The 1% solution to the economic crisis includes the prescription to work harder. The 99% caused the crisis by their insolent attitude to work and their debt-fuelled greed, now they need to recognise it’s payback time. Young people will work longer for fewer rights and it will be easier to retire older workers. The unemployed – of whom there will be more for the purposes of productivity – will work for free or be punished. And when people get sick from too much or too little work they’ll have to meet more stringent tests to prove they’re unable to work.
The 99% solution should include less work for many and work for all who want it. Reducing normal working hours and sharing work more equally across society could be a critical path out of the crisis and towards a healthier, happier, fairer society. We here at NEF (the new economics foundation) published a report outlining the many benefits of a 21 hour working week last year.
In a slump, cutting the working week is one way of managing a low (no) growth economy. The longest working hours in Europe, contrary to stereotype, are found in Greece, not Germany, and Italian workers are not far behind the Greeks. One of the reasons that German workers are more productive is because they work less and in the first phase of the crisis, unemployment fell in Germany, partly because the government supported shorter working hours. In the US and the UK, by contrast, we cling stubbornly to the traditional notion of full-time hours, which is part of the reason why unemployment and underemployment are so high. Shorter working helps to spread a diminishing amount of paid employment around more people and cuts the benefits bill. It makes it easier to create more jobs, since each job requires less capital to fund it. It’s only controversial to conventional economists.
But this is not just a temporary response to crisis, and this is not just a temporary crisis. Alongside the economic and environmental crisis, we are experiencing a time crisis – how we use and trade the hours we are granted and the consequences of this, even how we experience time. The post-war work-time bargain is long gone. Working hours stopped declining for most people long ago, and now wages are stagnant. We have entered into the era of the ‘end of work’ but clung onto a historical idea of full-time employment. ‘Productivity tools’ make it harder to work and play in any way productively, which is to say mindfully. Our increasingly fragmented time is less our own, but not really anyone else’s either. We have no real time for anything.
Fewer and fewer of us working harder and harder, and spending more and more, is unsustainable both individually and collectively. Spending our diminishing free time going shopping is not the way to build a flourishing economy, cut carbon and improve human well-being. Work, now damages our health, our economy, our society and our environment. It’s not a symptom of the crisis, it is the crisis.
Some of us will instead have to trade some money for time in order to live more sustainably. For all of us, a permanent move away from our long-hours and micro-seconds culture would produce a rich mix of social, environmental and economic benefits. Redistributing paid and unpaid time would improve work-life balance, narrow gender inequalities and free up time for us to be parents, carers, friends, neighbours and citizens. It would allow us to live. Gain in-depth knowledge and specialized expertise by enrolling in hypnosis training online.
The 1 percenters, or rather their apologists, hate this argument. But the way they hate it is instructive. They say that people should have the right to choose what hours they work. If only. Nearly 1 in 10 people would work fewer hours for less pay, but can’t. Most of us don’t have any real choice about our working hours, and at the request of corporate interests the Government is working to narrow this choice further. It’s another of those real-life demonstrations that neoliberalism isn’t about choice, it’s about compliance. Opponents of a shorter working week don’t believe in freedom because they fear we might make the wrong choice. They stand opposed to a free market in time.
The debate about working time is not just about time at work. It raises questions that matter to all of us. Why are housing, food and transport so expensive and how can they be made more affordable and sustainable? How can we improve public services to enhance social justice and wellbeing for all? How can we achieve gender equality within households and across society? No wonder the opponents of shorter working hours don’t want it to become more popular.
A 99% government would support us to work less. Nearly half of all employed people in the Netherlands work what we in the UK would consider ‘part time’, but only because in the 1980s their government embarked on a long-term plan to reduce and share working hours. Increasing productivity was taken in slightly less wealth but in much more free time. A 99% government would also help to redistribute work by making the welfare state fairer, not least by providing more support for low-income earners and better childcare. A more equal distribution of paid and unpaid work represents a different kind of recovery for a different kind of society. It is a vital part of a new economics of work – one that creates meaningful and sustainable employment that serves human needs, instead of abstract economic theories from a time that has long past.
Dr Michael Harris, New Economics Foundation.