Cut the working week to a maximum of 20 hours

Graham_Devon

Britain is struggling to shrug off the credit crisis; overworked parents are stricken with guilt about barely seeing their offspring; carbon dioxide is belching into the atmosphere from our power-hungry offices and homes. In London on Wednesday, experts will gather to offer a novel solution to all of these problems at once: a shorter working week.

A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: "There's a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none."

She argued that we need to think again about what constitutes economic success, and whether aiming to boost Britain's GDP growth rate should be the government's first priority: "Are we just living to work, and working to earn, and earning to consume? There's no evidence that if you have shorter working hours as the norm, you have a less successful economy: quite the reverse." She cited Germany and the Netherlands.

Now, I get where they are coming from. Would be lovely.

However, not gonna pay the mortgage and bills, is it?

Thinktank?! More like cash drain. Sometimes, you just have to despair at these "experts".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/08/cut-working-week-urges-thinktank

antrobus

Graham_Devon wrote: »

...Thinktank?! More like cash drain. Sometimes, you just have to despair at these "experts".

Well it's the New Economics Foundation, what do you expect? Utter bunch of dipsticks in my opinion. The say, "if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round" - well yes, there might well be, but there's no guarantee that they'd be British jobs; they could just as well be German, Greek, or even Chinese ones. In fact I can't think of a better way of making it 100% certain that they would be German, Greek, or even Chinese,

HappyMJ

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Now, I get where they are coming from. Would be lovely.

However, not gonna pay the mortgage and bills, is it?

Thinktank?! More like cash drain. Sometimes, you just have to despair at these "experts".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/08/cut-working-week-urges-thinktank

It depends on what wage you are talking about. It doesn't work on minimum wages. In theory if everybody on average wages worked just the minimum number of hours to be able to earn enough to pay the mortgage and bills maybe 4 days a week then employers could take on an extra member of staff for every 4 employees. The employer would still get 20 days of worker availability every week. It would cut government expenses by not having to pay the fifth currently unemployed person any benefits at all. This saving could then be passed on by reducing taxes on the other 4 working people. It's also cheaper for the employer as they would pay less employer national insurance contributions. Have you ever noticed lots of minimum wage jobs available at 16 hours? Why? Because no employer national insurance contributions are due at all. Much cheaper having 2 members of staff at 16 hours rather than one at 32 hours.

I would need to earn £272.70 per week or more to not be reliant on benefits in any way so I would need to earn £9.09 an hour for 7.5 hours per day over 4 days. One third of £272.70 is enough to pay my rent.

Now in reality most people want to earn as much as possible so it isn't going to work.

wotsthat

Another registered charity trying to justify it's existence.

Fair enough I suppose - I wonder how much money they receive form the taxpayer for this stellar work though?

RUN_RABBIT_RUN

ha ha, terrible, has the fact that part-time work is currently at a record high completely pass them by?

FTBFun

It's a bit silly - for instance in my line of work there's generally a shortage of suitable candidates (its well remunerated but dull) so me working 20 hours would just mean no-one has the time to do any work.

I think where it falls down is they're assuming that the unemployed can do any job around which is absurd to put it mildly.

RE their funding. I found this old blog from a couple of years ago:

http://timworstall.com/2009/07/01/funding-the-new-economics-foundation/

The accounts are here:

http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/DocumentList.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=1055254&SubsidiaryNumber=0&DocType=AccountList

i8change

I like the 1932 essay by the great columnist Bertrand Russell. Bit dated now but still interesting.

http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/praiseidleness.htm

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.

The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

PasturesNew

HappyMJ wrote: »

I would need to earn £272.70 per week or more to not be reliant on benefits in any way so I would need to earn £9.09 an hour for 7.5 hours per day over 4 days. One third of £272.70 is enough to pay my rent.

Where I live I'd never find a job over minimum wage of £6/hour and LHA on a 1-bed flat is £104/week.

£6/hour for 20 hours = £120/week
£6/hour for 30 hours = £180/week

I do think working 20 hours is the answer, and to get from where we are now to there just needs some deep thinking and long planning .... benefits would have to be downshifted too.

Annisele

Well, I reckon I work one day a week to pay for my retirement (pension contributions), then about one-and-a-half days a week to pay the government (tax/NI) - so I already live on two-and-a-half days of money.

So if we all stop paying our taxes and planning for our retirements it'll be dandy.

toby3000

As the article points out, we all consumed less then it'd be fine working less - when I was earning more money, I did cut my hours because I was earning more than I needed to live on and I prefered the time off. However, most people are more interested in buying things than I am - most consumption isn't needed, but I guess lots of people prefer to buy lots of stuff than have more time.

The Guardian has previously commented on reducing working hours, which was quite interesting;

"Oddly enough, the four-day week was once envisaged as the future. As Prime Minister in the 1950s, Winston Churchill saw a time when accelerating technological advancement would enable us to "give the working man what he's never had – four days' work and then three days' fun". This did not seem as improbable then, as it sounds now. After all, the weekend was a comparatively recent and expanding invention. "What's a weekend?" asked the (fictional) Edwardian Dowager Countess of Grantham quite plausibly in Downton Abbey, set at a time when Saturday mornings were still worked."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/apr/16/four-day-working-week

AD9898_2

I kinda like the thought of a 'reset' of everything. I have absolutely no interest in working long hours, so 20 would be fine. I understand that the human philosophy is to strive to be better but there has to be a balance and I think we are nowhere near it.

The stresses and strains all take there toll and even though we live longer, in many ways I think quality of life has deteriated. I'd be quite happy to work 2-3 days a week and have 4 off, keep wages the same and bring the economically unproductive into society. I know that's being simplistic but I'm sure it could be done over time.