A 15-hour work week sounds too good to be true. Credit:iStock Bregman will discuss the 15-hour work week as well as other ideas from his book Utopia for Realists, such as the universal basic income, at the Sydney Opera House's Antidote festival on September 3. 'Bullshit jobs' Bregman said many workers, particularly in high-paid white-collar professions, believe a great deal of what they do at work is pointless. He labelled these types of careers as "bullshit jobs" – a term coined by anthropologist David Graeber – that contribute little to "real wealth – something of actual value".

"I'm not talking about the teachers or garbage collectors or care workers here, I'm mainly talking about corporate lawyers, consultants or bankers," he said. James Arvanitakis, a professor at Western Sydney University, said his previous career in the finance industry was profitable "but I didn't feel it was meaningful in many ways". Credit:Ben Rushton He pointed to a survey of British workers that found more than one-third believed their job was meaningless, while 40 per cent of Dutch workers expressed similar dissatisfaction with their jobs. Working hard is considered a virtue but Bregman said productivity and longer work hours do not go hand-in-hand; a conclusion he said was made by the cornflakes magnate WK Kellogg in 1930 when he introduced a six-hour work day at his factory. Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists, said working less hours would reduce stress and workplace accidents. Credit:Maartje ter Horst

A 23-month experiment with a six-hour work day, beginning in 2015, at a Swedish elderly care facility resulted in improved health outcomes and efficiency among nursing staff, but opponents raised concerns about the cost. James Arvanitakis found working less improved his productivity when he returned to work in the finance sector after taking time off to travel. When I talk about the 15-hour work week, I'm talking about doing less paid work that we don't really care about so that we can do more things that are actually valuable. Historian Rutger Bregman. "I found myself more efficient and productive in three days than what I was in five days," he said. "I think a lot of jobs can be sliced down in that way. I think we do spend a lot of time doing things like writing reports that no one will read." Arvanitakis, now a professor at Western Sydney University's Institute for Culture and Society, spent 10 years working up to 12 hours a day in the finance industry before turning to research and teaching.

"My previous work was profitable but I didn't feel it was meaningful in many ways," he said. "I didn't ever feel there was a huge value to a lot of what I was doing." The benefits of less work Bregman's notion of a shorter work week is not designed to provide more time to sit on the couch massaging the remote control. "When I talk about the 15-hour work week, I'm talking about doing less paid work that we don't really care about so that we can do more things that are actually valuable," he said. "Whether it's volunteer work or caring for our kids or elderly. We need to update our idea of what work is." He said shortening the work week, in tandem with implementing a universal basic income, would offer people the freedom to decide what to do with their life while providing a level of financial security.

Bregman said working fewer hours would reduce stress and workplace accidents. He also said countries with shorter working weeks had less income inequality and greater gender equality. It sounds costly and unrealistic but Bregman said a reduction in work should be a political ideal. "Then, we can curb the work week step by step, trading in money for time, investing more money in education, and developing a more flexible retirement system and good provisions for paternity leave and childcare," he writes in Utopia for Realists. In the past, influential thinkers such as Keynes and science-fiction author Isaac Asimov believed boredom would be one of the great challenges of the future. Instead, Bregman writes: "We aren't bored to death; we're working ourselves to death. The army of psychologists and psychiatrists are fighting not the advance of ennui, but an epidemic of stress." Working harder to consume

Average weekly full-time hours worked by Australians have increased since 1985 from 36.4 to 38.6 for women and from 39.5 hours to 42.3 hours for men, according to Troy Henderson, a PhD candidate in political economy at the University of Sydney. "The slight fall in average hours is wholly explained by a significant increase in part-time work." Henderson pointed to a number of reasons why the fall in working hours had stalled in recent decades, including the stagflation recession in the mid-1970s, increased globalisation of trade, rising unemployment and insecure work. "Free market fundamentalism reinforced the 'work ethic' and the power of employers to dictate terms to workers," he said. "But the main reason is that capitalism – without resistance from other social forces – has a strong bias towards taking the benefits of productivity growth in the form of more consumption rather than more leisure." A 15-hour work week might sound like a fantasy, but Henderson said: "In rich countries we no longer send 10-year-olds down coalmines. We have weekends. Paid annual leave. Public holidays. And age pensions. Change that seems 'utopian' today can be taken for granted 20 or 50 years later." Henderson said a shorter work week and universal basic income were "utopian-pragmatic" reforms.

He added: "In Australia, I think full employment (meaning a job for all those who want one), a four-day 30-hour work week and UBI could all be pursued at the same time." Rutger Bregman will appear at the Sydney Opera House's Antidote festival on September 3.