Increasing numbers of workplaces around the world are embracing technology, and a greater array of tasks is being automated. In the eyes of one major British Labor organisation, that need not be a threat to workers, but may instead offer an opportunity: less time working.
“I believe that in this century, we can win a four-day working week, with decent pay for everyone,” Frances O’Grady, the head of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group, said in a speech at the Labor federation’s annual conference. That, she said, would help workers reap the benefits of technological change.
It is not the only organisation scrutinizing how technology affects productivity and work-life balance.
Perpetual Guardian, a firm that manages trusts and estates in New Zealand, instituted a four-day week and kept wages the same. It said productivity increased among its staff when their working hours were reduced to 32 hours from 40. The company is now considering whether to make the change permanent.
France has created a law giving workers the “right to disconnect.” It requires companies with more than 50 employees to negotiate a new protocol to ensure that work does not spill into after-work hours, an effort to prevent cases of burnout, which officials say are becoming more prevalent.
Several measures have been taken in Germany to improve work-life balance. The country’s Labor Ministry ordered its supervisors in 2013 not to contact employees outside office hours.
Any such change, even if it were possible, would not occur overnight, said Alex Bryson, a professor who specialises in Labor studies at University College London. Companies that wanted to limit working hours would have to make investments to help their workers become more productive, which would take time and cost money, he said.
“It’ll be a gradual switch,” added Paul Swinney, head of policy and research at the Center for Cities, a London-based think tank. “We’ll see a bit of that with some people deciding to work four days one week, and five another. It’ll change gradually along with social norms.”
“In 50 or 100 years time, it may be that four days is the norm,” he continued, “but we shouldn’t expect it by 2020.”
