Twelve years after Keynes’s 15-hours week

Photo by Rob Lambert on Unsplash

The arrival here has been gradual. During the time of the Industrial Revolution, the standard working day of fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, was reached.

The hours of daily work also decreased: twelve, ten, eight… And we are now at the current standard, eight hours and five days a week, a change that came in the seventies partly due to the spread of a consumer society that needed time to spend its money on shopping and leisure.

Now we are starting to talk about shorter working days, between 30 and 35 hours a week, which will better distribute the work to reduce unemployment and in turn allow workers more breaks.

In the newspaper library, we find many references to this stage in which we are gradually disembarking. Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba, for CNBC:

“ I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week. My grandfather worked 16 hours a day in the farmland and [thought he was] very busy. We work eight hours, five days a week and think we are very busy”

According to Bregman, basic income eliminates poverty, the absence of which in turn eliminates high levels of crime or unemployment while public health improves.

With the perspective of a UBI on the horizon that will be accessed by a greater or lesser percentage of people, citizens will have many more hours of recreation and leisure per week, in some cases, in fact, all their time will be free.

These people will begin to have an internal debate, a search for answers, which will end up extending to the bulk of society:

What will this time be devoted to?

How will not having a predetermined life activity such as work affect us?

It’s not a trivial issue. Elon Musk himself spoke about it in the context of the advent of the UBI: