Shorter working week or fewer hours in a working day - either way we still need to have a way for those who have to work in weekends to get a fair deal. Is it really necessary for retail shops to be open seven days a week, for example?
Perhaps it could be fair for everyone, bar no-one, to have overtime payments. There would also need to be protections against employers pressuring employees to under-report work hours.
Yes it is, and it suits students etc to have part time weekend work available. Lord knows we don't want to get back to the drab days when everything was closed from 6pm Friday night until 8am Monday morning.
Anything to reduce traffic congestion , and excessive energy consumption, must be seriously considered. Productivity can be lowered by long commutes. Wasting time in traffic contributes not one dollar to GDP. The social benefits of improved mental health and heightened family solidarity must be considered. There must be no going back to the horrific waste of the last century. No more factory sweet shop conditions, no more pointless office rituals and no more nine to five work over five or even six days. Unpaid overtime is theft and must never be condoned. Leave politics out of it. Fair working conditions is a human right. It’s not a luxury.
Traffic woud be improved more by spreading workplace hours over 5 days than by concentrating them in 4. It would be improved even more by congestion taxation.
John, can I also please point out to you the potential for congestion charging to be a similarly good progressive change as a longer-term climate action that serves people's interests rather than as a short-term political project?
London's congestion charge since 2003 has been immense in helping reframe the city and the streets as healthy places for people.
Oh righto. Sorry I haven't read that book, but that journal article is interesting. Unscrambling would be amazing to see, and bringing in congestion charging with a set of trade-offs (such as charging for city streets but making the motorway bypasses free) could be a good way to sell this idea to the public.
I have a theory that since London's congestion charge has proven successful, that it has built trust in the government to act on transport problems and has helped enable further progressive policies such as ULEZ, more buses, road upgrades including bike lanes, and low traffic neighbourhoods at significant scale.
I'd like to see a reduction in the work day, rather than a reduction in the work week. The productivity of my final hour in a 7:30 work day seems minimal, whereas I believe the evidence on the four day week is mixed (and rather thin).
I also think it's interesting to consider the social implications of a four (or four and a half) day week compared to a shorter work day. Shorter work days mean more time to spend with your family during the week, more time to prepare meals and more time to engage with your community. The four day week, meanwhile, means more time to travel and more time on leisure activities.
I prefer the shorter work day (six and a half hours would be about the right number, I think). It feels more in line with climate realities - less consumerist and more communal. It could also be adopted more broadly: small retailers could easily adapt to opening an hour later in the morning, cafes already close fairly early, larger retailers are already open outside the standard 9-5, and so require multiple shifts anyway.
It's a tricky question, because I think people are not very good at judging their own productivity and so will favour fewer, longer days. I base this partly on tutoring students who don't seem to see the decline in their attention and learning over the course of an hour, let alone two hours, of continuous study. And much like the work from home debate, there are senior staff who pride themselves on working ten hour days and who will oppose shorter days on principle.
Wouldn't a shorter working week enable people to work either shorter days or fewer days? And perhaps this could be flexible depending on the needs of the workers and of the work?
This flexibility could be good for everyone, but only if it can be fairly negotiated between employer and employee with balanced power between them.
I also applaud your focus on little 'p' politics (policies that serve people) rather than capital 'P' (Professional Political Partisanship).
But since you mention Labor, can we also please acknowledge that many other parties or independents could support a shorter work week? Could this be a policy that could unite a progressive majority to support this common cause?
I agree with you that Labor's incrementalism is a problem. I don't know if it's been spelt out as simply as this, but it seems to me that the reason it's a problem is that things are getting worse faster than Labor is fixing things. Climate and biodiversity are obvious cases where Labor's reforms are too weak to address the problem at the scale it needs to be addressed, but I'd also add integrity, transparency, tax reform, and wealth inequality to that list.
> "What we need, above all, is hope for a better future and a shorter working week will be a step in that direction."
Let's also note that we need to FEEL that things are getting better. Giving people a shorter working week is a clear and practical shift that people can experience and enjoy, over and over again.
You're on the right track with reducing work, John.
However, your Friday afternoon idea risks worsening travel congestion, especially on the new Friday noon peak hour. It would be awful if everyone says, "yay, it's the weekend... oh shit, the traffic is bad!" So while I'd love for everyone to share a 2.5 day weekend, I'd prefer for people to take their time off at different times.
