Conor here: In the following post, Murphy details how working fewer hours can improve health, well-being, and productivity per hour. Sounds great. I know a lot of people who would prefer to work less, but it is unfortunately not an option, and they’re actually in need of more work—or better pay.
By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future.
There is a phenomenon being observed in the UK economy at present, which is that some of the best-paid people in this country are working less, by choice and are, in fact, even going part-time, and as a consequence are improving their quality of life.
A recent article that I read suggested that this is an indication of a crisis of confidence in the UK; a failure of people to absorb the work ethic as they go up the ladder of seniority, and it’s all, in any case, because of bad tax policy, which the article in question blamed on the Labour Party, although, as far as I could work out, all the policies that they were referring to had in fact been created during 14 years of Conservative government. But whichever way you look at it, I think that if we look at this situation and argue that there is a crisis going on because people want to work less, we’ve got the wrong end of the stick about the relationship between work and life, and to me, that matters.
The fact is that there is very strong evidence that average working hours, particularly amongst people who are higher paid in the UK, those who are earning over £75,000 a year or more, are actually declining. This change amongst the highest earners, those earning over a hundred thousand pounds a year, is quite marked. They might be reducing their hours by up to 10%, but that isn’t just because we have a tax break at around the £100,000 income bracket. That’s not the case at all in my opinion. I’m suggesting that these people are reducing the amount of time that they spend working by choice, not because they’ve got a loss of confidence in the UK economy or because they’re tax-averse, because there are plenty of other ways in which they can manage that tax break. Instead, it reflects the fact that they are looking for better ways to live.
They’ve realised that when your income reaches a certain point, you’ve actually got enough, and there are other things to do in life apart from work. In that case, framing reduced hours as economic weakness or a sign of falling productivity or a threat to growth is absurd.
The assumption that work is always better and that more output is always progress is, in fact, wrong because there is a point in life where that isn’t true.
Now, in a blunt way, we call that point in life retirement, but because people who are in the pre-retirement era are very likely to be amongst the highest earners in society, and therefore those about whom these claims are being made , we are misinterpreting the situation. People, in fact, don’t want to retire at a blunt point of time.
As people now are getting into their fifties and maybe a bit beyond, because people do work well into their sixties, they find they’ve reached a point where their housing is secure, their pensions have become credible, and their basic material needs are met largely because the children have left home if they ever had them. At that point in time, they suddenly realise that there are things more valuable than money, and that is the phenomenon that we are observing.
People realise that money can accumulate without limit, but time cannot, and health, relationships, meaning, and care, all require an alternative investment, particularly if retirement is going to be long and meaningful, because there is plenty of evidence that those who work flat out to retirement day and then stop and do nothing thereafter have quite short lives as a result; the shock is too great to manage.
So rational people are beginning to manage what is scarce, and this has literally nothing to do with tax. Choosing fewer hours of work as you get older is not irrational. It’s logical.
And in fact, there are real benefits from encouraging older people to work a bit less. For example, when senior, well-paid staff reduce hours, space is opened for younger workers, not just to be recruited, but also to be promoted. The opportunities for those younger people to get up the ladder is increased, and skills are transferred rather than hoarded because that’s necessary as older people begin to recognise they’re going to give way. In other words, labour markets will become more porous, and opportunity is shared and not blocked.
Now, this is circulation and not stagnation that we’re talking about here. This is growth potential and not loss of it, and this is about a healthier transition within society. This manages the shock of retirement, but it also lets businesses adapt to the fact that older people will eventually leave.
We have to manage that transition in a way that we’ve not been very good at. We hear time and time again that there are some professions, some forms of work, which are dominated by older people. Train drivers are a perfect example of this. About half of all train drivers in the UK are aged 50 and over, and inevitably, we’re going to face a crisis of a shortage at some time because we simply aren’t allowing for flexibility to ensure that younger people can join what is a well-paid workforce, because we are not doing the transition, but we need to. And this message that older people want to begin to phase out of work rather than work till the last moment and then retire is an incredibly important one, and one I think we need to look at.
It also means that we would manage mental health better, because long hours are well correlated with poor mental health, chronic illness, and reduced life expectancy, and that’s particularly true in demanding professions where burnout is known to be a very high risk. So, fewer hours can actually mean better productivity per hour worked, and better decision-making, and longer working lives overall because people want to stay rather than quit at the first possible opportunity.
