Peter Viney's Blog

The Four Day Week

Among the plethora of promises from both parties in this Autumn of 2019 we have Labour’s suggestion of a four day week for all in ten years.

This is one that set me thinking. I’ve ranted at length on the subject over the years. Back in the 1970s, I used to apply for Film Studies jobs, few and far between then. My pitch was that in the future we would all have vastly more leisure, and the main education growth industry would be helping and training people to use their enforced increased leisure creatively: sports, yoga, art, music, craft, making films, photography, even learning foreign languages. I believed that we would have more leisure because increased mechanisation (and I was ranting about this before computers and robotics) would give us a stark choice. Either we could have an elite of employed, and a vast underclass of poor unemployed, OR we would have to job share. Effectively, the four day (and three day) week for more people.

I used to quote H.G. Wells The Time Machine. Wells was an ardent Socialist and saw it somewhat differently. For his future the effete upper class, the Eloi, did not work, but lounged around in wispy clothes on the Earth’s surface in beautiful gardens, while the Molochs (working class) toiled in the filthy underground to do the industrial jobs. But the dark secret was that the Molochs also preyed on the Eloi and used them for food. When the Time Traveller goes to the further future, the Molochs have evolved into crustaceans crawling around the dying Earth, catching the giant butterflies which the Eloi have evolved into.

I tried a few times to start my own Science-Fiction story based on a future where most people worked three days a week (job sharing), but if you were very lucky you could apply to work for four days, or join the upper classes on five days. The aristocracy also worked on Saturday mornings.

Saturday mornings? In my first summer jobs in a warehouse it was a five and a half day week. It was the same in my gap year job in a museum. That was standard. That’s why football matches were at 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoons. In the early 60s, you wouldn’t have got a crowd for a 12.30 kick-off. So the working week has changed.

I eventually wrote a different version of the ‘future issue of work and leisure’  for English Language learners, Sunnyvista City (originally Streamline Graded Readers, then OUP’s Storylines series, now in its third version in Garnet Oracle Readers). In the story, vast numbers of people exist in huge holiday resorts, drugged to the eyeballs to believe they’re having fun on holiday, though none of them can remember when the holiday started. It’s that society’s way of dealing with more people than they can employ.

Sunnyvista City (ELT graded reader, level 3) Also on amazon as a Kindle e-reader.  LINK TO GARNET SITE

So let’s think about the four day week. Four and a half days is already happening. We often travel to the theatre by road, and by lunchtime on Friday right through the year, the roads are vastly more crowded. Poole to Stratford-upon-Avon is a favourite trip, and that will be heavy traffic all the way on Friday. The rush hour on Fridays in London starts at lunchtime. A friend who was a secretary in merchant banks way back in the 1970s, said that the three hour lunch started on Friday at 12 for the bankers, they then lurched off home. She worked until 5.30.

A few years ago, the control computer died on my car. The main dealer told me it was going to take a while. No one at the German factory worked on Friday afternoons – the entire company shut down at lunchtime, and Monday was a holiday in Germany.

The professions are well into it already – those where you can earn enough in three or four days. When we did our will, we found most of the law partners moved to a four day week at 55, then a three day week at 60, so as to slowly ease into retirement. This was choice, not compulsion. It seemed a good idea.

There is a strong argument that the crisis in GP Waiting Lists is due to the number of GPs who choose to work part time. 2018 figures are that 69% of GPs work less than 37.5 hours a week. In contrast,  27% work more than 50 hours, and 20% work more than 60 hours. General Practice has become a female dominated job, and is ideal for women doctors with children. I know of many who choose to work three days or two days. I discover this every time I call for an appointment.

Unless you’ve taught kids (or anyone), you won’t understand the difference between CONTACT hours (on your feet in the classroom) and WORKING hours (signed in, employed). You cannot equate 50 minutes in a classroom with 50 minutes sitting at a desk. I am sure the same must apply to GPs. Much of the work must be highly stressful. Dentists for example, must use a massive amount of focussed concentration. But even so, an increasing number of GPs are having three or four days OUT of the practice a week.

One GP (a man) told me I ought to do 60 minutes to 90 minutes in the gym every morning. This was ten years ago. He was about forty. He said that he never missed it. I asked where he got the time, ‘Oh, you have to prioritise your health. That’s why I don’t start seeing patients until 10 a.m.’ ‘OK,’ I said, ‘Have you got kids?’ ‘Oh, my wife organizes getting them up, breakfast and the school run,’ he said airily.

Indeed. Some people’s healthy lifestyle relies on someone else – wife, or home help- doing those dull domestic chores. If he moved to a four day week, his wife (or other help) would still need to wipe arses, clean teeth, cook breakfasts, put hankies in pockets every day.

I wanted to tell him that he was a very lucky bastard, but then he had a rubber glove on his hand at the time.

What we’re establishing is that those who are well-qualified in well-paid jobs (No, irritated GPs who feel underpaid, compare it with working for amazon) can afford to put health and lifestyle at the front of their priorities.

You could also say that a public school education is designed for just that purpose. Games all afternoon, every afternoon. A friend’s brother had a full scholarship to public school. He was awful at Games and hated it, but they kept on till they found him one he enjoyed and excelled at … sailing.  Then friends who worked in banks were encouraged in the 70s to take up golf and tennis … keep healthy, meet clients.

So how is the four day week going to work? Are we all going to have a three day weekend?

What about schools? Are kids going to have a four day week? If we are going to job share, it means we’ll have irregular days off, I believe, rather than a universal three day weekend. The “weekend” has long since gone for retail workers for instance, where Saturday and Sunday are the busiest times.

There is the question of attitude to leisure time. I heard the managing director of a large restaurant chain on the radio. He was explaining why very few of his staff were British. He said that so many British kids applied for a job in a restaurant then told him, ‘But I can’t work Friday or Saturday night because I go out then.’ He used to say, ‘Ah, you go to pubs and restaurants then? So who do you think works there?’

I was talking to someone who works in admin in a large office. He said the worst part of holidays was going back to find that your assigned tasks had piled up on your desk (or virtual desktop), rather than having been done for you. That’s in contrast to retail or catering (or teaching) –  if you were off, someone else had to do the job.

For primary children continuity is vital, and we all know that fill in and supply teachers will tend more to child-minding than teaching.

Farmers will still need to milk cows seven days a week (unless veganism becomes compulsory too).

How will we pay for it? Will robotization mean such huge savings that employers (state or private) can afford to pay 100% for 80% of the time? Or will many people have to take a 20% cut? Yes, lawyers, doctors and merchant bankers can afford to choose a 20% cut. Others can’t.

Does everyone want it? We knew someone whose husband was a manual worker and he couldn’t stop. At weekends he redecorated the house, painting and wallpapering. Every room was redecorated once a year in a cycle like painting the Forth Bridge. Some people enjoy being hamsters on a wheel (and not all of them are lycra clad cyclists either).

Others have a shorter working week enforced upon them by the gig economy. It’s not in their control when an employer can simply say, ‘You’re not needed tomorrow.’

In this case, the four day week is not a “Labour promise” I would just dismiss out of hand. Working against it, will be the increasing demands for care for the elderly and personal health care, which can’t be mechanised. Something like the promised four day week may evolve. I’m not sure how easily you can just legislate it though, or how much of the population it can apply to.

It IS a blinkered and old-fashioned view of work. I don’t think John McDonnell can see beyond people working regular clock-in / clock-out hours in offices or factories. Much work can be done at home now, from computer programming to being part of a “call centre.”  I haven’t clocked-in, so to speak, since 1980. Flexi-time can now be extremely flexible.