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After many years when working time reductions have been off the political agenda, the shorter working week has finally emerged into the political mainstream. A recent survey found that Britons are the most enthusiastic in Europe about the proposal, with 71 per cent thinking it will make them happier. With work-related stress, depression, or anxiety accounting for 57 per cent of all sick days, and two-thirds of workers worried about machines taking away their job, the clock is ticking on the UK’s broken and outdated model of working time. There is no natural law determining the amount of time we spend in work. ‘Typical’ working hours are, in fact, a matter of collective decision-making, and have changed throughout history. A century ago, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) was founded to set labour standards that would prevent the exploitation of workers and advance social justice. The ILO Constitution included a convention to ‘limit the hours of work in industrial undertakings to eight in the day and forty-eight in the week’. Prior to this, working hours averaged nearly sixty hours a week. A combination of increased pay and productivity, strong collective bargaining, and labour market regulation meant that the average full-time week in the UK fell steadily to forty hours by 1979. Towards the end of the 1980s, the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU) ran the ‘Drive for 35’ campaign to reduce working time down from 39 hours a week. Incorporating successful tactics used by German union IG Metall, the CSEU won a 37-hour week after adopting a strategy of mass campaigning, followed by selective, indefinite strike action. However, unlike in past campaigns, the reduction in working time by the CSEU did not work its way through to the rest of the economy, and the trend for ever-shorter working weeks faltered from the 1980s onwards. Following labour market deregulation, reduced collective bargaining, and slower growth in pay for low income workers, the average full-time week fell by just 2.5 hours to an average of 37.5 hours by 2016. Recent New Economics Foundation (NEF) modelling has shown that if average hours had continued to fall at post-war levels after 1980, then the UK would be on target to reach a 30-hour working week by 2040. The twin challenges of automation and climate change will dominate political discussions in the coming years. It is time to move beyond seeing these simply as impending crises, and to start seeing them as opportunities to fundamentally rethink the world of work. That conversation should start with a bold solution: the four-day week.

Automation and Climate Change In 1984, an indoor theme park named AutoWorld opened in Flint, Michigan. It was hoped that it might help to stem the impact of automation and deindustrialisation, which had torn their way through one of the USA’s most significant manufacturing heartlands. One exhibit inside the theme park — sponsored by General Motors — was a puppet of an autoworker singing a love song called ‘Me and My Buddy’ to the robot replacing him on the assembly line. Unsurprisingly, Autoworld was a dismal failure and closed its doors six months later. Flint continued its terminal decline, eventually becoming the poorest large city in the US, with almost half of its population currently living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, General Motors continues to be one of the world’s wealthiest corporations. It is a classic story of our age: owners and shareholders absorbed the gains of new technologies, while workers suffered falling wages and widespread poverty. Despite being a solidly Democratic state since 1992, in 2016 Michigan turned decades of anger into political action by voting for Donald Trump. The UK has its own painful history of deindustrialisation and automation under neoliberalism, with the devastation of industrial and mining towns in Wales, Scotland, and the North of England still felt many years after Margaret Thatcher left office. It is predicted that up to 30 per cent of existing UK jobs could be impacted by automation by the early 2030s. One recent report by think tank Future Advocacy found that the highest levels of automation are likely to take place in Britain’s former industrial heartlands. With the country already the most regionally unequal in Europe, the impact of this could be disastrous. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Political action could ensure that new forms of automation don’t just benefit an ever-smaller elite. It is time to revisit perhaps the earliest demand of the labour movement: an economy allowing us to work to live, rather than living to work. Reducing the working week has the potential to address the structural inequality at the centre of our economy: the growing gap between those who hold wealth and those who earn incomes. A reduction in hours without a reduction in pay results in a higher hourly wage and a lift for the share of income going to workers instead of to profits. Unions are already campaigning on the battleground of automation — and winning. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) have agreed with Royal Mail to shorten the working week from 39 to 35 hours for 134,000 postal workers. This concession was won in direct response to the impact of automation. They argue that their members should benefit from the mechanisation of the parcel packaging process in the form of shorter hours. Politicising automation is a far better approach than rejecting it wholesale. A shorter working week can be part of an ambitious plan to reshape the world of work, redistributing work across generational and gender lines by providing opportunities for more women to enter traditionally male jobs like manufacturing and engineering, or providing an opportunity for a gradual retirement that allows people more time outside of work to care for loved ones. If progressives can lead this conversation in the coming years, we can build a campaign that provides answers to many of our social problems. Automation is not the only major challenge we face. We urgently need to move towards a zero-carbon economy to avert environmental breakdown. The end of the fossil fuel age is already underway, and change is coming on a shorter timescale than industry, government, and communities are ready for. A well-planned transition could see all workers shorten their working time without reducing their material quality of life. The energy of the Green New Deal and Sunrise Movements in the US has reinvigorated debate in the UK. A Green New Deal in this country could provide a new generation of green jobs across the country. And we have the chance now to talk about not just the quantity, but also the quality of those jobs. Reducing working hours can be part of a new, sustainable world of work. A 2012 report by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst examined the relationship between working hours and carbon emissions in twenty-nine OECD countries. It found that ‘countries with shorter work hours tend to have lower ecological footprints, carbon footprints, and carbon dioxide emissions’, and argued that a shorter working week should be a key component of climate change policy discussions. A move towards an economy which provides us with the time through which we can live fulfilling lives could change the behaviour of households away from energy-intensive behaviours and towards a more enriching use of leisure time. Even small changes — like more people taking the time to prepare food at home — could have huge knock-on effects, reducing the energy-intensive process of producing ready meals. A move away from a fast-paced and environmentally destructive culture could also improve our well-being, opening up the space needed to participate in democratic processes and build strong social relationships through community activities. It is important not to view time purely as something our economy ‘generates’, but as a resource which contributes to everything we do. This is especially crucial to childcare, domestic labour, and sustaining community and democratic life.