The fight for free time
Nick Srnicek sees the brighter side of a new machine age, believing that it could usher in a 4-day working week.
By Nick Srnicek
Everywhere we turn today, we are told that our traditional world of work is threatened by robots and automation. But what if this gets the story backwards? What if, rather than a threat, we saw these robots as an opportunity to liberate society from the drudgery of work and to free ourselves to create our own projects? This is the wager of a growing number of people around the world.
This movement points to a basic fact of wage labour: our time is not our own. Instead, our time at work is dictated by a manager, a boss, an employer, and ultimately, by capital. It is for this reason that Karl Marx once wrote, “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production.” Free time, in other words, is the basic condition for freedom. Building on these ideas, the movement against work also argues that more free time presents a tidy solution to the potential problems of rapid automation. If robots can do the work, why not let workers have more free time?
Until recently, the idea of fighting for more free time was not on the UK’s political radar. After the labour movement’s early successes in the struggle for an 8 hour day and a 40 hour work week (May Day, for example, has its origins in the fight for a shorter day), the postwar period settled into a focus on improving wages rather than increasing free time. This is beginning to change, particularly as technology looks to rapidly restructure the labour market (with or without net job losses). Across intellectual networks, political parties, trade unions, and businesses, there is a resurgence of interest and discussion of how we might reduce work time.
On the intellectual level, a variety of think tanks have come out in support of the idea, ranging from the New Economics Foundation’s (NEF) pioneering work in 2010, to centre-left stalwarts like the Institute for Public Policy Research, and even new and emerging think tanks like Autonomy. Advocacy groups, such as the 4 Day Week Campaign, are also starting to rise up and push the idea. And books such as Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism and my own book with Alex Williams, Inventing the Future, have strongly argued for making free time central to any future political project. Political parties have been following suit as well, with the Green Party proposing a four day working week and a national measure of free time, and the Labour party offering more bank holidays and suggestions of support for a shorter working week.
Unions have also started to take issues of free time more seriously. In 2017, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) set out a 32 hour work week with no cuts in pay as a core demand in future negotiations. This is a crucial issue (and opportunity) for RMT as many jobs in transport are threatened by automation, from driverless tube carriages to self-service ticket dispensers. The Communications Workers Union (CWU) faced a similar situation when new sorting machines were introduced and automated much of the labour involved in sorting mail. Employees were faced with having more work added elsewhere to make up for this increased productivity. Instead, the union successfully fought for those productivity increases to directly benefit workers by moving from a 39 hour work week to a 35 hour work week. And in September 2018, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) made waves by announcing that they would be aiming for a four day working week, albeit with a timeline that stretched into the next century.
Businesses are also making the shift. A Gloucester based firm, Radioactive PR, recently moved to a four day work week with no cut in pay, after a six week trial experiment showed it had significantly beneficial effects. Every employee reported feeling more refreshed and mentally healthier, and the firm gained new clients during their trial period. Tech companies are particularly attracted to the shorter working week idea: for instance, the London based firm Normally moved to a four day week in 2014 and the Edinburgh company Administrate joined them in 2015. Both of them found it improved employee morale and reduced turnover, with only minor impacts on overall output. (At Normally, only one person has left in the last 4 years). While this corporate take up of a shorter working week remains a minor position, there are nevertheless a growing number of companies around the world who are finding that it can benefit their business and keep workers happy.
Is a four day work week by 2035 plausible? Given the current pace of changes, in hegemonic common sense, in party pledges, in union demands, and in business practice, the answer appears to be ‘yes’. However, major hurdles remain to the fulfilment of this project. If we are to ensure that automation works for workers, and does not just further line the pockets of employers, then there are a few things that need to be done.
The first, and perhaps most important, is to reckon with the landscape of power. While businesses may see some benefits, the fight for free time demands a major shift of power from capital to labour. Even if productivity increases are sufficient to offset the increase in wages per hour, the tightening of the labour market that a shorter working week will bring means that workers will gain in power.
As such, advocates of less work should expect heavy resistance to the proposal. Strikes and collective mobilisation will be essential to achieving these goals, and legislative reforms, such as repealing the Trade Union Act of 2016, which requires a 50 percent turnout of workers for ballots to be valid, will be necessary.
There is also the question of whether the successes seen by large unions can be applied to smaller grassroots unions organising in the gig economy, the care sector, and elsewhere. The risk is that some of the biggest unions may see successes, while the rest of the economy continues to work long and dreary hours. For their part, the large unions often rely upon what Beverly Silver called ‘workplace bargaining power’, where workers have power because they occupy a key location within an industry or an economy. The RMT, for instance, can exert power by shutting down London transport — which is one reason why Boris Johnson wanted to automate the tube. Smaller unions must instead build ‘associational power’, which arises through workers collectively organising together across divides. If the fight for free time is to go beyond sectoral interests and spread across the economy, it will require these grassroots unions working together.
Fortunately, this is precisely what grassroots unions have been doing with some of the most imaginative and successful campaigns in recent years, whether organising cleaners across institutions, bringing together gig economy workers, or mobilising renters. And all these campaigns have sought to build solidarity beyond just the immediate sectoral interests and beyond the workplace. In an age of automation, where job losses reduce bargaining power, associational power may be our best hope in making technology work for us.
Lastly, there are questions of implementation. Should a shorter working week be implemented all at once, or instead incrementally brought in (perhaps by linking decreases in work time to increases in productivity, as suggested by the IPPR)? Is it sufficient to implement it sector by sector (via union struggles), or is an economy wide approach necessary (via legislation)? Still more questions arise surrounding the indirect effects of a shorter working week. Some jobs, for instance, require longer hours. How should they be organised? Some of society’s institutions, such as education, are currently organised around a five day week. How should they be changed, if at all?
Perhaps the biggest question, however, is whether society can untether itself from its puritanical mores. Can we ever cease to believe that “hard work” is an end in itself? To be sure, the identification with wage labour is strong, and the social value attached to it remains widespread. Yet everywhere we look we can see a yearning for a different way of living. We continue to value retirement (the closest thing to a post work world most people have), weekends are always enjoyed and Mondays routinely deplored, and holidays continue to show people the joys of life outside work. While shifting cultural norms around work may be a major challenge, it is vital if the economy is to shift to a new organisation of work.
Automation is only a threat to a particular idea of society: one where people must spend a substantial portion of their time in subjugation to someone else. If we relinquish this constrained imaginary about the future of work, we can see that automation is a major opportunity. A four day work week would be an immense accomplishment and major step forward for society, a moment where we collectively insist that free time is the basis of freedom and that there is a life beyond work.
This article originally appeared in the following RSA report (Dec 2018): A field guide to the future of work
