Switching to a four-day week

La semaine de travail de quatre jours est-elle possible ?

Le Royaume-Uni est l’un des pays européens qui travaillent le plus. La durée hebdomadaire de travail peut y dépasser les 48 heures. Mais, depuis peu, les syndicats et certains partis politiques appellent à la mise en place de la semaine de travail de quatre jours. Cette dernière pourrait changer le quotidien de nombreux Britanniques...

Imeet Rich Leigh for a coffee in Gloucester on a Friday, his day off. In fact, his entire company has the day off, because Radioactive PR, the firm led by Leigh, 30, has adopted a four-day week. It is one of a handful of UK businesses that now operate like this: staff still get paid their previous five-day salary, but they work a day less. The company began with a six-week trial and found that they achieved just as much – and there were even signs of growth. The key to the scheme’s success, Leigh says, is how happy his employees now are. “There are two ways to make money in my line of work,” he says, “retain clients and get new ones. Miserable, tired staff can’t do either.”

2. The four-day working week is being touted by some as the answer to Britain’s “productivity problem”. British people work some of the longest hours in Europe: the average British worker takes only a 34-minute lunch break and works 10 hours overtime each week (more often than not, this is unpaid). Yet UK productivity lags seriously behind our European neighbours, who tend to work fewer hours.

A TOLL ON HEALTH

3. British working practices have taken their toll on the nation’s health and happiness. More than half a million workers in the UK were signed off with work-related stress or anxiety last year. That amounts to 12.5m working days, and while it is difficult to quantify the financial cost of this, a 2014 study put it at nearly 4.5% of GDP.

4. The EU working time directive sets a limit of 48 working hours a week. Britain is the only EU member that allows workers to opt out of this and work longer hours, a practice that trade unions have argued has been subject to “widespread abuse”.

5. For campaigners, now is the time for a change. There is both opportunity and need, on health, happiness and business grounds. Those who have called for the introduction of a four-day week include the Green party and Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress. O’Grady argues that where businesses have increased their profits as a result of automation, that success should be shared with workers in the form of reduced hours: “It’s time to share the wealth from new technology, not allow those at the top to grab it for themselves,” she says.

British working practices have taken their toll on the nation’s health and happiness.

CRITICS

6. Overwhelmingly, the scientific evidence has said that working shorter hours makes us more productive. But the idea of the fourday working week hasn’t convinced everyone. Mark Price is a former managing director of Waitrose and a former deputy chairman of the John Lewis Partnership; he also served as trade and investment minister under David Cameron. Price can’t see the four-day week taking off in the public sector, where many jobs involve shift patterns that cover 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “If everybody in the public sector was to work 28 hours a week rather than 35,” he says, “you would have to increase the pay bill by 20% to cover that. It would mean taxes going up. I can’t imagine there is much of an appetite for that.”

7. Price is also concerned by the sentiment behind the movement, which he says is, in part, “the assumption that work isn’t good, so you should do less of it”. He points to the phrase “work-life balance”, which “implies that life is not work”, and argues that rather than concentrating on the quantity of work we do, we should focus on the quality. “We should be thinking about workplace happiness and engagement,” he says.

8. At the heart of this discussion are some very complex questions: what is work? Is there a difference between good work and bad work, and why is some work paid well and other work less so? Commutes in the UK are getting longer as housing prices in city centres rise, and it is becoming in- creasingly common for people to answer their emails while commuting. Should that count towards our overall tally of hours?

REDISTRIBUTION OF TIME

9. Aidan Harper is the founder of the 4 Day Week campaign. He wants to ensure that a shorter working week is universally guaranteed for all workers, either by legislation or trade union bargaining. “In the UK, we have growing numbers of overworked people,” says Harper, “but we also have a growing number of underworked people, namely gig economy employees looking for more work. So one question is whether the redistribution of time, of workload, might help this.

10. “And there is a more potent question about what the economy is for. Surely the purpose of the economy is to create a good life within it, and have a material basis from which you can be housed, have an education etc. But something our economy is not providing for us is time, which we need. The next stage in economic development should not be to generate more stuff, but to create the conditions in which we can live good lives.”

increasingly de plus en plus / to count towards être comptabilisé dans / tally décompte. 9. founder fondateur, instigateur / to ensure s'assurer / bargaining négociations / overworked surmené, surchargé de travail / namely à savoir / gig economy économie des petits boulots (gig boulot temporaire) / workload charge de travail. 10. potent ici, important / purpose but / to provide for fournir, offrir / stage ici, étape / stuff choses, matériel.