Four Day Weeks, Andy Burnham and the Death of Labour Dreams

While the Labour leadership deploy their time and effort to block the best-placed candidate, in Andy Burnham, to win a crucial by-election and keep Reform at bay, normal people with normal lives struggle to get on and get by.  

Labour’s leadership claim that this is what they are focussed on – making our lives better. But the reality is quite different. This is the short story of who, what and why some in the party seem hell bent, under no pressure from anywhere, on actually making our lives even harder.

What is the good society and the good life? Too often we struggle to just keep up, to keep our heads above water, to survive the day, to have the luxury of time to even contemplate how life could be transformatively better.  But without a lodestar, a utopian vision of what could and should be, progressives offer little hope or sense of direction. To be a dreamer, in a world ruled by scarcity, fear, insecurity, the clock, endless and mindless consumption, coercion and control, is deemed to be wasted idleness. But nothing good happens, has ever happened or ever will, without a dream.   

Enter the Governments Non-Dreamer in Residence, Steve Reed the Secretary of State for Local Government, who took it upon himself to crush the dreamers in councils with his pre-Xmas Scrooge like rebuke to even consider a four-day working week.  He said full time work for part time pay could be an indicator of “failure”.

As such Reed joins his soul mates at that bastion of progressive campaigning the Taxpayers Alliance in their predictable and dreary campaign to stop people having more time and instead keep their noses to the grindstone. 

Control over the working week is of course part of a centuries long battle between capital and labour. From the enclosures, through to the fabrication of the Protestant work ethic, the poor laws and the creation of the never ending turbo-consumption race that can never be won and should never have been started, people have battled for the right to spend more of their time how they want to.  

“There are many definitions of the good society” wrote the American economist JK Galbraith “the treadmill is not one of them”. But today we learn, to work, to buy. Many do more than one job to make ends meet. Parents pass like ships in the night with barely a moment to do the precious things in life, like the time to read a child a bedtime story. 

The remorseless and relentless grind of growth without purpose, the so-called ‘hard-working families’, the denigration of the so called ‘scroungers’ as opposed to ‘strivers’, the politicians who kick down and kiss up are all symptoms of a governing system that has lost its connection to us as human beings. 

Whatever Steve Reed says and does the demand for more time and greater freedom are only likely to grow as supply of work is likely to decline, while AI takes his grip on the vociferous and politically crucial middle class jobs of people who live in swing seats, and work in professions like law and accountancy. Every technological revolution leads to fears over systemic and permanent net job losses, only to see new areas of work arise.  The AI revolution looks like it could be different, with a structural decline in the demand for mental labour, as opposed to the physical labour job displacement of the past. The option to work less should be available to everyone, even as it becomes a fait accompli for many.  

The savings and benefits of a four-day week to individuals and society are almost incalculable, from mental physical health and well-being, care, volunteering retraining, the list goes on and on. 

A 2023 study by the 4 Day Week Campaign found that of the 61 companies that entered the six-month trial, 56 have extended the four-day week, including 18 who have made it permanent. In total, about 2,900 employees across the UK have taken part in the pilot. Surveys of staff taken before and after found that 39% said they were less stressed, 40% were sleeping better and 54% said it was easier to balance work and home responsibilities. The number of sick days taken during the trial fell by about two-thirds and 57% fewer staff left the firms taking part compared with the same period a year earlier.

And in a report on South Cambridge District Councils move to a four-day week Daiga Kamerāde, Professor in Work and Wellbeing at the University of Salford, said: “Our 27-month analysis shows that a four-day week can revolutionise the workplace while maintaining – or even improving – public service delivery. Most key performance indicators either remained stable or improved, providing robust evidence that challenges long-standing assumptions about longer working hours leading to higher productivity.”  

The think tank Autonomy has argued that the risk to business is not “fewer hours” but rather “unchanged systems.”  and that reduced hours should be treated as an operational excellence programme, not a benefit. 

The public sector should be leading the way in terms of pathfinding and prefiguring the good life and the good society. But this is a government that strives for safe orthodoxy, not the kind of transformative change the country voted for in 2024.

Steve Reed’s boss Keir Starmer has told us there will never be any such thing as Starmerism’, not least because he confessed that he never dreams.  

We should expect and demand that our leaders do dream.  We are being starved of hope. A good place to rebuild it would be a 4-day week.