Redefining work

The 4-day week provides an opportunity to relax and enjoy at least a day without work stress.

Over twenty plus years of being a IT contractor, I have been in a lot of working situations. Prior to technical writing, I did printed circuit board layouts which were done working on my light table at home, so I was already familiar with the lifestyle, though it was rather piecemeal rather than months working on one contract.

I have pulmonary sarcoidosis which effectively halves my lung capacity. While I can walk around without too much issue, as soon as I have to exert more than a certain amount of effort, I start getting breathless. At most contracts, there was not a lot of walking around, being mostly short walks, and most offices were in multi-story buildings with lifts. At one contract, it was a sprawling single-storied building, requiring significantly more walking to get to all the meeting rooms.

I was finding that such a lot of walking was leaving me rather depleted over time, so I went to a four-day week to give me enough of a break to recouperate week to week. I would not work the Fridays, giving me three full days in a row off.

Well, a normal weekend is two full days off work, but Saturday is not really relaxing because there is still elements of the stress of work hanging around, while squeezing in shopping or other household stuff. While Sunday is supposed to be relaxing, its latter scheduling is largely defined by the impending return to work. I basically never felt like weekends were really a break enough from work thinking that I got to actually feel relaxed. There was always some sense of work at the back of my mind, a weight on my shoulders reminding me that I didn't have time to relax.

However, a three-day weekend made a big difference because while the first and last days were still influenced by work thinking, the middle day was a real break from work, so that I felt the stress lifted enough to properly relax. That break allowed me to easily handle the stress of the other four days in the walkabout office. A whole day of being free of any work worry that I could totally devote to home life and my own interests, one of which was building a recording studio.

The one full day of not having to think about someone else's idea of my worth was sort of liberating in an emotional sense. As a contractor, I was owed no loyalty by, nor owed any to, ex-employers, but having to worry about getting enough to pay bills meant trying to find regular full weeks of work and all the stress that entails. Being between contracts was a half-time job with twice the stress!

Covid lockdowns forced a lot of people and businesses to think about future working life.

Millions forced off work during Covid lockdown decided that their former low-paid and stressful jobs were not worth going back to, after having to re-evaluate whether such work was really worth sacrificing their wellbeing over. Many were in no rush to go back to such jobs even when government Covid benefits were wound back. Their dawning need to respect their physical and mental health was overtaking their need to earn a living at any cost.

Many past and ongoing studies are showing that a four-day working week, but at their five-day salary, has resulted in increased productivity and less sick leave, both of which significantly increase business bottom lines. The question for businesses and their employees is about what else can be changed about working life that results in benefits for everybody.

The basic business thinking that has been the driver behind the push for long working hours is that productivity is proportional to effort, so that more effort – meaning more hours – for less money helps the business. That is the thinking that drove the first major management system based on studying time and motion of workers, and used the observations to find ways to make people more productive. It is still going strong in Amazon as well as other companies.

The problem with that system was that it was based on the assumption that people could be made to work at peak performance for long periods of time. The reality is that people are not machines, but even machines are generally not designed to operate at maximum performance for more than spurts. In general, machines operated at near peak capacity for extended times will fail prematurely, and people are no different.

However, while people in feudal and early industrial times – and still in places today – have no real say about their working conditions, creeping democratisation and unionisation allowed workers to get shorter working hours, so the 8-hour day and 40-hour week are celebrated as milestones in the liberation of work. 40 years of business-first and government and labour last thinking have severely curtailed a lot of those hard-won benefits, and the gig economy has undermined any certainty about work for millions of people.

One of the many work alternatives brought up over recent years is the universal basic income (UBI) guaranteeing a minimum living income.

Fortunately, many are coming to want to take back some control over their lives and have more opportunity to choose how they spend their time, rather than at the whims of those who only care about making money and maintaining their extravagant lifestyles. The 4-day week is not here yet, but other radical concepts are being discussed widely, such as universal basic income (UBI), and several small-scale experiments with it have shown societal and individual benefits.

It is basically a government-paid pension that is given to everybody, and is enough to allow people to live on. It is not scaled back when someone earns money working, so it is a guarantee of survivability against economic hardships. Of course, many have said that it would be a disincentive to work, but the experiments have also shown that people in general don't just want to slack around, but want to be productive, just not be exploited by people who value their own fortunes at the expense of their workers' health and wellbeing.

UBI would simplify a lot of government processes, as there would be no need for separate aged pension, disability pensions, unemployment income and the myriad other schemes that are based upon making people fit into the full working week mould. There would be no need for penalties, cajoling, shame or other efforts to force people to work. That means dispensing with a lot of people-effort and overhead that would significantly lower government expenditure on those efforts.

UBI would also simplify tax collection, as it would only be applied to hours worked, so tax returns would only need to be put in for those who do work. We don't need to account for the income everybody gets, so all the adding up of pensions and work amounts to work out the total income for tax purpose would not be needed.

Of course, UBI would be a huge expenditure, and while the savings from dispensing with the myriad obsolete disparate government programs may offset a lot of that, some of the mental health and other societal benefits may make it worth implementing. Coupled with full universal health care, we could really have the benefits of being in a society that really supports people to find their own place in the world.

Entrepreneurship is much vaunted these days, but all the big success stories are from people who had parents rich enough to keep them until their business venture made it.

UBI would make that opportunity available for a lot more people. It is a true democratisation of working life that gives space to develop and create without worrying about how to survive in the meantime. Many peoples' ideas will fail to eventuate, but then the same has happened of many of the ideas of corporations and those for whom the idea of UBI is an anathema have no problem with taking government money for themselves.

People want more equity in their work life and are starting to expect the same deference from governments that they see being given to businesses. While businesses generally have high failure rates, governments see that as a by-product of business life, but see people failing as some sort of problem that needs to be penalised. This is wrong societal thinking and needs more even-handedness in dealing with it.

UBI would free up many people to experiment in the arts without having to pervert their art to monetise it. YouTube would have a lot less videos churned out for monetisation, so producers could take their time making quality content. Musicians and artists could spend time perfecting their art and skills rather than busking for coins at the worst times of day or performing to drunken audiences in pubs. They could still have public performances or displays, but not because of an economic imperative. UBI would also bypass the grant application process that required artists to justify their work.

Time to look at more equitable working and commerce systems that allow people to find the right level of working life for themselves without being penalised, nor large businesses being given favour due to the privileged position and influence of their owners. We now have an opportunity to really examine what we are each here to do, and so be given an equitable opportunity to fulfil that vision.