Again, the clues are being misread. Falling working hours amongst people who are well paid is not a sign that they want to opt out of the economy. It is a sign that they want to opt into life whilst letting others have the chance, in economic terms. People are not, then, rejecting work. They are rejecting overwork, and meaningless pressure, and endless accumulation. That’s just because these things are actually contrary to well-being. This is not, therefore, about withdrawal; it’s about their expression of agency.
There is a deeper economic meaning in all of this. Traditional economics equates value with output and success with growth, but well-being does not scale with hours worked, nor does consumption beyond sufficiency. What people are realising is that the economic model that they’ve been taught, that we should keep growing forever, come what may, is simply wrong. It contradicts actual life experience. So this has a political consequence: if people stop chasing income, growth narratives weaken. But what we do get instead is an intergenerational narrative, which is at least as important, if not more so.
It also means that fear-based incentives lose their force, but care, time and stability gain value. And if that’s the case, politicians would have to notice because it creates a value shift. Now, this isn’t a revolution, and nor is it a sign of failure. It’s simply a message being sent that the state should think differently.
The state should now support flexible and phased working. And in this context, the fact that the Labour government is currently condemning councils who are exploring four-day working weeks because they are evidenced to increase productivity rather than reduce it, for precisely the sorts of reasons that I’ve been exploring here is worrying.
There is a fetishism amongst those in power about hours at work and presenteeism, but in fact, recognising that care, health, and time are as important in economic terms is vital because those who have those priorities do still want to work, but they need labour markets that are designed for lifelong participation, dignified transitions from work into retirement, and the creation of shared opportunity.
Economic success is not measured by hours worked, and output maximised or consumption inflated, in other words. It does depend upon lives lived well, stress reduced, care made possible, and futures made secure. Working less can mean living better. This is progress and not decline. We shouldn’t be fetishising the fact that people are choosing to work less; we should be celebrating it if they can afford to do so, and be encouraged by the opportunities that they’re creating for others. A mature economy allows people to choose when they’ve had enough. It’s time that our economy did that, because if it did, we’d all be better off.
Allowing people to think you can reach “enough” state is completely against consumerism/capitalism. What if trend catches on ?. Who will feed the market god?
The palace is full of splendor
but the fields are full of weeds
and the granaries are full of nothing.
People wearing ornaments and wearing fancy clothes,
carrying weapons,
drinking a lot, eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money:
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
isn’t the way.
Tao te Ching #53 (Le Guin rendition)
[Le Guin’s pithy note at the end: “So much for capitalism.”]
Amos 6:4-7 (NRSVU)
MAMMON SMASH
“fear-based incentives lose their force, but care, time and stability gain value”
This is the key, I think. Many somewhat well-off people are opting out of the 40-year career and ladder climbing for something more comfortable and less stressful.
About 4 years ago, I told my employer of 15+ years that I could either work half-time or no time for them. Luckily for me (and maybe them?), they chose half-time with benefits although I said I’d use my wife’s health benefits.
In my company, I’ve seen many people retire in their late 40s or 50s in the past few years. Most of these were exec types who had a bunch of stock option grants to fall back on. The key for retirement is having enough money for health care each year.
I definitely recommend the half-time route I chose, but people must have a good sense for how much their company might value them. For a 30 year old to try it, I could see a move to half-time being rejected. It is a lot to ask a company, especially in the U.S. where corporations typically pay 75% of health benefits.
If I ever get laid off or resign, my leverage is gone, and I could not see anyone hiring me half-time. I would have to look hard and long at retirement or the ever present and very difficult “consulting” as options. I could be back on the chain gain, full time soon enough in that scenario.
Income tax rates have been rising in the UK, which makes the work vs leisure trade off more favorable to the latter.
While many people regret working too hard before they die, no one ever wishes they had worked harder.
As a musician, work was play, and I wanted to play all day, I still do, though now past my sell by date. People would hire me and often the music they wanted me to play was not much to my liking, but I was professional so I did it. Except for my instruments it was much a rags to rags story, but I was happy. Except for the grim reality of the world, I still am and I’ll keep on keeping on.
I’m only really interested in Political Art at this point.
If I can make money off of that, then hell yeah.
I wish I could get paid to start my own local political party.
I know it’s anathema to use LLMs around here, but if we could create a NC AI that any young person could consult with for the purpose of forming these local polisquads would be COOKING 🧑🍳. NCAI could advise you on local election rules, the working class, political economic news content, how to barnstorm and throw townhalls, and how to meet the locals immediate needs would be greaaaaaaaattt.
Political Jazz, Man, outfitted with modern day tools 🧰
But in the end if they control the platform then I guess you don’t control the product!
