In ancient Greece, Aristotle was big on “noble leisure”, but modern Greece might need a refresher, having just introduced a six-day, 48-hour working week. Opponents have described the measure as “barbaric”, an erosion of workers’ rights in a country that already works the longest hours in Europe.
I have been thinking a lot about work recently. OK, I am not exactly formulating an incisive critique of the labour market (most of my thoughts are of dinner or pigeons), but I have been wondering why we still do so much of it.
I studied economics for a brief, inglorious time 30 years ago – with about as much understanding as a pigeon, actually – but the one bit that stuck was John Maynard Keynes’s assertion that, in future, we would work 15-hour weeks. In 1930, in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he argued (not entirely seriously; it was originally an after-dinner speech) that income from capital and technological progress would, within two generations, make work optional. Most people would do a bit (“Three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!” he said) because old habits die hard, but the “permanent problem”, he claimed, would be “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won”.
I don’t know about you, but what to do with my excess leisure time has not yet become a permanent problem; it is not a problem anyone in the Greek private sector will be complaining about, either. The global workforce is overstretched, frayed to breaking point and existentially exhausted. From fulfilment centre workers and drivers apparently peeing in bottles because they can’t take breaks to burnt-out white-collar workers realising that, for all its benefits, technologically enabled “flexible working” eats inexorably into our previously private time, people are working longer and losing quality of life.
Keynes wrote Economic Possibilities in the depths of the Great Depression; in 2024, it still feels properly audacious. A three-hour day is an idea even #softlife TikTok girlies wouldn’t dare to dream of: enough time with people you love and to fulfil your caring responsibilities; time for self-care, with proper food and exercise; time to engage in your community and to pursue diverse, intellectually satisfying interests? It’s the kind of decadent socialist wonderland that hardline Republicans in the US imagine Europe to be (they would expect no less of someone from the pansexual polycule that was Bloomsbury, I suppose).
So why aren’t we getting what Keynes promised? We are starting to look more critically at whether long working hours serve us. Critiques of hustle culture become ever more pointed. When the UK’s four-day-week trials concluded last year, 56 out of 61 companies chose to continue with the model; a second pilot is planned for November. Several European countries have legislated to protect employees’ out-of-work hours and Labour’s New Deal for Working People included a right to switch off that will hopefully become law.
These are unambitious baby steps, though. OK, Keynes underestimated the increase in post-work life expectancy; how the invention of better stuff would push us to desire and strive for it; and how much the distribution of wealth matters. But we live in a time of technological and AI-enabled wonderment that even Keynes could not have imagined. It is also a time of overconfident billionaire “disruptors”, beneficiaries of that unfair distribution of wealth. If one of them chose this as their goal, rather than firing penis-shaped craft in all directions, surely they could achieve it.
I wonder if something else is going on. We are not there mentally – just look at the flak Keir Starmer took for daring to suggest he might sometimes stop work at six on Fridays. Is it possible that we are scared? What if it turns out we have no intellectual hinterland, that we are impatient carers and rubbish at playing with our kids? What if we don’t want to make healthy food and do weight-bearing exercise and daily cardio – and no longer have an excuse not to? What if our leisure doesn’t turn out to be “noble” and we just spend longer staring at our phones?
We won’t know until we try. There are only six years before Economic Possibilities turns 100; come on, let’s make this happen.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
