“Shorter working week inevitable” – really?
// February 18th, 2010 // Information Overload
The New Economics Foundation put out a release on Saturday calling for a 21 hour week. Part of the rationale is that this would help address “lasting damage to the economy caused by the banking crisis”. What this utopian suggestion forgets is that the banking crisis was partly caused by homeowners mortgaging themselves to the hilt. That issue has not gone away so I can’t see hard-pressed homeowners voluntarily cutting their hours in order to help “distribute paid work” a bit more evenly or reduce their carbon footprint. Most need all the paid work they can get.
NEF is right in two areas – the country is becoming increasingly polarised and those in work are working ever longer hours. It reports that since 1981, two-person households have added 6 hours to their work week. As everybody will be asked to do more with less, this trend will continue upwards.
It is odd that nobody talks about the “Leisure Society” any longer. When the Edwardians stopped factory work on Saturday afternoons, professional football took off. Saturday working for manual workers stopped altogether in the 1950s when Churchill seriously thought he might be able to introduce a 4-day week for the working man. In 1981, when NEF base their research, I was a schoolboy working in a warehouse near Moorgate during my summer holidays and remember the foreman telling me authoritatively that we would all get Friday afternoons off before long.
So what happened? Firstly, those manufacturing jobs aren’t there anymore. We are increasingly becoming a nation of knowledge workers – the FT on Monday mentioned an IDC report which suggests that in 5 years’ time, only 10 percent of EU jobs will not require IT skills. (That warehouse in Moorgate is now a financial business of some sort – I walked past it the other day and a fleet of drivers in silver Mercs was waiting outside).
What’s happened over the last 20 years is that knowledge workers have begun to use new communications technologies such as email, mobiles, BlackBerrys etc. Paradoxically, we use these tools in such a way as to wind up working longer hours and carry our work increasingy into our home lives.
Reminds me of an old joke about some government minister in the sixties that was advised to adopt a five day workweek in Israel’s workforce (at the time the workweek was 6 days). His reply: “Let’s go gradually. First let them work one day, then we can ramp up” …