Does time equal money?
John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the year 2000, the average working week would be 15 hours long. Recent studies indicate however, that working hours in the UK have actually risen over the past few years.
The New Economics Foundation (NEF) has proposed a policy for a 21 hour working week, in order to give people “more time to be better parents, better citizens, better carers and better neighbours”.
Going from a 40 hour week to a 21 hour week is a fairly big step, but the NEF’s proposal is for it to be gradually introduced by giving more time off instead of pay rises.
More time to spend with family, take up new interests or simply become active in your local community sounds idyllic, but what effects would it have on the workplace?
To an employer, this is hardly likely to be a popular proposal. Despite the fact that longer working hours doesn’t necessarily mean increased productivity, by nearly halving the length of the working week it’s unlikely that your staff would be able to get everything done. So you’d need more staff.
Good news for the unemployment figures, but more staff means much higher costs for your business. And higher costs would force people to push up prices, so we could expect the cost of living to rise even higher.
As an employee, a 3-day week sounds fantastic, but for new or younger workers being frozen on a starting salary could prevent them from being able to afford to get on the housing ladder or start a family – especially as living costs would most likely become much more expensive.
Or it could have the effect of pushing up wages for new staff, as younger workers would be aware that they wouldn’t be able to progress onto a higher salary – and that would mean another expense for employers.
For older, more established workers this could be a great scheme. Once you’ve achieved a comfortable salary to support yourself and your family, there’s no real need for extra income, so taking time off instead could be a fantastic opportunity.
To me, this scheme seems highly impractical, and one that would only bring benefit to people who are already in secure positions and on a comfortable wage.
For employers it would dampen productivity and push up costs, and workers on low and starting salaries wouldn’t get the opportunity to improve their earnings.
In an ideal world, a 3-day working week would be perfect. But in reality, this would likely be a massively expensive policy that would disproportionately hurt the lowest earners and make hiring so expensive that many business owners might choose not to bother.