Why four-day work week is ethically desirable
‘We should work to live, not live to work,” declared Britain’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell last month, as he announced the British Labour Party would reduce the standard working week to 32 hours, without loss of pay, within 10 years of winning office.
The promise followed a report (commissioned by McDonnell) from economic historian Robert Skidelsky on how to achieve shorter working hours.
The report deals specifically with British conditions but presents an agenda with universal appeal. It says fewer work hours will improve productivity for employers while giving employees what they want.
It says having to work less at what one needs to do, and more at what one wants to do, is good for material and spiritual well-being. Reducing working time — the time one has to work to keep “body and soul alive” — is thus a valuable ethical objective.
Arguments for fewer working hours usually focus on the “economic” benefits, in the sense of resource allocation that maximises satisfaction. But Skidelsky’s report cites a more important reason: that it is ethically desirable.
Ethical desirability is not just a matter of costs and benefits. It is also a matter of justice and realising common goods (shared goods that require collective deliberation and action).
Skidelsky’s argument is essentially this:
● People are generally happier when spending time on what they want to do, rather than on what they have to do to earn an income.
● Less time spent on work will promote happiness (or wellbeing).
● Promoting happiness (or wellbeing) is ethically desirable, so it is ethically desirable to reduce the hours worked.
A variant of this argument substitutes freedom for happiness. On this view, less time spent on work (which is necessitated by an external reason, income) means more time to do what one wills.
But reducing the amount of work time doesn’t necessarily increase the amount of time available for doing what you want. Work is not the only context in which action is subject to external constraints. Much family life, for example, involves doing things that need to be done rather than want to be done.
Another problem is that ethical desirability is not just a matter of increasing the total amount of a good (such as happiness or freedom). It also concerns the good’s distribution. An outcome must be not merely optimal but also just.
There is a view that shorter working hours are ethically compelling because they correct an injustice arising from the unequal distribution of free time.
Studies, for example, show free time is unequally distributed between the sexes. Men enjoy a larger share of socially available free time, because women spend more time outside paid work on duties related to child-rearing and care-giving.
Reducing working hours has benefits, but it does not address deeper problems of inequality in the activity of work itself. It does nothing to stop the production of harmful things, or things that go against the common good.
The ethically desirable goals of equality and the realisation of common goods require deeper social changes in the way work is done and what it is done for. Real progress lies in realising equality and common goods through work as much as gaining more time for non-work.