The Case for the Four-Day Week
“The fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays.” — Ha-Joon Chang
A somewhat cursory reading of economic theory implies only paid work that is absolutely essential could possibly be occurring. If unnecessary work were happening, this inefficiency would be expediently and ruthlessly eliminated by the invisible hand of the market. In practice though, any claim of efficiency does not stand up to scrutiny.
The citizens of some countries work considerably fewer hours than others. If we look at typical working hours in Germany, this comes out at 1,349 hours actually worked per person in 2021. However, for a South Korean, this was a vastly larger 1,910 hours. Does the average South Korean worker perhaps earn more for their efforts? Not at all, they earn less. Life in Germany is of a comparable standard to South Korea. All of the best available products and services can be found in both countries. It is not as if the average German is looking with envious eyes at South Korea. Come, Hans, we must escape this Munich hellhole and make for Seoul at once. It doesn’t seem likely.
If these figures feel a little low to the harried employee, note that the statistics take into account those who work part-time which brings down the average. The 50-hour week spent compiling spreadsheets at the end of the financial quarter is balanced against a student supplementing their income with a few hours pulling pints in the local pub. Mileage may definitely vary.
Developed countries that may be more familiar to the English-speaking reader also put in many more hours than the typical German. The US averages 1,791 hours per person and Australia 1,649. It’s hard to point at what exactly Germans are missing out on though with respect to their fewer hours worked. Germans seem to have nice houses, well-built cars and copious beer (other measures of living standards are available). We can argue about GDP and numerical measures of prosperity, but fundamentally if any of us non-Germans were transplanted to Frankfurt, we would find the standard of living satisfactory and would not want for anything. Somehow the Germans have discovered the special secret of operating a prosperous nation on considerably fewer working hours than many other countries manage.
If we look at those differences in working hours between say a German and an American, a US citizen works 442 additional hours. If it is assumed a working week follows the typical US 40 hours convention, the average American is putting in a quite staggering 11 weeks of additional work per year. If an American considers the lifestyle of the average German to be acceptable, they should be able to take practically the entire summer on holiday every year and hardly notice a difference in living standards.
It does appear on the surface that there is a large amount of unnecessary work occurring somewhere. Differences in working hours may be cultural and long working hours may not genuinely be essential to achieve a high standard of living. For example, some workers report social pressure to be available in the office whenever the boss is present regardless of whether there is anything to be done. Occupying a chair would appear in labour statistics as “work” but does not necessarily add value to the world. Such pressure varies based on location and industry.
The anthropologist David Graeber, in his succinctly titled book “Bullshit Jobs”, explores the concept that many jobs consuming a lot of worker hours are not perhaps entirely essential. He identifies five categories of jobs that need not necessarily exist.
The first type of job only exists because other companies have people that do a similar job. These are often jobs in areas such as marketing where vast expenditures are made to keep up with other companies making similar vast expenditures. Pepsi and Coke are locked in a battle pulling customers from each other through exceptionally large marketing expenditures, but having a combined net beneficial output of essentially zero. If the respective marketing departments disappeared overnight the world would hardly notice.
It is rational why large companies may invest in marketing. If they can pull revenue from some other company that exceeds their investment then it makes sense to the individual organisation. If 99c in marketing costs is exchanged for a dollar in profit, there is an advantage to the individual corporate bottom line but overall nothing of value is really delivered. Perhaps they are making the customer in desperate need of a refreshing drink aware of Coke or Pepsi but the customers that wanted these kinds of beverages were already drinking one or the other. A visit to any supermarket prominently displays both as an option.
Some (not all) aspects of financial trading are in this category. There are many millions of people directly engaged in or otherwise supporting what is in effect a zero-sum computer game redistributing a pool of money amongst themselves. There is no suggestion that this is irrational behaviour. It’s very understandable why people may choose to play the game as if they win it can bring huge sums their way, but it is not work that is required for human existence any more than casino work needs to be done (although casinos at least provide some entertainment). If the pool of money was left alone, nothing would really change for humans as a whole. The jobs are entirely about whether one individual has the money, or another individual has the money. There is little actual value being created. There are various arguments about traders generating liquidity and other positive benefits but that’s a side-effect and is not the core reason why the participants are engaged in the work.
