The political storms raging on both sides of the Atlantic this week would seem fierce enough to sink any movement in progressive politics, yet the U.K. Labour party managed to pass a motion at its annual conference making a four-day work week official party policy.
The issue took center stage in shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s speech at the Labour Party’s annual conference, where he said, “We should work to live, not live to work,” and promised to reduce the average full time week to thirty-two hours within a decade—importantly, fewer hours with no loss in pay.
The four day week, explains Kyle Lewis, co-director of the think tank Autonomy, was championed by an emerging new set of thinkers and writers in the UK. Autonomy’s report on the shorter working week looks much like what Labour has adopted. “But rather than this simply becoming an intellectual echo chamber, these policies (along with a green new deal, abolishing private schools, etc.) have been embraced and forwarded by Labour members, trade unions and activists across the country,” Lewis says. “This demonstrates both the effectiveness of bottom up pressure and also the willingness of the Labour hierarchy to finally empower and listen to its base.”
What would it take to get a four-day work week on the agenda in the United States?
This country has a long and vibrant (and occasionally bloody) history of labor struggles over working hours. The Haymarket executions that led to the creation of May Day as International Workers’ Day came as part of a crackdown on the eight-hour day movement. Even as she campaigned around the country to save her husband Albert Parsons, one of the eight men accused of the Haymarket Square bombing, from the noose, labor agitator Lucy Parsons did not let the issue of shorter hours drop.
What would it take to get a four-day work week on the agenda in the United States?
“A hundred years ago [Benjamin] Franklin said that six hours a day was enough for anyone to work and if he was right then, two hours a day ought to be enough now,” she said on a podium in 1886.
From the beginning of capitalism, the struggle between laborers and the boss was a struggle about time. Who would control it, how much of it would have to be dedicated to work in order to survive. The fight for an eight-hour work day came after a successful fight for a ten-hour day, and the eight-hour movement’s slogan was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.”
The “what we will” part was particularly important to women who, as they do today, faced a double shift of care at home after the waged day was over. The power of the shorter hours movement, as I’ve written elsewhere, was that it cut across workplaces, unifying craft and industrial workers, men and women, black and white, and helping build the worker power that eventually helped build the New Deal-era welfare state.
McDonnell’s comment about “work[ing] to live, not living to work” resonates in today’s climate of diminished work opportunities. Particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, it’s been the middle-income jobs that have hollowed out, leaving a few great jobs at the top and everyone else scrambling to make ends meet.
While the highly paid jobs make a fetish of long work days—from Wall Streeters to Silicon Valley tycoons—shorter working hours are imposed on hourly employees who struggle to get enough time to make ends meet and wind up cobbling together a living from multiple jobs or, more recently, added gig work. They might not be working a nine to five schedule at one job, but their hours are extending longer and longer.
The ripple effects touch every part of our lives. Gentrification, by forcing many low-wage workers into housing on the fringes of the cities where they work, adds hours to the workday spent commuting on crumbling public transit. “Extreme day care” is another trend, as childcare workers must accommodate parents’ impossible schedules. Workers who make demands are told, breathlessly, that the machines are coming to automate their jobs away.
Long hours are not coincidental, not choices made by people who simply love their jobs. Nor are they inevitable. They are the result of the drive toward more profit, wrung out of workers who produce ever more, yet receive less pay for their efforts. The lessons of the shorter-hours movements of centuries and decades past are still deeply relevant, and are being revived for a new time.
The morning after McDonnell’s speech, in a triumphant session at The World Transformed, a leftist festival held alongside the Labour party’s conference, activists squeezed around tables to discuss next steps. What would a four-day week mean to them, but also, how would it be implemented?
Des Arthur of the Communications Workers Union, which backed the four-day week resolution, told the room about the union’s fights to shorten the working hours of postal workers, whose work has been getting harder, not easier, as a result of technology. Sorting machines mean the workers spend more time outside on their feet, and the rise of email and online shopping means more of their deliveries are parcels rather than letters.
A social welfare worker noted that her day often extends longer when she stays to help a client who relies on her, adding that many care workers, from doctors to home care attendants, face similar challenges. Freelancers also spoke up, wondering how shorter hours would apply to their project-based work. Educators wondered: would students, too, go to a four-day school week?
If you give people something worth dreaming about they just might organize to make it happen.
But these were problems to solve, not reasons not to push for less work. Those in attendance also shared dreams of what they could do with their spare time—a three-day weekend would allow for more travel, one young man noted, and another who writes plays in his off hours looked forward to more time for art. And since it was a room full of Labour activists, more than one mentioned having more time for political organizing.
The labor movement has been on the back foot for years. Yet young workers are organizing, and 49,000 GM workers remain on strike for a second week, signaling perhaps a new determination to fight.
When the Fight for $15 began in 2012, fast-food worker Pamela Flood told me that it was the audacity of the demand that got her involved and willing to take risks—$15 an hour was a thing worth dreaming about. The Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and now Elizabeth Warren, like the revitalized Labour party, are buoyed by promises of policies supporting working people—free college, free health care, a Green New Deal.
If you give people something worth dreaming about, as Flood said, they just might organize to make it happen. That’s the lesson of the four-day week in the U.K., and one that American labor and political candidates should take to heart.