The Guardian view on a four-day week: policies needed to make it a reality

theguardian.com:

After the first world war, workers wanted a peace dividend for their sacrifices. Within three years they got it. Almost every industrialised nation – with the exception of Japan – accepted the newly established International Labour Organization’s call to limit working hours to eight a day and 48 a week. While most developed countries enacted legislation to achieve these aims, Britain, along with the United States and Italy, did so through collective agreements.

Today, the triple crises of Covid, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Brexit will create job-altering shocks. Employers are already implementing remote working. Some workers, perhaps those with comfortable homes, prefer online messaging to water cooler chats and web conference calls to in-person ones. Others, meanwhile, are opting out of work altogether. From Monday, thousands of workers in 70 UK companies will be paid the same wages for a four-day working week as a five-day one. Like an eight-hour day in 1919, workers are demanding changes once regarded as fringe, eccentric ideas.

There are good arguments for a four-day week. Studies suggest improvements in workers’ happiness and improvements in productivity. The UK has for too long fostered a working culture that encourages long hours and employee exhaustion. About 10 million people – almost one in three people in work – would work fewer hours if they could. Remarkably, 3 million of them would take fewer hours even with a loss in pay.

Having to work less hard for a desired income is obviously welcome. But such a desirable outcome is complicated by factors such as the pressure to consume, security of employment and inequalities of power and income. Given the prevalence of in-work poverty, and with inflation hitting those