Philip Hammond threatened in his interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag to turn Britain into a low-tax offshore sweatshop, although he expressed a personal preference for a European model of social organisation. Just how distant his preference is from his threats is clear from some recent developments in Europe: the French have passed a law limiting the use of email out of hours; the Dutch and Finns are thinking about a universal basic income, and in Sweden the city of Gothenburg is evaluating an experiment that allowed care workers in an old people’s home to work six-hour shifts instead of eight-hour ones for the same full-time pay and benefits.
The idea has been tried on a small scale elsewhere in Sweden many times over the last 10 years, but almost always at “creative” or desk-based jobs. Dedicated physical work, as is involved in a care home, seems an entirely different category. Successive scandals at Amazon, Sports Direct, and similar places have accustomed us to the idea that a modern economy is distinguished by the most sophisticated possible exploitation of the workers who actually move things (or even humans) around by those who manipulate algorithms and exhort the rest of us to productivity.
The Swedish experiments suggest that there is a better way, and a better perspective to think about this than simply productivity, narrowly considered. They represent more than a victory for unionised labour and its allies in the endless struggle against capital. At the moment the experiment is justified on the grounds that the workers who had to work less felt less stressed and reported sick less often. They would, wouldn’t they? It still cost their employers extra money to replace them, and it’s not clear that there is the political will, in Sweden or elsewhere, for taxpayers to contribute further to the wellbeing of council employees. But there are other ways to look at the matter, starting with asking: what is the purpose of work?
The question worth asking is not whether shorter hours made the workers feel better, but whether it caused them to do their jobs better. In the case of creative industries, the answer is obvious, and to some extent measurable: there really is a limit to the amount of time that can productively be spent on sustained intellectual effort every day. Once that is exceeded, more work produces less worthwhile product. Some of the things necessary to fill a long working day, like meetings and email, actually erode the capacity to produce anything valuable. This isn’t surprising. Professional athletes have to be careful not to overtrain. Why not professional athletes of the mind and the imagination? Teachers and social workers burn out. There need be no shame in this: people are not machines, and work that demands inner resources demands also that they be given time to be replenished.
But care work, too, makes demands on the intellect, the emotions, and the capacity for attentiveness, which are hard to measure but go far beyond the physical. Anyone who has looked after small children understands this and knows that it would be almost impossible to keep up periods of intense engagement for as much as eight hours. Old people are not less demanding, deserving, or less in need of attention. If they are propped up in front of a television screen and left to vegetate for hours this isn’t productivity but institutionalised meanness and indifference.
In practice, and by long, bad tradition, every kind of health work is associated with crushingly long hours. The doctor on call and the A&E nurse can both work to the point of impaired judgment far beyond exhaustion, sustained only by the knowledge that they are desperately needed. In this country, at the moment, we can hope for no more than a very slight amelioration of these conditions. But the European experiments suggest that there might be a radically different and better way in some other future far from Brexit Britain.
The Guardian view on shorter working hours: not just for the rich | Editorial
