Iain Dalton, Socialist Party National Committee
The four-day working week has hit headlines once again with reports that the ‘workers’ rights’ bill the Labour government is due to put before parliament may include the right to request a four-day working week.
At present there is a general right for workers to be able to request flexible working arrangements which came in in April 2024. But just because workers can request flexible working, doesn’t mean employers aren’t able to ignore it. As one lawyer from the firm Stewarts interviewed by the BBC pointed out, “At present it is quite easy for them to do so”.
But the rumoured proposals are for so-called ‘compressed hours’ – where the 40 or so hours of a five-day week are compressed into four longer working days.
Some parents may be keen on the idea of working fewer days because of the soaring cost of childcare, even the ’30 free hours’ is only 30 funded hours term time rather than year-round, meaning parents either have to find the money to pay for additional childcare, or reduce their working hours. And that’s if they can find childcare at all – councils, including Labour-controlled ones, such as Brighton, Hackney and Leeds, are closing down nurseries.
But why should parents burn the candle at both ends, working longer days so that they are exhausted when they are spending time with their children? The same goes for other workers who may look towards compressed hours to fit in responsibilities like caring.
The workers’ movement has long stood for shorter working hours – in 1890, May Day demonstrations were launched around the world to fight for an eight-hour working day. Workers fought for decades to reduce the working week from six to five days. Labour’s manifesto under Corbyn in 2019 called for a 32-hour working week with no loss of pay.
Even pro-capitalist thinkers have talked about drastically shorter working weeks on the basis of improvements in technology. In 1965, a US Senate subcommittee projected workers would only work 14 hours a week by the year 2000, and in the 1930s capitalist economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week.
But even the slightest proposal that could mean pressure for a reduced working week sees businesses screaming. They are ‘petrified’ of Labour’s plans to give parents the right to request a four-day week, according to Tory shadow employment minister Kevin Hollinrake.
Which is hardly surprising. Throughout history, employers have fought to oppose any reduction in working hours – the less time workers are at work, the less time they are producing profits for them!
But for decades employers have increased their profits at workers’ expense – according to a 2023 Resolution Foundation report, workers’ wage stagnation has left them £11,000 a year worse off than if wages had continued to grow in real terms at the rate they had been fifteen years before.
Society has the wealth, resources and technology so we could all be working a 32-hour working week now, with no loss of pay – if we fight for it. And when the capitalist bosses insist they can’t afford it, we can’t afford their failing system. We need workers ourselves in charge, to democratically plan society – to spread out the work and remove the waste of capitalism. A socialist society could provide for the needs of all, and drastically reduce all our working weeks.
- The length of the working day and week is a crucial issue for workers. Unite members working at Guys and St Thomas’s Hospital in central London began September with three strike days against unsustainable increases to shift times. Theatre nurses are burnt out and have no work-life balance