Also, moving to a 35 hour ceiling more readily sets up a future move to 32.5 hours, then 30 hours, and so on... This transition would be simpler and easier for people to adjust to than moving knock-off time from Friday noon to Thursday afternoon , then to Thursday noon, and so on...
So I reckon fewer hours in the work week is better than fewer days at work, because:
1. The temptation to overwork across fewer days needs to be avoided,
2. A shorter work week should enable more diverse options for when and where people work, and
3. More people move about at different times.
This requires a really strong system for mandatory overtime payments for all workplaces, including white collar offices where overtime can often be culturally ingrained.
A 35 hour work week sounds like the sort of bold policy a progressive Labor government should have. But you can be sure that the conservatives, billionaire oligarchs and News Corp will run 24/7 propaganda about how this will destroy the economy. Labor would need a plan on how to deal with the right wing backlash before announcing the policy or it will go down in flames, like the Voice Referendum.
For a Labor party whose policies are mostly very Liberal, if Labor proposed a shorter working week and the LNP opposed it, then perhaps it could be an opportunity for a positive progressive framing of it as, "our policy is in the interests of working people, while the LNP's objection to this policy only serves the interests of multinational corporations."
Labor's policy has been right in some domains but decidedly left in others, including workers' rights and entitlements. Labor has made some excellent amendments to the Fair Work Act.
Fair point. What I'm suggesting is that a policy debate on worker's rights could be favourable to Labor. You mentioned a scare campaign from the conservatives and conservative media - perhaps that could backfire if the debate could be successfully framed as everyday people verses corporate profits.
Real wages have decreased since 2020? That sound like a much bigger deal than ca be fixed by a shorter workweek. And if it's a structural change, a shorter work week may not even help. Why not a progressive wage subsidy?
Shorter working week or fewer hours in a working day - either way we still need to have a way for those who have to work in weekends to get a fair deal. Is it really necessary for retail shops to be open seven days a week, for example?
Perhaps it could be fair for everyone, bar no-one, to have overtime payments. There would also need to be protections against employers pressuring employees to under-report work hours.
Yes it is, and it suits students etc to have part time weekend work available. Lord knows we don't want to get back to the drab days when everything was closed from 6pm Friday night until 8am Monday morning.
Anything to reduce traffic congestion , and excessive energy consumption, must be seriously considered. Productivity can be lowered by long commutes. Wasting time in traffic contributes not one dollar to GDP. The social benefits of improved mental health and heightened family solidarity must be considered. There must be no going back to the horrific waste of the last century. No more factory sweet shop conditions, no more pointless office rituals and no more nine to five work over five or even six days. Unpaid overtime is theft and must never be condoned. Leave politics out of it. Fair working conditions is a human right. It’s not a luxury.
Traffic woud be improved more by spreading workplace hours over 5 days than by concentrating them in 4. It would be improved even more by congestion taxation.
Both of these changes would be brilliant.
John, can I also please point out to you the potential for congestion charging to be a similarly good progressive change as a longer-term climate action that serves people's interests rather than as a short-term political project?
London's congestion charge since 2003 has been immense in helping reframe the city and the streets as healthy places for people.
+100 I've been banging on about this for 30-odd years, going back to my book Great Expectations in the 1990s Here's a paywalled piece from 2005 and a more recent one Unscrambling the Toll Road Egg https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jiayu-Wang-34/publication/326755021_Unscrambling_the_toll_road_egg/links/5e7059ff458515eb5aba86bb/Unscrambling-the-toll-road-egg.pdf
Oh righto. Sorry I haven't read that book, but that journal article is interesting. Unscrambling would be amazing to see, and bringing in congestion charging with a set of trade-offs (such as charging for city streets but making the motorway bypasses free) could be a good way to sell this idea to the public.
I have a theory that since London's congestion charge has proven successful, that it has built trust in the government to act on transport problems and has helped enable further progressive policies such as ULEZ, more buses, road upgrades including bike lanes, and low traffic neighbourhoods at significant scale.
I'd like to see a reduction in the work day, rather than a reduction in the work week. The productivity of my final hour in a 7:30 work day seems minimal, whereas I believe the evidence on the four day week is mixed (and rather thin).