JHB, I labor (is that work?) to deconstruct your writing until
when I think I do not want to associate jazz (music and thought) with political intrigue
We could work happier as well as less? As in, doing work which demonstrably makes a difference to improving society – a bus driver or a construction worker can go home each day with a sense of accomplishment and service to humanity, a banker not so much.
Or reorienting the structure of work so it’s not bosses, owners or shareholders benefitting- you’d work at Dunder-Mifflin if you had a sense that paper was essential to a functioning society and was why you did it. Or reorganizing every workplace as a co-op, no bosses or just rotating workers as bosses. I suspect most of us would rather work at co-ops.
I’m reminded of Anares in The Dispossessed, there were job boards and people volunteered, often changing roles entirely, based on sense of solidarity for meeting changing needs articulated by confederated groups. They applied, they trained, they did the job until it no longer needed doing, they moved on to the next job needing doing.
Less work days has always seemed the ideal, to me.
You can rest better, attend to personal affairs better (appointments, annoying banking crap you have to wait in line for hours for), maintain a healthy social life rather than increasingly isolating yourself, reinforce relationships with family members and friends (imagine parents actually getting time to teach kids a sport/take them to museums/random road trip and chill), not to mention the other benefits in the article.
Especially for relationships/’family values’. Almost all of the kids I meet at work/personally don’t get time with their parents, even if they work from home. That goes for most kids in general, but one of the things we ‘prescribe’ them is more time with parents doing fun things. Sadly, it often leads to the parents cutting out extra time they don’t have for it, or not doing it often enough – which can easily lead to them feeling like failures if we’re not careful.
Science fiction has promised us that more advanced technology and automation of drudgery type tasks would allow us all to work minimal hours and enjoy great material prosperity, thanks to one miracle development or another (nuclear energy, robots, computers, “nanotech”, etc.), and for a short time it did seem like work hours were getting shorter. But that had little to do with technology and a lot to do with political organizing, labor union militancy, and the threat of actual violence from those being exploited. Like solving “world hunger” or one of those other perennial utopian goals, the chief obstacle is that those who already have the most money and the greatest power don’t want people to work less, don’t want them to have comfortable lives with a lot of leisure time, don’t want them to not have the example of others starving and being ground underfoot to demonstrate their precarious position in the economy. We had improvements because ordinary people fought back, but those are slipping away. My great-aunt worked 12 hour days 6 days a week in the mills. Recently one of the founders of Google said 70 hours a week is the “sweet spot” for how many hours workers should be made to put in to get the most productivity out of them. So the motivation is there to bring us back to the labor situation of the McKinley days (Trump’s favorite era).
If the Democrats and the unions had had their heads on straight, they would’ve been campaigning for a 30 hour work week at least from the time the Vietnam War ended. And the idea that everyone between the two goalposts of “becoming an adult” and “retirement age” could be treated as the same in terms of labor market participation is another stumbling block, as workers in the last decade before “retirement age” in many occupations are worn down, facing the medical problems that come with aging, and being subjected to hiring discrimination if they need to find new jobs due to “business re-engineering” or one of those buzzword names for dumping payroll. Rather than occasionally yelling about “Medicare for all” and then doing nothing about it, the Democrats should’ve tried just incrementally lowering the age at which one became eligible for Medicare (and maybe introducing it at the other end of the age spectrum to replace the patchwork of existing incompatible children’s health care programs). I assume the union leadership and nominal “left” political party leadership in both the US and UK got co-opted and paid off by the “malefactors of great wealth” from whom earlier generations had won concessions–so all the incrementalism has instead been going the wrong way, backsliding.
Senator Hugo Black, 1932:
A nationwide 30-hour workweek? It almost happened.
Thanks for that one Alice X. My personal favorite from that same era – Bertrand Russel’s In Praise of Idleness
Guess I was ahead of the curve. In my 35 year corporate career as a computer design engineer (a fairly new term that refers to both electronics hardware as well as software), I worked a total of six years full time. First job for two years, then four after the GFC of 2008 due to the job market.
I consider this my biggest career achievement. It didn’t come easy. I had to face down management several times, some I won and some I lost.
Totally worth it, kept me (somewhat) sane and my kids still talk to me.
It’s fine if you are a salaried employee paid £75k and up … not so hot if you are a worker on a Zero Hour Contract.
An inspiring trend, but I believe people at large still have a lot to discover about the true nature of work vs play and the way we should allocate our time. I think it begins with desiring to live simply and discarding the goals others have set for mankind.