The second type of unnecessary jobs are those created to enhance the importance of superiors. The big boss needs many underlings. It is commonplace for the importance of a senior manager to be measured effectively by the size of the department they command. The boss that has a thousand staff is more likely to be in receipt of a large salary than the boss that has only a dozen. This incentive leads to natural inflation in the number of workers beyond that which is really necessary. The workers themselves may have plenty of busywork to do over long hours but the real value to the executive is not in what the workers produce but in the fact that they exist.
The third type is what Graeber describes as “duct tapers” who are employed to fix problems that really shouldn’t exist. These include jobs such as customer service roles that do little other than apologise to customers for something the company has failed to do. There are people who have the job of transferring information between different kinds of forms because the two systems are not integrated. There are people employed to clean up the mess caused by another employee. These are people employed to fix inefficiencies caused by the way companies operate.
Box tickers are the fourth type of unnecessary work on Graeber’s hit list. These are administrative jobs that have been established to provide the appearance that something useful is occurring, but in reality nothing of any practical benefit actually is. Box tickers are effectively employed to write reports on how the status quo continues to be achieved.
Lastly, Graeber identifies what he describes as taskmasters who exist to distribute work to others. These kinds of jobs are often in middle management and have the effect of generating unnecessary work because that is what the job description is. If they do not continuously generate work, then they are not fulfilling their job role and are at risk of redundancy. Taskmasters are measured against how much work they generate and so tend to produce quite a lot of it.
Many managers are intermittently accidental taskmasters due to being in the position of having an assigned quota of work that must be created. If a manager has five members of staff, then enough work for five people must be produced as even with the best intentions a manager often does not have the power to send workers home if there is nothing to do. Something must be invented to occupy the time of workers and the quantity of work to be done tends to be defined by the resources available.
Identifying bullshit jobs can be difficult. Few people who have a private inkling that their job is perhaps not entirely essential are likely to make any public statement to that effect due to the very understandable fear for their livelihood. People will put up with a considerable amount of nonsense when there is a mortgage to pay. There would in most cases be exceptional resistance to the merest suggestion that your personal job should be retired. Therefore surveys asking people if their job is worthwhile may not produce accurate results. Even if a job survey is anonymous, employees may strongly suspect the information might influence someone with the power to cut their role and keep quiet.
Individual jobs in an organisation are rarely cleanly segmented into productive and unproductive work. It might be the case that 20% of a role is not very valuable and the remainder is doing something useful. When put in that context, a lot of people could probably think of some fraction of what they are employed to do that doesn’t seem terribly useful, even if they may not feel comfortable mentioning the fact. Perhaps there are two or three meetings where it wouldn’t seem that any great harm would befall the company if the meetings didn’t happen. Perhaps a week is spent crafting appraisals for staff that are doing just fine and the forms will be filed away to never be seen again.
Some employees don’t know if their work is valuable or not. An employee may have spent months perfecting a financial report and was told it went up to the big boss who used it at the board meeting to influence the corporate direction. That sounds like it was a valuable thing to do and it may be motivating to continue the work. However, perhaps what really happened was the big boss read the first summary page and then waved around the inch-thick slab of paper as a piece of theatre to demonstrate due diligence was done. The vast majority of those pages were unnecessary and the content that mattered could have been an email written in 10 minutes.
Most people would be on board with the idea of working less and getting paid the same. A solution to teasing out the inefficiency might be to slowly put more legal limits on working hours. One way to achieve this could be to incrementally add more national public holidays. Combined with appropriate legislation to prevent the working day from being extended, this would gradually and subtly apply pressure such that business has to think more carefully about the usage of working time.
A few forward thinking organisations have already successfully implemented a four-day week whilst keeping pay the same. It may be imagined though that in the main there could be more resistance to the concept from industry. Ultimately though, business would adapt and it would push workers slightly closer to the coal face and into doing more essential jobs. The factory foreman who spends days ticking boxes and writing status reports no one ever reads will instead spend part of their time covering shifts for missing workers and the useless reports will be forgotten. The same amount of the production that matters will still take place with the same number of people paid the same money but they’ll all work slightly less.
See also: The Possibility of a Zero Work Society