I also think it's interesting to consider the social implications of a four (or four and a half) day week compared to a shorter work day. Shorter work days mean more time to spend with your family during the week, more time to prepare meals and more time to engage with your community. The four day week, meanwhile, means more time to travel and more time on leisure activities.
I prefer the shorter work day (six and a half hours would be about the right number, I think). It feels more in line with climate realities - less consumerist and more communal. It could also be adopted more broadly: small retailers could easily adapt to opening an hour later in the morning, cafes already close fairly early, larger retailers are already open outside the standard 9-5, and so require multiple shifts anyway.
It's a tricky question, because I think people are not very good at judging their own productivity and so will favour fewer, longer days. I base this partly on tutoring students who don't seem to see the decline in their attention and learning over the course of an hour, let alone two hours, of continuous study. And much like the work from home debate, there are senior staff who pride themselves on working ten hour days and who will oppose shorter days on principle.
Wouldn't a shorter working week enable people to work either shorter days or fewer days? And perhaps this could be flexible depending on the needs of the workers and of the work?
This flexibility could be good for everyone, but only if it can be fairly negotiated between employer and employee with balanced power between them.
Bravo! A shorter working week transfers more productivity gains to workers than the equivalent in $ increases.
I also applaud your focus on little 'p' politics (policies that serve people) rather than capital 'P' (Professional Political Partisanship).
But since you mention Labor, can we also please acknowledge that many other parties or independents could support a shorter work week? Could this be a policy that could unite a progressive majority to support this common cause?
I agree with you that Labor's incrementalism is a problem. I don't know if it's been spelt out as simply as this, but it seems to me that the reason it's a problem is that things are getting worse faster than Labor is fixing things. Climate and biodiversity are obvious cases where Labor's reforms are too weak to address the problem at the scale it needs to be addressed, but I'd also add integrity, transparency, tax reform, and wealth inequality to that list.
> "What we need, above all, is hope for a better future and a shorter working week will be a step in that direction."
Let's also note that we need to FEEL that things are getting better. Giving people a shorter working week is a clear and practical shift that people can experience and enjoy, over and over again.
You're on the right track with reducing work, John.
However, your Friday afternoon idea risks worsening travel congestion, especially on the new Friday noon peak hour. It would be awful if everyone says, "yay, it's the weekend... oh shit, the traffic is bad!" So while I'd love for everyone to share a 2.5 day weekend, I'd prefer for people to take their time off at different times.
Also, moving to a 35 hour ceiling more readily sets up a future move to 32.5 hours, then 30 hours, and so on... This transition would be simpler and easier for people to adjust to than moving knock-off time from Friday noon to Thursday afternoon , then to Thursday noon, and so on...
So I reckon fewer hours in the work week is better than fewer days at work, because:
1. The temptation to overwork across fewer days needs to be avoided,
2. A shorter work week should enable more diverse options for when and where people work, and
3. More people move about at different times.
This requires a really strong system for mandatory overtime payments for all workplaces, including white collar offices where overtime can often be culturally ingrained.
A 35 hour work week sounds like the sort of bold policy a progressive Labor government should have. But you can be sure that the conservatives, billionaire oligarchs and News Corp will run 24/7 propaganda about how this will destroy the economy. Labor would need a plan on how to deal with the right wing backlash before announcing the policy or it will go down in flames, like the Voice Referendum.
For a Labor party whose policies are mostly very Liberal, if Labor proposed a shorter working week and the LNP opposed it, then perhaps it could be an opportunity for a positive progressive framing of it as, "our policy is in the interests of working people, while the LNP's objection to this policy only serves the interests of multinational corporations."
Labor's policy has been right in some domains but decidedly left in others, including workers' rights and entitlements. Labor has made some excellent amendments to the Fair Work Act.
Fair point. What I'm suggesting is that a policy debate on worker's rights could be favourable to Labor. You mentioned a scare campaign from the conservatives and conservative media - perhaps that could backfire if the debate could be successfully framed as everyday people verses corporate profits.
Real wages have decreased since 2020? That sound like a much bigger deal than ca be fixed by a shorter workweek. And if it's a structural change, a shorter work week may not even help. Why not a progressive wage subsidy?