Читать книгу The Case for a Four Day Week - Anna Coote - Страница 9

So let’s take a closer look at how our current ideas about ‘normal’ took shape. In nineteenth-century Britain, a regular working day ranged from 10 to 16 hours, typically for six days a week. From the midnineteenth century onwards, workers on both sides of the Atlantic campaigned for a ‘just and sufficient’ limit to their hours of labour. The eight-hour movement gathered strength, and workers came out in their thousands to demand ‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will’.⁷ Karl Marx maintained that shortening the working day was a ‘basic prerequisite’ of what he described as the ‘true realm of freedom’,⁸ and this became a central issue for socialist and labour movements in industrialized countries across the world.

In 1856, stonemasons in Melbourne, Australia, fought successfully for an eight-hour working day – a global first.⁹ In 1889, gas workers in East London became the first to do so in Britain. In 1919, the nascent International Labour Organization (ILO) set out its Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, establishing the principle of an eight-hour day, or 40-hour week, which has since been ratified by 52 countries.¹⁰

In 1926 the US Ford Motor Company was one of the first major employers to adopt a five-day, 40-hour week for workers in their factories – with no reduction in pay. Productivity increased and the corporation went from strength to strength.¹¹ In 1930, the cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg replaced three daily eight-hour shifts at his plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, with four six-hour shifts. Results included big cuts in absenteeism, turnover and labour costs, and a 41 per cent reduction in workplace accidents.¹²

Franklin D. Roosevelt launched his ‘President’s Re-employment Agreement’ in 1933, urging US employers to raise hourly wages and cut the length of the working week to 35 hours. Roosevelt shared the view of UK economist John Maynard Keynes that government spending could stimulate the economy and that there was a strong relationship between higher productivity and shorter hours of work. He hoped to get more people back into work and – by raising wages at the same time – boost consumption and growth. Firms readily signed up, and between 1.5 million and 2 million new jobs were created.

A combination of industrial struggles and government initiatives ensured that the two-day weekend and the 40-hour week were widely adopted as standard by the middle of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. Average working hours continued to fall, as Figure 1 indicates, but less steeply from the 1980s. After that, the trend flattened in many countries and in some went into reverse.

In 1930, Keynes famously predicted that a 15-hour week would be the norm by the twenty-first century – how wrong he was! What happened to put a brake on progress towards reduced working time? A combination of economic and cultural developments have locked us into the eight-hour day norm.

Figure 1: Average annual hours actually worked per worker, 1950–2018, all G7 countries with data pre-1971 and the OECD average.

Source: OECD https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AVE_HRS