The debate over the four-day week misses the point

TheAncient Greek poetess Sappho isn’t always considered an important voice in the realm of employability, but she has her moments. “Some say an army of horsemen, some of footsoldiers, some of ships, is the fairest thing on the black earth, but I say it is what one loves.”

At Finito, that’s what we care about – not that candidates find their way into what they quite like, but into what they love. That journey is harder for some of us than others. Some degrees, such as medicine, law and architecture, are highly vocational, others less so. Students with degrees in the humanities often leave university as unsure at its end about what they want to do in life as they were in Fresher’s week.

This all feels relevant to another question that reared its head during the pandemic. Back in May, Nicola Sturgeon promised a four-day working week for Scotland if the Scottish National Party was re-elected – as it was. The SNP manifesto stated that “Covid-19 changed the way we work almost overnight,” and that the party wants “to do more to support people (to) achieve a healthy work-life balance.”

But the argument typically meets the bifurcation so common in politics –with Conservatives understandably sceptical of the cost (in this case around £3 billion a year), especially at a time when borrowing has been so high, and productivity so low. Boris Johnson batted the matter away as a non-starter.

One recalls the old saw of the capitalist responding to the communist: “Your arguments are so old I’ve forgotten the answers to them.” Many of our working structures are an inheritance from the Industrial Revolution. Up until the 1920s, workers would labour for 70 hours a week. Henry Ford is usually credited with reducing the working week to 40 hours, as it suited his factory timetable to do so. Just as we now inhabit a world moving away from Ford’s cars, the argument runs, why keep to his schedule?

Then there’s the occasional research pointing to increased productivity from a four-day week. A 2013 Stanford study found that productivity at a Chinese travel agency rose by 13 per cent when employees were allowed to work from home at least one day a week.

Another argument feeds into our anxieties surrounding global competitiveness. For instance, Spain recently became the latest country to trial the four-day working week. Companies taking part will operate on 32 hours a week and receive funding from the government to avoid lowering employees’ wages. The country will spend about £44 million on the programme. Similarly, the SNP promises to “establish a £10 million fund to allow companies to pilot and explore the benefits of a four-day working week”. It could be argued that this is a relatively small amount of money to carry out a relevant social experiment.

Of course, the shift towards a fourday working week differs from the “compressed” work schedule already offered by some employers across the UK. Rather than decrease hours with no pay cut, a compressed schedule redistributes normal hours across fewer days. Criticisms of the compressed schedule include increased stress and rushed work.

The foundation of our working schedule has remained essentially stagnant for 100 years. As times change with automation, faster computing, and the ability to work from home, it might be that it’s time to establish a new way of working that which will benefit both employer and employee.

But of course, whichever side of the argument one comes down on, this is only a small part of the problem. Productivity issues and stress are only a factor in jobs which we do not enjoy; similarly when it comes to the arguments surrounding international competition, Spain might indeed find itself more productive if its pilot scheme is successful – but if the entire population were mired in jobs they didn’t enjoy the increase would fail to register.

As machines become more effective at doing the jobs we don’t enjoy, that should free up human capital for more creative and fulfilling work, and at Finito we want our candidates to be a part of that narrative. Actually, if that happens, and you find something you love, you tend to work a sevenday week voluntarily – because you’re happy. In other words, we need to think of work not as a burden but as a joy.

‘Work is so much more fun than fun,’ as Noel Coward put it. Sappho would have agreed.

Many Finito World readers will now be recovering from another summer holiday of juggling parenting and working, but does it need to be this way? The indefatigable campaigner Gina Miller is now calling for a new commission to consider the present state of education in the UK more deeply. “We need to have a commission now to look at the whole system. When I look at where we are in the world, it’s very disappointing. When I was growing up, the British education system was the gold standard everywhere in the Commonwealth,” she tells us.

For Miller, our country was lagging behind before the pandemic, and has fallen still further behind of late. But now is not the time to let a crisis go to waste.

So what should this commission look at? For Miller, the long school holiday needs to be jettisoned, and a fourth term seriously considered. She points out that the summer term is an inheritance of children being sent out into the fields to pick the harvest – and as such is outdated.

So how would it work? Well, this would be no brutally academic affair, but instead a term with a different flavour altogether. “It would have an academic element but mainly include things like the environment, gardening, cooking, community service, and sports,” she says.

This rings true. Many parents, especially those who used to commute regularly into town, have been filled with admiration at the standard of teaching. When children did return to school after the third lockdown, many experienced a renewed sense of the central roles schools play in communities.

And the timing feels right. Many of those working from home, having ceased their hamster-wheel commutes, now have a livelier sense of community than they did before the pandemic. This is now the time to consider the future, to recalibrate and think again about how we structure our society. Schools need to be at the centre of that.

And if at the same time we resolve some of the arguments surrounding the need to broaden the national curriculum, wouldn’t that also be to the good? Finito World continues to side with those who would like to see gardening, the arts and sports have a wider place within our education system. We are therefore supporting the idea of this new commission. It should be cross-party and given a full mandate to make bold recommendations. As Miller says: “A school is not just for educating people, it’s about our community.” What could be more important?