For many years, I have impressed my friends with the description of my working life. As an academic economist, only the timing of my lectures is set in stone – about 90 hours per year. I can’t miss those. Everything else is freedom. I can decide what I want to do, when, where and how I do it. I can take long weekends and no boss will tell me off. I can extend my holidays in Portugal and write an article for The Real Economics in a beach bar. I can swim during lunchtime or leave early to watch my team’s Champions League early away match. As long as students are happy, and I continue to produce research, it doesn’t matter where and when I work. Believe me, this narrative is so powerful that even my friends with high-paying jobs in the city feel a bit envious. This is one of the visions on offer for the Future of Work – the vision of flexible working.
Work wasn’t working already before the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK, one in six workers experienced depression, anxiety or stress. In 2018, these three illnesses were responsible for 44 per cent of all cases of work-related ill health and half of all working days lost due to health issues – about 91 million working days lost. Human resources experts blame burnout for half of employee turnover. Estimates of the economic costs of mental health problems for the UK are somewhere between £34.9 billion and £100 billion each year, and up to 4.5 per cent of its GDP. For the US, Harvard Business School estimates that stress-related burnout imposes a healthcare cost of $125 billion to $190 billion a year. These problems have become worse during the pandemic! A survey by the Office for National Statistics showed that stress and depression among Brits doubled during the pandemic, but it tripled for working people. It is clear to most of us that the economic engine is running too fast and that we need to shift gear. Flexible working seems to be a perfect solution.
Flexible working is a catch-all expression for several practices initiated by workers and supported by firms, either working for home, part-time work, job sharing, compressed hours or flexibility around childcare duties. These were already popular before the pandemic, and given the success of our forced experiment of working from home, they became even more popular after. Flexible working is defended by unions, think tanks, human resource associations, political parties, and top-notch academics. The benefits of having the freedom to decide when to work, where to work, and how to work are so attractive that is hard not to get excited with this vision. There are many merits of flexible working, but when you put the romanticism apart, it comes with four serious problems.
It is based on an individualist notion of work.
Flexible working arrangements are ideal for an academic writing a single author paper, a journalist writing a monthly piece, or a lone programmer designing an app. But in recent decades, firms have become more collaborative. In a typical work week, the percentage of time spent on the phone, email or in meetings is between 70 and 85 per cent for white-collar workers and can reach 95 per cent for top executives, many of whom spend all day in meetings and briefings. Even my work as an academic is full of contact with students outside classes, with co-authors of research projects and with plenty of administrators waiting for my academic opinion on irrelevant issues. When working, people are more productive when in constant contact with their manager, co-workers, suppliers and clients. If workers become part-time or are taking some time off, losses occur because of the difficulties in collaboration and delays in communication and decision-making. Teamwork makes a firm more productive but requires some coordination of hours, and also of physical presence. Developing a new product or a new marketing campaign requires brainstorming and a white board, and is much more difficult with Zoom. Coordination was already important in the 20th century factories, but it is even more important in the 21st century weightless economy.
It is based on an individualist notion of leisure.
Leisure is a network good – its value depends on the number of other people in your social network who are also free. The benefits of not working on Wednesday are limited if my wife and all my friends are working. Coordinating hours of leisure is as important as coordinating hours of work. It is the reason why weekends exist in the first place. To avoid overloading roads during the week and restaurants and museums over the weekend, as well as to make more intensive use of expensive machinery, it would be more logical if everyone rotated their days off. This form of organising economic activity was never adopted, and the reason is the benefits of coordination of economic activity overcome by far the costs of congestion and peak utilization of machinery.
It views work from a position of power.
