Addicted to the daily grind  

The FT (via the Business Spectator) has an article on renewed interest in the four day working week and other schemes to reduce the amount of time we spend at work - Addicted to the daily grind. The author seems pessimistic about the ability of many people to enjoy more leisure time - but he has probably been working too hard to fully appreciate the virtues of sloth...

It took a member of the insouciant Bloomsbury set to suggest, during a depression that had left millions unemployed, that salaried work was a social evil. In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that rising productivity and living standards would, in a century, allow people in developed countries to toil for just 15 hours a week. They would cultivate “the arts of life” the rest of the time.

The current downturn is giving many Britons a taste of what Keynes was talking about. Voluntary schemes that reduce working hours in return for pay cuts are spreading from their redoubt in manufacturing into professional services. Staff at KPMG have agreed to take sabbaticals or to switch to four-day weeks when demand for their services is low. Norton Rose and Herbert Smith, the law firms, are mulling similar arrangements. The schemes are a sensible way of retaining talent and avoiding redundancies.

Sharon Baynham, a senior tax adviser at KPMG, has just spent a six-week sabbatical working on her debut novel. This promises to be “a saga about relationships” of the searingly-honest school exemplified by the works of Lionel Shriver. On her first day back at work, Ms Baynham told me she was grateful “for the chance to explore writing in a [financially] safe environment”. Which beats journalism, at any rate. The experience had been “far more positive than expected”, Ms Baynham said, before recommencing the Herculean task of emptying her email inbox.

Could the shorter hours forced on some workers by recession become a positive choice, easing progress towards the elevated lifestyle envisaged by Keynes? After all, one school of thought associates purposeful leisure with nobility and humdrum work with brutality. This began with the Ancient Greeks and continued with the snobbish Bloomsburys. The work ethic is arguably the invention of thin-lipped Calvinists. As the poet and grumpy old man Philip Larkin once rhetorically asked: “Why should I let the toad Work squat on my life?”

The answer is that without the toad Work squatting on one’s life, one feels curiously exposed. In his playful essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Keynes predicted that the standard of living in developed countries would rise by four to eight times in 100 years. The lower limit has already been surpassed. But working hours have fallen by far less. It is most unlikely that by 2030 we will graft for only two days a week.

Keynes, according to Professor Alan Manning of the London School of Economics, “underestimated the appeal of materialism”. In part, this was because he failed to anticipate the ingenuity of business in supplying unnecessary but desirable new products and services, from video games to spa treatments. Had the great thinker ever had the chance to battle fellow Bloomsburyite Virginia Woolf at Wii Frisbee, he might have been more bullish about acquisitiveness. Financial competition is the other element. People work hard in order to be better off than their peers, or if that fails, to keep pace with them.

There is another snag with Keynes’ prediction. He presciently argued that advanced societies would solve what he called “the economic problem” by abolishing serious want. But he largely ignored the existential problem that troubles the leisured. The challenge is to formulate a personal raison d’être if you are not occupied in syndicating bonds for Goldman Sachs or stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s. Most people need to be needed. Salaried employment suggests to them that they are. Moreover, work outside the confines of minimum-waged drudgery is increasingly complicated and difficult. Which makes it a lot more interesting than sitting at home with a book of Sudoku puzzles. ...

Modern Britons work much harder than Keynes expected but far less than they themselves believe. As reflected in the never-ending spat over the 48-hour week promoted by Brussels, we tend to look down on the working practices of Continentals. We suspect them of squandering valuable office time by engaging in elegant love affairs and eating long, delicious lunches. But John Philpott says that the UK average working week of around 36 hours is nothing special. Perhaps we downplay our latitude for pursuing “the arts of life” because, if truth were told, we are not very good at them. A 15-hour week could merely highlight our inadequacies.