What do we want? A shorter working week! When do we want it? Erm… when we are ready for it!
My more rigorous friends tell me I am a dreamer. It’s all very well telling your nice stories about going home early on Friday and Mayday and the moon, they say, but what do you actually want? What policy changes will get us to this Utopia of which you speak? Have you thought about that?
Well, I have! And the possibilities are many. One option is a statutory limit on working hours – as was done in the middle of the last century to create a no-arguments weekend, and much more recently in France when weekly hours were for a time capped by law at 35. More likely in this country is a more gradual voluntary change, backed by supportive policy. So we would campaign for a stronger legal obligation on employers to take requests for reduced working hours or flexible working seriously. This campaign would need, of course, to work closely alongside a push to make a living wage a reality.
However, there is a reason why I don’t talk about this much. I don’t think it’s the right time yet. Timing is everything in campaigning.
Take this election campaign. All the main parties have proposed an extension to free childcare for young children, to their credit. But that is as far as it goes. Across the spectrum, the idea of the shorter working week, despite its obvious appeal, has not been mentioned.
It’s not it is never mentioned at all. On the contrary, there are press articles specifically calling for a four day week, from Spectator to New Statesman, and the mainstream press regularly features calls from the great and the good for shorter working hours, news pieces on areas such as the link between long hours and poor health, and in-depth features on companies experimenting with innovative working hours arrangements.
So there are lots and lots of nuggets, just waiting to be joined up by a campaign – but the idea is not yet mainstream. And campaigning for specific policy change before it is in that mainstream would be too easily dismissed. Rather, the first job of a campaign for shorter working hours is to get the idea from the margins to the mainstream, discussed around pub tables and water coolers, up and down the land and also in Westminster and on Newsnight. And to do that, there needs to be a networked community of people who are already working a shorter week, or aiming to, who know the benefits and want to spread them. (If you are one of those people, sign up to this blog for exciting news over the coming months.)
Once that is done, the time will be right to campaign for the policy change to make it happen. By the 2020 election, the manifestos of all the parties will feature a shorter working week, and we will be ready to chant as we march.
What do we want? A shorter working week! When do we want it? Now!
A Shorter Working Week for All 