Four-day week? Talk about back to the future!

LABOUR’S latest vote-winning wheeze is a plan to reduce the standard working week from five days to four. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has hinted that the pledge could be included in his party’s manifesto for the 2022 General Election. The TUC is already agitating for the introduction of a statutory automation Labour believes four-day offer that the week. new opportunity technology to and cut working hours for everyone.

It’s an argument we’ve heard time and again ever since the advent of computerisation, which was supposed to lead to longer leisure time by freeing workers from drudgery. That was the theory, anyway.

In reality, the opposite has happened. People may not be chained to desks or machinery as much as they were in the past, but the advent of mobile phones, texts and emails means that in many sectors of the economy hardly anyone is ever off duty.

Far from a reduction in the working week creating jobs, which is supposed to be a beneficial side- effect, all the evidence points to the contrary. When France introduced a legally enforcible 35-hour week, unemployment went through the roof.

It’s also been tried before. When I arrived in Fleet Street in the late Seventies, most staff were on a four- day week. As an economic model, it proved unsustainable as newspapers racked up enormous financial losses.

This was when the power of the unions was at its peak. No wonder the TUC wants to turn the clock back. Although the plan is being sold as liberating the workers, it is in effect merely part of a wider assault on individual freedom.

One significant element of the motivation behind the campaign to force part-time workers in the gig economy to be treated as fulltime employees is to drive them into the arms of the unions and deny them the flexibility to pick and choose when and where they work. It’s a way of imposing collective bargaining on fast-moving tech companies, such as Uber.

This isn’t a great leap forward, it’s back to the future.

And never mind the four- day week, we also experimented with a three-day week in the Seventies. It was a panic measure brought in by Grocer Heath’s government to mitigate power shortages caused by the OPEC oil price crisis and industrial action by coal miners. For just over two months at the beginning of 1974, companies could only operate three days a week to conserve energy. Pubs and cinemas were forced to close early and television shut down at 10.30pm.

I recall vividly sitting in the office typing by candlelight, brewing tea on a Calor gas stove before going home in the dark to huddle in bed under a pile of scratchy sheets and blankets.

It was a struggle to keep warm because the pitiful storage heaters relied on a steady supply of cheap overnight electricity, which had been switched off.

As far as Britain’s economy was concerned, the three- day week was a disaster. Productivity and output nosedived, firms started laying off staff and between January and March 885,000 more people registered for unemployment benefits. Still, Corbyn and McDonnell have a peculiar, rosetinted nostalgia for the Seventies, which they seem to think was some kind of workers’ nirvana.

All their main policies hark back to the decade before the Thatcher revolution, when the unions ruled the roost and the United Kingdom was considered the Sick Man of Europe. Demands for a shorter working week were routinely bolted on to extortionate pay claims in the late Seventies.

Few under 50 can have the faintest idea what Britain was like then. Today’s pampered and indulged Corbynista millennials wouldn’t last five minutes.

Accustomed to an unlimited selection of mobiles available online 24/7, how would they cope with being expected to wait six months before the Post Office Engineering Union got round to installing any kind of telephone?

ONCE the four- day week’s up and running, perhaps Labour could reintroduce some of the other quaint policies which contributed to life’s rich tapestry four decades ago.

Most people would only work Monday to Friday, eight-to-four or nine-to-five, when they would have to clock off. The shops would shut at six, close half- days on Thursdays and all day Sunday. Television would start at teatime and go off air before midnight.

The pubs would only open between 11am and 2.30pm, then reopen from 5.30pm until 10.30pm. Sunday lunchtime would be restricted to two hours between noon and 2pm and from 7pm to 10pm in the evening.

And you could forget about taking an Uber home back then. There weren’t any. Nor would there be today if Labour had its way.

If you were lucky, the last bus might not leave until 11pm — that’s always assuming the drivers weren’t on strike in support of a demand for a four-day week . . .