The 4/4/4 Movement — Cut the Work-Year by 2/3rds
Humans should be free. For 40 hours a week, humans are unfree. It’s a moral necessity to get the boot off of our necks by reducing standard work hours. It’s not enough to have a 4 day work-week, or even a 4 hour work-day. We need the clarity to demand a 4 month work-year.
To bring balance to human life, we should split the work-year in three, four months for each work, democracy, and leisure. With this comes two new jobs for all. The first job is a solid four months to participate fully in politics and public life and democracy. The second is to have four full months to be leisurely and tinker with the things that make us happy. These critical aspects of human life are both neglected at the expense of work and are both critically important to a healthy and balanced society.
In practice, this could look different to different people. If you split the work-week three ways, it comes out to 13 hours and 20 minutes each week for each work and democracy. If someone worked in a job which was active for half of the year, they could work for 26 hours and 40 minutes a week. If someone was in an intensive field which worked full-time hours, they’d have to work only four merciful months to earn a full year’s wages.
Some may prefer to put their work in big blocks, and some may prefer to spread their work out. Choice is key, and the workers can determine their own fates, both on the individual level and through political institutions of freedom — real democracy. Is that really too much to ask?
4 Months for Work
The demands of a modern life on the worker are simply too numerous (and often, in the case of child-rearing and other care work, important) for a lifetime of crushing and mandatory forty-hour workweeks. It’s toxic. It sucks the life out of people. It makes people lonely. It makes life dull. Many people look at the calendar stretching out ahead of them with the dread of death. Full time, 12 months a year work is a soul-sucking purgatory, an bleak white room that extends to infinity. We should demand better for people.
In practice it’s not actually needed we work people to the bone to give everyone a good life. It’s not needed that we have a reserve army of depressive unemployed sending off futile resumes. It’s possible that we reduce work while producing the necessities and joys of life. (A usufructian property system and a culture of repair and recirculation could also contribute greatly to balancing these needs.)
Time-poor labourers make ideal consumers: unable to cook for themselves, clean their own house, or make their own fun, they turn to shopping, take-out, and hired servants. In place of doing the things we love, people increasingly turn to buying things that remind them of what they wish they could do. Collecting video games they never actually play, buying books they never read, and downloading movies they never actually watch. This poses a painful personal crisis, but even worse, it’s a crisis for political life. Most are too tired after the tedium of work to think about their own affairs and relationships, let alone engage in the political action required to sustain a healthy democratic society.
It’s a deadly mix, with work-related stress transforming into stress-related early mortality. The work-stress-mortality continuum is costing the healthcare system billions, costing families their kin, and making the world a less merry and joyful place for all. Workers are dying guilty for the time they missed with their children for work. Parents need time with their children, and they need more money than people without children. It’s not fair, and it harms everyone.
Working less means jobs for everyone, but not devestating jobs which burn through human bodies and spirits. Working less means slowing our impact on the planet, slowing the loss of biodiversity, reducing carbon emissions, reducing energy use. Critically, working less (and needing to produce less) means more time to be ourselves, to be free, and to engage deeply in the politics of our society and species.
4 Months for Democracy
We should understand that under our current system, work has pushed out democracy. Work precludes and prevents democracy. Our democracy-week has been taken over and crowded out by our work-week, and until we challenge work culture, there will be no democracy.
Currently our society allocates 40 hours to paid subservience per week, and a few hours every couple years to to democracy and political agency. This means that in order to really participate in political life one needs to skimp on time with friends, hobbies, or chores.
A real democracy involves life-long education, self-directed research, and participation based on affinity, expertise, and what affects us. To do this right we need protected time for study, deliberation, and participation. We need time to look into matters, discuss matters in groups, and to propose and vote on policies. This is time that almost no one has now.
The final shape of our future democracy it is hard to predict in detail. We know that there will be democratic assemblies, there will be online asynchronous voting and deliberation, with expressive means like range voting and long-form ballots as parts of the process. We know that there will be means to democratize the workplace, the neighbourhood, and the economy. We know that all of these democracies will fit together in ways which are as complex and varied as the real world as we know it.
There would be different options to deeply participate in various political issues for months at a time, or to participate for a few hours a week on an ongoing basis, or some combination between them. For people less inclined to participate deeply, proxy voting could provide a means to enable maximum expression during times with minimum participation. But what we should aim for is a fully democratic society, with expressive participation, and time for mutual education and deliberation. Democracy is at least as important as work.
4 Months for What We Will
Labour produces the means of life, and democracy allows us to collaborate on the direction of our society and species, but we are not productive robots. To quote David Graeber, what is the point if we’re not going to have fun? It’s joyful to have purpose through our work and through participatory politics, but leisure and social life are what gives us time and space to become who we are.
What you do with your time is up to you. You can learn things if you’d like, you can travel, you can spend time with your friends and family. You can play video games, read books, watch movies. You can volunteer and help others or you can stay home and do nothing. You can fart around as you see fit. You can smoke cigarettes and waterski while balancing a stack of puppies on your big toe for all I care, as long as the puppies come home safe. It’s up to you. This season of freedom is something we’re owed that has been denied for too long.
The promise of four months for your own whim and joy is the hook we use to pull society along with us to a better world. I don’t care who you are. That sounds nice.
A Balanced Society
We want to live in a society which values democracy and leisure as much as it values work. A world where we have time to spend with our kids, where our voice matters in society, and where work does not crush us.
We want to redistribute our time from the bosses to the workers. One third back to the collective project, and one third back to each individual to use as they wish. Workplaces will learn to balance shifting staff of different intensities, and democracies will learn to balance shifting intensities from participants from season to season as they see fit.
How can it be done? The programme of a three-way-split does not have to be implemented by thunderstrike. It can also happen piece by piece. Any reduction in standard work hours is a win for the 4/4/4 movement. Any increase in democratic participation, especially if paid and institutionalized, is a win. Any increase to norms around vacation, bank holidays, and leisure is a win. It will probably happen in fits and starts, chips off of work culture here and there, and finally, we’ll be able to achieve the full outcome we desire. The path ahead could take many forms but the first step is to know what to ask for.
For more discussion and reflections on this subject, listen to the 4/4/4 episode of the SRSLY WRONG Podcast.
