The five-day working week remains the norm in most countries, as it has done for the past 100 years, despite the nature of “work” having changed enormously during that time. Would workers – would all of us – not be better off moving to a four-day work week, writes Joe Ryle?
The four-day week is a freedom project. Giving workers 50% more free time – on the same pay, which is exactly what a true four-day week does – is a necessary move if people are to really have the freedom to be able to live happier and healthier lives.
If you go back 100 years, virtually everyone used to work six days per week, with Sunday reserved as the day for going to church. After a major campaign by trade unions and some progressive businesses, the weekend was eventually won for all workers in the UK. Between the 1920s and 1940s, a similar story played out across much of the world.
Yet 100 years on, the “nine to five”, five-day working week still remains the dominant model across most of the world (according to the CIPD, over 60 per cent of jobs in the UK still operate using this model), despite the fact that the world of work has been completely transformed since the 1920s and 30s. So why are we still working a similar amount of hours as we were back then?
Since the 1980s, working hours in the UK have barely reduced at all. Workers are much more productive than they were a few decades ago – just think how quickly we can now gather information, share documents with colleagues or respond to emails using digital technologies – but hardly any of these gains in productivity have been passed back to workers in the form of more leisure time. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the total “hours” of labour going into the economy has gone up significantly as a result of women joining the workforce: in the early 1970s, the female employment rate was around 53 per cent but by the first quarter of 2023, it was up to 72 per cent.
As David Graeber said in 2020: “it’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”
Despite this expansion in the headcount, typical weekly working hours just haven’t reduced accordingly. As David Graeber, former Professor of Anthropology at LSE, said before he passed away in 2020: “it’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”. This would all be much easier to accept if living standards were rising, but the opposite is happening – they are falling.
International comparisons make the UK’s situation stand out even more. We now work some of the longest hours in the world, especially vis-à-vis our European neighbours: we work longer full-time hours compared to nearly every country in the European Union, while at the same time we have one of the least productive economies. So all these long working hours that we’re putting in are not producing good results for workers or for the economy. What they are producing, however, is a workforce where millions are burnt out, stressed and overworked, as can be seen by the millions of people who are currently out of work with ill health.
In 2022, we ran the biggest ever trial of a four-day week, with no loss of pay, to take place anywhere in the world so far. It involved 61 companies and nearly 3,000 workers and lasted for six months. At the end of the trial, remarkably, almost every company – 56 out of the 61 that participated, or 92% – decided to continue with the four-day week. The results of the pilot showed that moving to a four-day week can be a “win-win” for both workers and employers: huge improvements were recorded on work-life balance and life satisfaction, while for employers, productivity and business performance were maintained or even improved. In England, we now also have the first four-day week council – in South Cambridgeshire – again with overwhelmingly positive results.
We ran the biggest ever trial of a four-day week to take place anywhere in the world so far. Afterwards, remarkably, 92% of participating companies decided to continue with the four-day week. They showed that this shift can be “win-win” for workers and employers alike
I understand that on the face of it, these results – working less hours, on the same pay, but with greater productivity – can seem counter-intuitive. But there is already mounting evidence in support of this hypothesis.
The first thing to say is that well-rested workers are generally better workers. We know that from the hundreds of four-day week companies that now exist in Britain. But adopting a four-day week isn’t just about doing the same work as you would do in five days, only at break-neck speed. For the most part, it’s an opportunity to work smarter, not harder: to take care around re-prioritising (and de-prioritising) work, and focusing on outputs, rather than hours worked. And as we’ve found, there are various methods that can be utilised to improve business performance to make a four-day week a reality.
Of course there are some industries where implementation is more complex, but working towards a four-day week over the next 10 years should be possible for the vast majority of companies. A 2020 study by The Autonomy Institute found that a carefully designed four-day week would be affordable to most firms with more than 50 workers.
Finally, with the adoption of more automation and new technologies and with ever more jobs (or tasks within jobs) likely to be automated, we can reflect on the total amount of human labour that is going to be needed – and how this can be spread across workers in the economy. If ChatGPT and the like can take on a large chunk of our overall workload, then we should all benefit with more free time. Rather than being scared of artificial intelligence taking away our jobs, a shorter working week could allow us to embrace this new technology.
As campaigners, we’re determined that we finally get work-life balance right so that, on a very basic level, there is enough time outside of work to be able to get our chores done, to get our life admin done and most importantly of all, to have the freedom to be able to properly enjoy our lives. The time for a four-day week has come.
Sign up here to receive a monthly summary of blog posts from LSE Inequalities delivered direct to your inbox.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credits: La Famiglia via Shutterstock.
Hi Joe I definitely agree: NHS and Universities need this to re-balance the overemphasis on bureaucracy over education, learning and health. How would you think this should be done?