Sacred Headwaters #57: The Four Day Workweek

A wide range of groups - from degrowth economists to the World Economic Forum - have started calling for reducing working hours as, among other things, a climate solution.

Mar 07, 2023

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Issue #57: The Four Day Workweek

The progressive — arguably approaching ecosocialist — opposition party in the province of Canada where I live recently launched a campaign calling on the government to lead the way in instituting a four day workweek. Interestingly enough, the billionaires in Davos are calling for the same thing. These unlikely partners are joining a tradition of radical economists who have been calling for reducing working hours for decades, today most prominently under the banner “degrowth” (for more on this, see issue #7).

The most recent news cycle about reduced working hours is the result of the conclusion of a large four day workweek trial that just wrapped up in the UK and reported overwhelmingly positive results. But the idea has been gaining traction among remarkably diverse groups for some time, so I wanted to dig into it and try to elucidate exactly how and why there might be climate benefits as well as to understand how groups with such divergent interests could all support the policy.

The short answer seems to be that they are not actually supporting the same thing: traditional media, centrist thinktanks, and the folks at Davos are calling for a four day workweek in the so-called “knowledge sector” as a way of actually boosting overall productivity. Radical economists, on the other hand, call for a four day workweek (or job sharing or other tools for reducing total hours worked) as a way of mitigating economic hardship while reducing economic growth with the goal of ecological sustainability.

The latter of these, reducing economic growth, has a clearly established relationship with ecological footprint, but the former’s climate benefit is much less clear. And a closer look reveals that in many cases, the articles being written in support of this policy from capital’s perspective are uncritically citing (and even occasionally quoting!) authors whose work has focused on reduced working hours as a means for degrowth.

That’s not to say that reducing working hours wouldn’t be valuable for other reasons: the impacts on wellbeing are well documented, and there’s at least some evidence accumulating that having more time leads to more environmentally sound behaviors, most notably including (at least in some possibly self-selecting groups) more engagement in community and environmental activism. And there may be some climate benefits even with this capitalist-friendly version of reduced working hours.

The readings in this issue offer some background on the empirically established relationship between working hours, GDP, and ecological footprint; make the capitalist case for reducing working hours; and highlight the limits of reduced working hours as a tool for cutting emissions in an effort to elucidate what exactly this kind of policy can achieve and who stands to gain from its various permutations.

This is what the 4-day workweek means for equal rights, productivity and climate change (5 minutes)

Bincheng Mao, World Economic Forum, Feb 18 2022

This short article lays out the capitalist-friendly case for a four day workweek: “it enhances the wellbeing of working people while also preserving economic growth” (emphasis added). Mao goes through some of the empirical data and makes the case that reducing working hours doesn’t reduce overall workplace productivity, and that in many cases, it has been shown to actually increase it. The research has generally identified this as a result of worker wellbeing: healthier, happier workers are more efficient — and they take fewer sick days. But the vast majority of reduced working hours experiments have occurred in the knowledge or information sector. Is the World Economic Forum calling for maintaining pay levels while reducing work hours for labor that actually requires presence, whether it’s grocery store cashiers, nurses, or teachers? (The premise underlying their proposals raises the question, at least in my mind, of whether most of these knowledge sector jobs actually involve doing anything at all, a question explored in great depth by David Graeber’s work on “bullshit jobs”).

Mao very briefly addresses the idea of reducing carbon emissions by citing two studies in the UK and Utah. Both found that cutting a day from the workweek reduced emissions primarily by reducing commuting and office expenses. Most of the jobs in question, though, could easily achieve the same emissions reductions by promoting remote work. And replacing private car travel with free public transit might multiply those reductions across the whole work week.

The climate benefits of a four-day workweek (10 minutes)

Giada Ferraglioni and Sergio Colombo, BBC, Feb 20 2023

This article summarizes the results of the recent six month trial in the UK. They were extremely promising from a productivity standpoint and the majority of companies that participated intend to continue their four day workweek going forward, but the trial istelf didn’t attempt to directly measure changes in ecological footprint. To answer that question, this article cites a paper that we’ll read below by the sociologist Juliet Schor, who helped run the UK pilot, as a way of linking it with climate change. The problem, as I alluded to earlier, is that this paper looked at reduced working hours as part of a broader paradigm shift now commonly known as degrowth. A shorter work week that increases productivity by more than the reduction in work time — something this trial suggests is possible — will have its potential climate benefits offset by the harms caused by additional economic growth.

That said, some of the companies in the UK trial did note both quantitative and qualitative changes that could help reduce environmental harm, including “an increase in pro-environmental behaviours” among their workers.

One last thing worth highlighting from this piece: much of the coverage, including this article, insists on citing unnamed experts who speculate that more free time might lead to more energy intensive lifestyles, thus increasing emissions. But the named experts and the literature on the subject indicate the opposite: emissions are lower on non-work days across all geographic and cultural contexts.

The Ecological Limits of Work: on carbon emissions, carbon budgets and working time (10 minutes)

Philipp Frey, Autonomy, 2019

If ecological sustainability requires an overall decrease in material consumption, a vast expansion in terms of leisure time and thus an increase in “time prosperity” would be less of a luxury and more of an urgency.

This short report from the UK thinktank Autonomy reviews the existing research on the relationships between working hours, labor productivity, GDP, and emissions and estimates the working time reductions that would be required for OECD countries to reduce their per capita emissions to a sustainable level (in this experiment given as 1.6 tons per year). Frey turns the question of meeting our climate goals on its head by asking, “How much work can we afford [to do]?” given the global carbon budget? It’s an interesting way of thinking about it that puts the focus on both the necessary timeline of emissions reductions and on the reality that “decoupling” growth from environmental footprint, whether technically possible or not, simply does not describe the relationship between economic activity and emissions that exists right now. Frey’s results suggest that, at least as a tool for climate mitigation, a four day workweek is nowhere near sufficient: we need something more like a four hour workweek.

Frey’s research is based on macro-scale relationships between economy-wide variables, but he points out that reducing working hours might not lead to the proportional reduction in emissions that his calculations suggest because the reduction in working hours might improve worker productivity (GDP per hour). That is precisely the argument that the Davos contingent is making for reducing working hours. As Frey points, any productivity gains actually run counter to potential climate benefits.

Reducing Growth to Achieve Environmental Sustainability: The Role of Work Hours (30 minutes)

Kyle Knight, Eugene A. Rosa, and Juliet B. Schor, Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Nov 2012

This paper is the study that most of the media coverage points to when discussing the climate benefits of establishing a four day workweek. It was written by a group of radical sociologists attempting to build on a thoroughly anti-capitalist economic tradition and thoroughly situated within the increasingly cohesive field known as degrowth. It gives an excellent overview of the literature surrounding economic growth and environmental footprint. It also makes it clear why reducing working hours is such an important part of any degrowth policy package: market economies typically become more productive over time, meaning that more GDP is produced per unit labor. Economic growth allows the employment rate to stay the same while productivity increases, but an economy that stops growing will see the total amount of work go down, causing unemployment and economic hardship…unless it was coupled with a reduction in working hours.

This paper establishes a strong relationship between reduced working hours and reduced environmental footprint. It also points out that that relationship is a large part of why environmental footprints are so much lower in Europe than in North America: work hours are, on average, far lower in Europe.

In contrast with most of the articles citing this paper and even interviewing Schor, though, the paper is clear:

Our findings suggest, though, that decreasing work hours while maintaining current levels of GDP is less effective in reducing anthropogenic pressure on the environment than reducing GDP by lowering work hours.

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