The Three-Day Week: more rest, less work, more play...and better?

Signs that our economic crisis are compelling politicians to think the unthinkable. There are several reports today that UK ministers are considering imposing a three-day working week on large areas of British industry and services. With the general tightening of finance and credit, the suggestion from both business and government is that it would be better to have people working three days out of five at 70-80% of wages, with the gap covered by a government subsidy, than have the businesses collapse and risk the far greater social expense of millions more on unemployment benefit.

For those of us who have been advocating regulations towards a shorter working week, for a whole range of different reasons - to benefit from the productive gains of technology, to address our deep disatisfactions with our parenting or community lives, to expand opportunities for self-development and mental health - this suggestion seems more like an opportunity, than the "dark threat" the Independent renders it as. 

As Jonathan Gershuny and Madeleine Bunting reminded us several years ago, the original 'three-day week' in the UK of the early seventies - instituted as a response to energy shortages caused by industrial dispute - had a very small negative effect on general productivity levels, way smaller than the 40% drop you might have expected. (I found a discussion on Channel Four's community website which backs this up anecdotally). 

There's a classic unreconstructed quote in one of the Independent pieces, covering JCB's decision to adopt this policy: "All the wives have given their men lists of things to do since the hours disappeared," says a foreman varnishing his door. But again, those of us who are interested in the power of play have to ask: is this a true picture? Do people, when given more free time from work, simply turn to leisure-and-recreation? ("Gardening leave", they call it in the newspaper industry, when a writer or editor who had been poached by another paper was being paid not to work - ie, add value and quality - for his new organisation). 

One would hope that things have changed since the seventies, and that there might be a significant amount of workers - in these 'quality-of-life' conscious times - who would welcome and embrace this de-centering of work (and to a degree consumption) in their lives. There are so many social indications - from the rise in demand for literary festivals, allotments and personal training, to the attractions of social media (now becoming real utilities like The School of Everything, Gumtree and Freecycle), to the incessant anxieties over parenting - that we want more time and space away from the workplace. 

Why might we want this? Well, to explore these highly-connected, highly-informed, highly-sensitised selves and communities that we have become, in the network society. And maybe, as a result, this free-time will give us a new perspective on the kind of products and services that we have been making and delivering. If it's a "New Green Deal"  that both the US and the UK are promoting as the ultimate kick-starter for prosperity again, then that can't be just construction jobs - it will also require some degree of innovation and entrepreneurship, about how we can live sustainable lifestyles that feel as replete and complex as the ones we've left behind. I think some more guaranteed free-time in our lives to explore different lifestyle options - and maybe open up new green markets, products and services as a result of these explorations - might be not a temporary measure, but an essential shift.

Again, I point you to Benjamin Barber's fabulous essay in The Nation, where he suggests that the financial crisis gives us a real opportunity to re-assess what we regard as 'valuable activity' in our lives - and one of those re-assessments might be that if we aim to reduce our consumption, we'll be able to work less, and invest in life more:

What if Obama committed the United States to reducing consumer spending from 70 percent of GDP to 50 percent over the next ten years, bringing it to roughly where Germany's GDP is today? The Germans have a commensurate standard of living and considerably greater equality. Imagine all the things we could do without having to shop: play and pray, create and relate, read and walk, listen and procreate--make art, make friends, make homes, make love.

Sound too soft? Too idealistic? If we are to survive the collapse of the unsustainable consumer capitalism that has possessed our body politic over the past three decades, idealism must become the new realism. For if the contest is between the material body defined by solipsistic acquisitiveness and the human spirit defined by imagination and compassion, then a purely technical economic response is what will be too soft, promising little more than a restoration of that shopaholic hell of hyper-consumerism that occasioned the current disaster.

Amen. Let's see opportunity in this crisis - the play of possibilities in what might seem the darkest of situations.