Yes, we can afford a shorter workweek

It is a place “Where money has been exchanged for the good life,” wrote a medieval poet in an enthusiastic description of Cockaigne, the mythical Land of Plenty, “and he who sleeps the longest, earns the most.” In Cockaigne, the year is an endless succession of holidays: four days each for Easter, Pentecost, St. John’s Day, and Christmas. Anyone who wants to work is locked up in a subterranean cellar. Even uttering the word “work” is a serious offense.

Ironically, medieval people were probably closer to achieving the contented idleness of the Land of Plenty than we are today. Around 1300, the calendar was still packed with holidays and feasts. Harvard historian and economist Juliet Schor has estimated that holidays accounted for no less than one- third of the year. In Spain, the share was an astounding five months, and in France, nearly six. Most peasants didn’t work any harder than necessary for their living. “The tempo of life was slow,” Schor writes. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

So where has all that time gone? It’s quite simple, really. Time is money. Economic growth can yield either more leisure or more consumption. From 1850 until 1980, we got both, but since then, it is mostly consumption that has increased. Even where real incomes have stayed the same and inequality has exploded, the consumption craze has continued, but on credit. And that’s precisely the main argument that has been brought to bear against the shorter workweek: We can’t afford it. More leisure is a wonderful ideal, but it’s simply too expensive. If we were all to work less, our standard of living would collapse and the welfare state would crumble.

But would it?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Ford conducted a series of experiments which demonstrated that his factory workers were most productive when they worked a forty- hour week. Working an additional twenty hours would pay off for four weeks, but after that, productivity declined.

Others took his experiments a step farther. On December 1, 1930, as the Great Depression was raging, the cornflake magnate W. K. Kellogg decided to introduce a six -hour workday at his factory in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was an unmitigated success: Kellogg was able to hire an additional 300 employees and slashed the accident rate by 41%.Moreover, his employees became noticeably more productive.

“This isn’t just a theory with us,” Kellogg proudly told a local newspaper. “The unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”

For Kellogg, like Ford, a shorter workweek was simply a matter of good business. But for the residents of Battle Creek, it was much more than that. For the first time ever, a local paper reported, they had “real leisure.” Parents had time to spare for their children. They had more time to read, garden, and play sports. Suddenly, churches and community centers were bursting at the seams with citizens who now had time to spend on civic life.

Nearly half a century later, British Prime Minister Edward Heath also discovered the benefits of cornflake capitalism, albeit inadvertently. It was late 1973 and he was at his wits’ end. Inflation was reaching record highs and government expenditures were skyrocketing, and labor unions were dead set against compromise of any kind. As if that weren’t enough, the miners decided to go on strike. With energy consequently in short supply, the Brits turned down their thermostats and donned their heaviest sweaters. December came, and even the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square remained unlit.

Heath decided on a radical course of action. On January 1, 1974, he imposed a three -day workweek. Employers were not permitted to use more than three days’ electricity until energy reserves had recovered. Steel magnates predicted that industrial production would plunge 50%. Government ministers feared a catastrophe. When the five day workweek was reinstated in March 1974, officials set about calculating the total extent of production losses. They had trouble believing their eyes: The grand total was 6%.

What Ford, Kellogg, and Heath had all discovered is that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand. In the 1980s, Apple employees sported T--shirts that read, “Working 90 hours a week and loving it!” Later, productivity experts calculated that if they had worked half the hours then the world might have enjoyed the groundbreaking Macintosh computer a year earlier.

There are strong indications that in a modern knowledge economy, even forty hours a week is too much. Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day. It’s no coincidence that the world’s wealthy countries, those with a large creative class and highly educated populations, have also shaved the most time off their workweeks.

Rutger Bregman is the author of Utopia for Realists.