Four days a week: Is it time for us to work less?
Dmitry Kurkin
British Laborites discuss the possibility of reducing the work week to four days. John McDonell, the shadow chancellor of the treasury (that is, the representative of the official opposition government), has already conducted a substantive consultation with the economist scientist Robert Skidelsky, and it is possible that the "crusade for the four-day working week" will become one of the key messages of Labor’s political program in the next parliamentary election.
With a weekly labor rate, the British have long-standing bills. A country where the principle of “eight hours to work, eight hours to recover, eight hours to rest” was invented two hundred years ago, by the end of the 20th century, discovered that its citizens are chronically reworked compared to residents of European countries: the average Briton works 42 hours week, while his colleagues in the Netherlands - 29 hours, in Denmark, Norway, Ireland and Germany - from 33 to 35 hours. (In Russia, this figure is 40 hours, but in reality it varies greatly between 34 and 46 hours.) Moreover, as leftist political columnist Owen Jones notes, these refineries are often not yet paid: in 2017, thanks to the British over two billion hours . The results: chronic fatigue and a higher level of diseases, including those caused by emotional overload, and - contrary to the plan - less productivity.
The fact that working less can be done better has been talked about for a long time: a similar initiative was launched five years ago by the New Economy Foundation, but he proposed reducing the forty-hour week more to thirty hours. However, even in countries that have reduced the working week to 35 (France) and 30 hours (Netherlands) at the state level, the transition to four days remains a tempting prospect rather than a matter for the near future.
Five by eight
Unlike day, month and year, a week is not an astronomical concept. At different times, people explained the habit of measuring time in seven days by beliefs (in the Germanic and Scandinavian languages the names of the gods to which the days were devoted were preserved in the names of the days), or the beauty of the prime number seven (even the number of celestial spheres was customized to this philosophical aesthetics). In essence, this division is based on nothing more than a working rhythm and an intuitive understanding that after N workdays, a person needs rest.
But how much rest? Ideas about this have changed throughout history, and to the formula "eight hours, five days a week," which today seems unshakable, humanity arrived relatively recently. Welsh social reformer Robert Owen invented it at the beginning of the XIX century, and it took another hundred years of debates, research and strikes to legitimize it at the state level, and then not everywhere and not immediately (in the USSR, working five-day days appeared only in the thirties, in the post-war the period turned back to the six days and only in 1967 was restored).
For those who worked 10, 12 and even 16 hours a day, it was a significant victory, but the economy and life are not static, and today the classical formula already looks like an anachronism. If only because in reality we do not work eight hours a day: according to one of the studies, a modern person spends directly at work a little less than three hours, the rest of the time somehow flows into breaks.
Six hours or four days
Private business has already figured this out, and in cases where work is focused on results rather than on regular shifts - such as in social services - de facto employees are much less likely to force out the norm for the sake of formality. (True, flexible graphics have a downside: in design works, such as video game production, and ambitious startups, such as Tesla, this curved path leads to exhausting reworkings.) A completely different problem is to fix the reduced working week at the municipal and state level. .
The authorities of the Swedish Gothenburg decided to try out a six-hour working day in 2015, choosing as the experimental employees of institutions for the care of the elderly. The experiment cost them 12 million kroons from the budget (almost 90 million rubles in terms of recalculation) and, under the pressure of opposition criticism, was completed 23 months after the start, but nonetheless gave interesting results. Working six hours a day, participants in the experiment took less sick leave and reported that they generally feel much better. One of the nurses notes with displeasure that after the forced return to the eight-hour regime, she immediately began to feel fatigue.
Similar results give smaller-scale experiments with a four-day working week: workers who switch to such a schedule tend to reduce stress and increase motivation and involvement in work (although there are also those who make an extra day off feeling uncomfortable - they do not always understand what to spend the vacated time). Teamwork is also improving.
Rather, it suggests that a person quickly becomes accustomed to good, but what about productivity? According to the results of the Gothenburg experiment, the productivity of nursing home staff during the six-hour day increased by 85 percent - in practice, this means that they spent more time with elderly patients (for example, they took them for walks more often). More stringent economic justifications for a shortened work week do not yet provide a clear understanding: the profit of companies that have switched over to four days does not decrease - but it does not increase either.
In order to present clear and weighty evidence that both employees and employers will benefit from a shorter working day or working week, more research and more data are needed. And even when they are received, at the state level the initiative will rest on the question “Who will pay for all this?”: If we are talking about social services, then you can shorten the working day only with additional employment, and you can afford the luxury only economically prosperous countries (and, as the Swedish experience shows, they doubt the appropriateness). And at the level of private enterprises, a shadowy, still poorly regulated area of processing and employee loyalty abuses emerges: if you can bypass the 40-hour week rule, what prevents you from bypassing any other standard?
Nevertheless, we are gradually moving towards the realization that we need to work not eight hours a day or forty a week - but as much as we work, because the rest of the time is somehow eaten by procrastination. In addition, a shortened work week is a good, but far from the only way to socially care for employees. “You will work for five days, as the Bible says. The seventh day belongs to the Lord. The sixth day is for football,” the writer Anthony Burgess once said when commenting on the established schedule (it should be noted that he found the time when they entered and three-day working week). As you can see, this sacred principle can be corrected for common good.
Photo: store.moma, jazzitupinteriors