The Tory Politics of the Four-Day Week

Local authorities have been under the cosh for 13 years, and before that cuts to budgets and therefore services were not uncommon. The result? Many councils are close to financial collapse, and nearly all are running services made brittle by the Tories' austerity agenda. With another challenging funding round in the offing, what do you suppose Michael Gove, in his ministerial Levelling Up guise, was noted for during his speech at last week's Local Government Association conference? More money? Answers to the terrible restrictions his government have imposed on councils? No. It was his attack on the four-day working week being trialled by South Cambridgeshire District Council.

In a 61-firm pilot of the four-day week by Autonomy, they found 39% of employees of the companies who took part were less stressed, 71% felt less burnout, 40% slept better, and there was an overall improvement of physical and mental health. Where it comes to the bottom line, revenue increased by 14% on average and staff turnover declined by 57%. Of the firms who took part, 56 said they were keeping to the four-day week. Why might Gove find this successful pilot so objectionable? It's worth quoting him at length:

I’m a strong believer that a five-day working week is what so many of our other citizens are facing, and they need to work those five days in order to be able to pay their council tax and meet their other needs. A five-day working week seems to me to be what we should expect of people in public service who are having their wages paid by those council taxpayers.

Gove might have talked about the practicalities. He could even have drawn on the grumbles cluttering up many a local newspaper website about council employees "never" being in, but he went straight for the beggar-thy-neighbour argument and reached for the fetish of "the taxpayer". But why? If you want to look at these things naively, a shorter working week that results in a happier work force has several beneficial spin offs. Less time off equals more productivity. Better physical and mental health means fewer visits to the doctor's. Staff retention saves money on recruitment and associated paperwork, and allows for the development of institutional memory. Why might Gove be against something that improves a service for all concerned?

The reasoning is not hard to fathom. It comes back to class relations. While it is true the Conservative Party have historically favoured certain sectors of business over others - particularly the City of London - their propensity to short-termism and seemingly illogical policy lurches (from the standpoint of economic growth) is never far from their custodianship of class relations. They came to power in 1979 with a plan of class warfare, carried it through by defeating the labour movement in literal pitched battles, and have ever since responded with alacrity whenever the wage relation has been challenged or undermined, or appears to face such an obstacle.

Recall our recent experience with Covid. During the virtual closure of the country and the suspension of business-as-usual, the Tories resisted all calls to make direct payments to help people through the acute phase of the crisis. Support was purposely linked to employment via the job guarantee scheme, and you'll recall the lack of support - that reduced some to destitution - for whole swathes of the self-employed. Especially in sectors the the Tories don't like. Then no sooner as furlough was rolled out and other support measures announced, the government began its campaign of whittling it away. Conditionalities for social security were the first to return, and the government and their press allies kept banging the drum for a generalised return to work and relaxation of restrictions - regardless of what the data showed. What Covid demonstrated, however, was politically impressible. Despite decades of rhetoric it turned out the power of the state, even one as pared down and as dysfunctional as the British state, might be used to support people. It demonstrated a different way of doing things. This (potential) raising of expectations, such as properly funded public services and the idea lif didn't have to revolve around work had to be hammered so the status quo could be resumed after the emergency.

And so it has proven. The Tories badly mismanaged Covid, but they largely escaped its political consequences by a conscious effort of depoliticising the crisis and blaming everything since on abstractions and international crises (inflation! Ukraine!). Indeed, inflation is being used by the Tories to drive down living standards, and should be seen in the context of the potential power workers might wield in a tight labour market. Gove's refusal to countenance the four-day week is a moment in the Tories' collective effort to drive down the horizon of political possibility, to reinforce the idea there can be no other possible way of living your life than selling five days of your time (or more) per week. There is no alternative, and Gove and the Tory party are working hard to make sure it stays that way.