Who cares about the damn jetpack? What about a four day work week?

Tom Hodgkinson, Bring on the Four Day Working Week, The Idler, September 25, 2018:

Back in the 1930s, economists, intellectuals and trade union leaders were united in the belief that a shorter working day was fast approaching. The machines would shoulder more and more of the toil, they reckoned, leaving lots of time off for workers. A three or four day week would be ample to procure the necessities of life. The increase in leisure would be spent pursuing healthful recreations such as philosophy, dancing, sewing, cooking and wandering through the woods collecting mushrooms.

This was the view of John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1930 that by 2030 all economic problems would have been solved and the only issue left to deal with would be how to enjoy doing nothing without having a nervous breakdown. He was, perhaps surprisingly, an opponent of the work ethic. “We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy,” he wrote in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, predicting that, in one hundred years’ time, “We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”

Bertrand Russell shared this Christ-like disdain for striving and argued for the four hour day. Oscar Wilde had predicted that the machine would be the saviour of man and would lead everyone to enjoy the life of an Athenian aristocrat: instead of toiling in the mills, we would wander through the groves and discuss atomism and the meaning of the “good life”. His contemporary Walt Whitman wrote of the ideal he called “higher progress”, in other words the liberation of human beings from wage slavery in favour of lazing about and reading books.

This democratic leisure ideal in fact had been a key element of the dream of the Founding Fathers. The second president, John Adams, forecast that his grandchildren would have the time to study “painting, poetry, music, architecture” and the other liberal arts, in short, that everyday life would be organised to allow the “pursuit of happiness”.

Things didn’t quite turn out like that. In the hands of a capitalist élite, supported by governments in most cases, the machine became an instrument for the creation of huge profits for a few, while the majority toiled long hours. The doctrine of consumption rather than time off was introduced.

You can say that again! Now this is more like it:

At the Idler we have aways argued that working long hours for a large company is almost like being a slave and very much like being an indentured employee, because we tend to buy our consumer goods and services on the credit card, and then settle up later.

Resources-wise, the best thing you can do for the planet, it could be argued, is absolutely nothing. To take a day off and lie on your back in the park all day is completely free, harms no-one and demands no fossil fuel inputs.

And what would we do with all this freedom? Sit around and watch Jeremy Kyle all day? No, say its defenders. Leisure is not just for shopping and TV. In our spare time we will do the things that bring us pleasure. Remember hobbies? We’ll be less stressed out and healthier as a result.

And while we in the UK may be just thinking about a four-day week, those plucky Swedes have gone ahead and done it. The council at Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, have announced that they are to begin a year-long thirty-hour week trial for city workers. “We hope to get the staff members taking fewer sick days and feeling better mentally and physically after they’ve worked shorter days,” said Deputy Mayor Mats Pilhem.

Who nows, maybe it will happen.

Lately even the great tycoons have joined in the chorus for a shorter working week. Google co-founder Larry Page recently declared in an interview: “The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true,” he said, before outlining his scheme for less work all round. Page went on to say that people need to be more idle.

“Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek. And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs.”

He said he had discussed the issue with none other than Richard Branson.

The Mexican telephone company billionaire Carlos Slim went one further and argued for the three day week. Speaking at a recent conference in Paraguay, Slim, often identified as one of the two richest men in the world, argued that this would provide more time for the important stuff of life – being idle. “We would have more time to relax, for quality of life,” he said.

We have sixteen years left to fulfil Keynes’s prophecy. The great increases in efficiency that capitalism has achieved over the last two hundred years, and which the economists boast about, should lead not simply to greater profits for shareholders and those at the top, but to an aristocratic style of life for the 99%.