The five-day week feels natural, immortal, set in stone, even though it only arrived with the Industrial Revolution.
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Are we working too hard? The answer is an unequivocal yes. By European standards, Britons spend a lot of time working – 42 hours a week – but we’re not particularly productive when we’re there. And the answer to getting more done, counter-intuitively, could be working less.
At the end of last year, a Radio 4 producer called me to ask if I would present a series of One to One, talking to a single interviewee for 15 minutes. The topic should be something close to my heart. I chose overwork. There is a huge problem at both ends of the labour market: in prestigious jobs such as journalism, academia and banking, there’s an assumption that the busiest person in the office is also the most successful. Meanwhile, in the gig economy, there’s often little choice about working long hours if you want to make ends meet.
My interviewees were an eclectic bunch: the first was Robert Skidelsky, the Keynesian economist, still working at 79, overseeing a commission for the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, into the four-day week. He is also an advocate of a universal basic income. “We need to redefine work and leisure; we need to accept that meaningful activity is not the same as paid activity; we need to decouple both from pay,” he said in 2016. “In other words, we need a revolution in many of our social and economic arrangements and habits.”
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