The 4 day week

The whole world is protesting against racism in the wake of the death of George Floyd. You may think from my last post, that I am skirting around the subject and you are probably right. I empathise completely and I deplore violence and racism. But as my son points out, I have almost definitely said things that could be construed as racist in my life. For that I am sorry.

But this blog is always about action and moving forward. Its about finding solutions and taking small steps and promoting big ones. I know that I don’t have any of the answers. I see the protests and I don’t know where the solutions lie and how the change can come about. I am hoping to get a guest post from someone I trust to deal with this subject better than I can.

In the meanwhile I saw part of an interview with Russell Brand and Professor Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University. They were saying that part of the underlying problem is that there is a surplus of workers.

The idea was always that manual work would be automated and robots would become the cheap labour of the future, in order to make life easier for people. For example if machines can do the hard part of mining, then less people need to risk life and limb underground. It sounds like a good idea.

The intention was that people would then need to work less, would have more leisure time and could do more creative roles, but this is where it has all fallen down. Automation has been used to reduce the need for manual labour and the resulting surplus of workers has decreased wages for low skilled jobs. This has just led to widespread poverty. As the interview above has pointed out, this disproportionately affects Black and Minority communities the most.

We need a 4 day week. I am not the first to think or say this by a long shot. Apparently British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted back in the 1930s that a century later the average work week would be just 15 hours (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes, 1930).

There is a lot to be said for a 4 day week, not least that it should create 25% more jobs. The video below highlights more of the benefits, such as less illness and more family time.

The benefits of a 4 day week don’t really materialise until the change is made by the majority. It also has to come hand in hand with a rise in the minimum wage. It seems to me like the highest earners in society are holding the purse strings too tightly to allow that to happen without a fair bit of persuasion.

Reading further through Keynes predictions, he sees a time when the pursuit of wealth over everything else will end. (I have included another extract from the same source below) I hope in this aspect he is right and that within the next 10 years (100 years since his prediction) it becomes a reality. Then at least we may have a more level playing field to deal with the issues of racial equality.  

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth – unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them. For we shall inquire more curiously than is safe to-day into the true character of this “purposiveness” with which in varying degrees Nature has endowed almost all of us. For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment.