Professor John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, caused a stir this week by advocating a four-day working week. This would improve our mental and physical health, reduce stress and we would all "enjoy ourselves more".
One reason to bring in a four-day week is that we work the longest hours in Europe. But this lamentable workaholism is also the reason it won't happen. Our schoolchildren are among the most-tested in the world. We, alone in Europe, have an opt-out from the 48-hour maximum on the working week. And the political left is more committed to helping the three million Britons who want to work more rather than less, even though a four-day week could balance this inequality.
The government also introduced an extension of the right to request flexible working this week, but, as the TUC pointed out, "there is nothing to stop the employer saying no", and their spokesperson presented me with a familiar scenario: "A woman requests flexible working in the sense of wanting to work a few hours a week less. Her partner then compensates for the loss of income by working a few hours a week more." As for the political right, if the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) can be so described (which I think it can), their press officer stopped me in my tracks when I called to ask its response to Ashton's idea: "I don't think we're going to go for it, Andrew."
Later, he called back to ask whether the idea was that people would cram five days' worth of work into the four days, or simply for a shorter working week. I don't know whether the CBI is aware that the former was tried, apparently successfully, in Utah a few years ago; the latter is almost the norm in Holland, where one in three men have an extra day off. ("Daddy days.") I said I'd like to know what the CBI thought of either. I heard nothing more.
I relayed all this depressing news to Prof Ashton, who replied with spirited sarcasm, "I've put forward my idea! It's your job to shoot it down!" I said I very much liked the idea, as a challenge to the inelegance – the uncoolness – of being a nation of try-hards; a country that puts in the hours only to achieve relatively low productivity, probably as a function of those same long hours.
The name of the game is to be in the office even if you're not doing anything: the blight of presenteeism. "Presente!" Ashton barked down the phone when I said this. He explained that he was invoking Franco's Spain, where this was the required utterance not just when the school register was taken, but for adults too at public gatherings. ("It's still a very emotionally loaded word in Spain.") There seems to be a prevailing neurosis by which we as a nation agonise and strain but don't deliver. Our World Cup humiliation, for instance, would have been lessened if we hadn't been quite so bothered about progressing to the knockouts – and we might have played better.
I asked Ashton how we'd come to be so wedded to over-work. "Pass!" he said, in his enjoyably forthright way. "It's a matter for conjecture. I'm sure you can conjecture."
Right then: protestant work ethic, allied to post-imperial crisis of confidence; a weakened trade union movement and fear of unemployment; the need for downsized workforces to do more; the Americanisation of our business culture (most Americans take two weeks holiday a year); failure to counteract the Gove-ite notion of everyone having to make sacrifices – some more than others – in view of a frantic scramble for survival in a globalised world. ("A race to the bottom," Ashton calls this).
What is so good about hard work that it affects our whole discourse? We have that creepy Labour formulation, "hard-working families", which suggests dogged morons with their heads down. Why have a family if everyone's going to be slogging their guts out all the time? The phrase "work in progress" is worn out by overuse. Any kind of book club or literary seminar is not reading and talking about a book; they're "exploring" it. And anyone doing almost anything is "on a journey", seemingly with no end in sight, if you're reckless enough to ask them about it. For the record, Scott of the Antarctic was exploring; he was also on a journey, and look how it finished up. But everything must be presented as hard work, which is why, when the chattering classes have a chat, they often call it a "workshop".
Somewhere along the line, we came off the rails. The most admired Victorian legislation reduced working hours. The Factory Act of 1847, for example, restricted the working day for women and children to 10 hours. Tom Hodgkinson, founder of the Idler magazine and Academy, traces the honourable history of not working all the time. "Until the Reformation, life was supposed to be about contemplation, philosophy and the intelligent use of leisure. In ancient Athena, the idea was to be a philosopher in your spare time. In Greek, the word school [skole] means leisure."
The aspiration lingered in our politics. Hodgkinson cited Oscar Wilde's essay of 1891, The Soul of Man Under Socialism ("It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure") and John Maynard Keynes's essay of 1930, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. That means us, by the way, since the essay was a prediction of society in 2030. "Science and compound interest," Keynes believed, would ensure we could "devote our energies to non-economic purposes." Some might still want to work, but a 15-hour week "would be quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" I'll throw in Winston Churchill, who, in the booming 50s, predicted "a four-day week, then three days' fun" for British workers.
The four-day working week implies the three-day weekend. The weekend Ashton foresees would be a movable feast. "Husbands and wives might want to take off a different extra day." "To avoid each other, you mean?" I said. "I meant for the kids," Ashton chasteningly replied, "so they can see more of their parents."
I told him I preferred a universal, fixed three-day weekend. We need the formal cut-off. I've been freelance for years, but I'm still excited on Fridays, like when I was a kid, when Leslie Crowther on BBC1 would shout, "It's Friday! It's five to five, and it's Crackerjack!" (Younger readers, Google it). I'm also miserable most of Sunday, because Monday is round the corner. Half the weekend, in fact, is the end of the weekend. And I'm even more miserable now that everything's open on a Sunday than I was when everything was closed. The modern Sunday is like a man trying to enjoy himself at a party, but he has something weighing on his mind (Monday morning).
The extra day would make all the difference. It could have something in common with the old sabbath, not in the sense of being tremendously dull, but in being a different sort of day. Ashton suggests a community service option, in return for tax credits.
No doubt this is all like those schemes I'd dream up while watching the rain fall on the old Sundays: unlikely to be realised. In which case we can fall back on the Charwoman's Epitaph, as quoted by Keynes in that essay of 1930: "Don't mourn for me, friends, don't weep for me never/ For I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever."
