the Idler, it’s highly entertaining, but please encourage people to create and produce and be inclusive so the working day is rewarding and fulfilling and not something to escape from. I have to work to pay my rent and bills. If the working week gets shorter, wages will also reduce and many people cannot afford that. I suspect people will start to take on two jobs again or three even.
Karen Gibbons

Sir: Hurrah for the four-day week. I’ve been shouting at the telly for years, whenever some dreary politico drags out the usual guff about rewarding hard-working families: “What about laid-back families? And what about people who aren’t in families? Anyway, how ‘hard’ are the hedge fund managers and venture capitalists working for their millions?” And so on. Enough of it! The Puritans lost the game in 1660 – why are we still dancing to their miserabilist tune?
David Gordon

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