How busy are you?  Are you working all hours? Are you always rushing between home, school, work, shops? How often do you wish you had more space in your life, more control over your time?

We rarely question how our time is measured or what it’s really worth.  A new book, Time on Our Side, published by nef (new economics foundation), argues that there are many advantages to changing the way we understand, use and value time, and to moving towards a shorter working week.   As we try to forge a new economics for a sustainable future, we must recognise that time is a vital component.

Starting from the premise that society, environment and the economy are interdependent, the expert contributors to Time on Our Side show that reducing paid working hours can help to manage an economy that flourishes without growing.  It does this by helping to create more jobs and reducing unemployment, which is often an unwelcome by-product of a steady-state economy.  It also helps to cut carbon emissions.  This is partly because people can live at a different pace when they have more disposable time. They can walk or cycle, for instance, instead of travelling by car.  They can take a train instead of a plane, grow and cook food instead of buying energy-intensive ready-meals, repair broken items instead of replacing them.  And they have more time to care for each other – and generally to reflect on what really makes us happy and what it takes to live sustainably.

The authors show that a shorter working week would bring other benefits to the economy.  People who work shorter hours tend to be more productive hour-for-hour and less prone to work-related illness.  A quarter of all sick days in Britain are currently due to work-related problems such as stress-related mental illness. A shorter working week could cut down stress levels and give us more time to take more exercise, to prepare and eat more nutritious meals, and to look after ourselves and one another better.  It would be good for our well-being and for productivity.

Other countries, such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, have considerably shorter average hours than the UK. Their economies are just as strong, or stronger. There is no correlation, then, between average working hours and economic success.

Redistributing paid and unpaid time could powerfully reduce gender inequalities. Women today are squeezed between growing pressures to work for a living and to care for children and elderly parents.  As a result many are trapped in low-paid, marginal employment and have little or no time to call their own.  But if everyone – male and female – put in 30 hours of paid work a week, instead of 40 hours or more, this would open up a range of opportunities for doing things differently. With a 30-hour norm, ‘part-time’ would become the new ‘full-time’. The pressures on women of combining paid work and caring would ease substantially. The corrosive inequalities of income and power between women and men might begin to reduce. Men could build their capabilities as parents and carers.  Children would get more time with their fathers as well as their mothers and develop less polarised views about male and female identities.

The authors make practical suggestions for starting to move towards a shorter working week. Where there’s an annual increment in return for productivity gains, some of this could be traded for time rather than money. Workers should be given the right to request shorter working hours, with employers obliged not to refuse unreasonably.  Young people could enter their first jobs on a four-day week, with the assumption that they will stay that way, increasing the numbers on short-hours working year by year.  And people over 55 could be given the right to reduce their working week by one hour each year, creating a gradual transition to retirement over 20 years or more.  

This will need to happen slowly but steadily over a decade or more – and no-one is suggesting it will be plain sailing. The most obvious problem is the effect on low paid workers. For many, shorter hours could mean abject poverty.  But this is a problem of pay rates, not working time. The answer is not to force people to work long hours, but to tackle low pay directly. We need to decide what makes a decent living wage for workers who put in 30 rather than 40 or 50 hours a week. Then we can work out what governments, employers, trade unions and campaigners must do to achieve levels of pay that are compatible with working hours that are socially just and sustainable.

Time on Our Side: Why we all need a shorter working week, edited by Anna Coote and Jane Franklin, published by nef (the new economics foundation). £14.99 hard copy and free to download