Flexibility is great when you have power and full control over your work, precisely because everyone that works with you will work around your schedule. I work around my more senior co-authors schedules, and my junior co-authors work around my schedules. That is the nature of power. Flexibility without power looks more like dependence or servitude. The forced experiment of working from home shows exactly that. The one or two hours saved from commuting – one of the main advantages of working from home – quickly feed into one, two or three more hours of work. A survey cited by The Economist found that throughout 2020, employees worked, on average, 455 hours more than their contractual hours. People have breakfast and lunch in front of the computer and receive unapologetic out-of-hours messages from colleagues. Even junior bankers at Goldman Sachs rebelled against their ninety five-hour working week and demanded a limit of eighty hours. It is much more pleasant to work from home from a five-bedroom house with a garden, than from a 100 square feet room with no windows in a shared flat. For most office workers, particularly young workers and women, the barrier between work and life disappeared, contributing to greater anxiety, burnout, stress, and overwork.
It is not universal.
Have you tried asking a nurse, a teacher, a waiter, a factory worker or a shop keeper, how they feel about flexible working arrangements? All of them would laugh with the prospect of working from home. And the idea of choosing when and how to work, crashes with very tight and multidimensional rotas at best, or it goes against the employers that dislike workers that don’t accept whatever shifts they are offered. The discussion about flexible working is office-centric, detached of the lives of much of the workforce. It is more polarizing than unifying.
Working from home and other flexible arrangements will improve the lives of many workers and will be useful tools for the future. They should be cherished, but they are not a panacea. They are not the future of work. In my book, Friday is the New Saturday, I offer another vision for the Future of Work, one of a coordinated working week of four days – Monday to Thursday – and a coordinated weekend of three days – Friday to Sunday – establishing four days as the norm for all workers through legislation. Paul Samuelson, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970 and the father of modern economics, called the four-day working week a “momentous social invention”, comparing it to language. That is precisely my view of the four-day working week, not as a partisan policy or a win for the labour movement, but as a social innovation – a better way to organize economic activity in the 21st century. Coordinating office work, school, banks, stock market, over four days will set the time for effective teamwork, both within and across firms, increasing the productivity of the business sector. It will also give every worker the time off and the individual freedom to make the best use of it: to rest, to develop their passion, to spend money, or even to work more in their own projects. People will have more freedom to work further under the four-day week than they have of working less under a five-day week. The four-day working week is democratic and universal as it will work for everyone, no matter what is their occupation.
In the book I argue that the gains of the four-day working week for society and the economy will be much bigger than the productivity gains for firms or the well-being of workers. The four-day working week will stimulate the economy through the demand for leisure industries, hospitality and tourism. Imagine what you would do and where you would go over three-day weekends. Most likely it would involve spending money. The four-day working week will unleash innovation and entrepreneurship because many new ideas and products are born from passionate people with day jobs creating something new in their sheds during the leisure hours. The best example is Henry Ford, the greatest entrepreneur of all time, who took three years to build his first car with an internal combustion engine while having a six-day day job at one of Thomas Edison electricity plants. He became Henry Ford because of what he did in his leisure time. Like Ford, there are countless examples of innovation born out of leisure. The four-day working week will protect jobs at risk of automation reducing technological unemployment, reducing inequality. Plus, by sharing the benefits of economic growth with everyone, it will reconcile a polarized society and crush populist movements, one of the biggest threats to our economies. In my book, I argue that all of these effects, or at least some combination of them, will come from shortening the working week. The precise effects are hard to predict because they depend on how it is implemented and how the economy will adjust, but it will surely take the economy in the right direction. These effects arise because of the coordinated nature of shortening working hours, something that flexible working arrangements do not achieve.
The Final Word
The solution for our work problems is not decentralized flexible working, but a coordinated shorter working week. But one shouldn’t think of the two as mutually exclusive – in the best scenario they would complement each other. Why not a two plus two, where a four-day week is split into two days in the office and two at home? Flexible working brings many advantages, but by itself will not fix our working problems. My idyllic academic life is much less flexible and my freedom is much more limited than what I make it to be to impress my highly paid friends. But they are easily impressed and publishing a book also works wonders. When I tell them that I wrote a best seller during my leisure hours, they might even feel tempted to sacrifice a bit of their wages for more free time.
Prof. Pedro Gomes, Professor of Economics at Birkbeck, University of London and author of Friday is the New Saturday.
