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What will be the benefits of a shorter work week? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, writer at The Correspondent, on Quora:
Someone asked me once: What does working less actually solve? I’d rather turn the question around: is there anything that working less does not solve?
The first and most obvious thing is stress: since the 1980s we’ve been working more and more, resulting in an epidemic of stress, burn-outs and depressions.
Then there’s the biggest challenge of this century: climate change. I’m not saying that a shorter working week will ‘solve’ this problem, but it will definitely help. Countries with a shorter working week have a smaller ecological footprint, because they consume more of their prosperity in the form of leisure.
Third: unemployment. Researchers at the International Labour Organization have concluded that job sharing – in which two part-time employees split a workload traditionally assigned to one full-time worker – went a long way towards resolving the last economic crisis. Particularly in times of recession with spiking unemployment and production exceeding demand, sharing jobs can help to soften the blow.
Fourth: gender inequality. Since the 1980s, more and more women have joined the labour force - and that’s a good thing. But at the same time, men should have started doing more in the kitchen, caring for our kids etc., but that didn’t really happen. I’d like to see a world where men do more unpaid work and women more paid work. Paternity leave is a crucial policy instrument here.
Fifth: inequality. The countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest working weeks. While the poor are working longer hours just to get by, the rich are finding it ever more “expensive” to take time off as their hourly rates rise. Nowadays excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.
And finally: meaninglessness. It’s not just that we’re working too much, it’s also the kind of work that is problematic. A recent poll in the UK found that as much as 37% of British workers think their job is meaningless. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about the garbage men, the teachers and the care workers here. I’m talking about well paid professionals in the service sector who are basically sending emails to each other all day or writing reports no one reads. The anthropologist David Graeber wrote a brilliant essay about this: ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’.
Some people worry that other people will waste their time if they’d have the opportunity to work less. I think it’s the other way around. It is precisely in overworked countries like Japan, the UK and the US that people watch an absurd amount of television. Up to five hours a day in the U.S.!
Sure, swimming in a sea of spare time won’t be easy. But that’s why a 21st century education should prepare people not only for joining the workforce, but also (and more importantly) for life. “Since men will not be tired in their spare time,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, “they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid.”
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