On September 25, 1926, a revolution took place in the factories of Henry Ford in America — the six-day workweek was transformed into a five-day one, still with eight hours a day and no decrease in salary. It was just a minor adjustment to the calendar, but quite a significant event in the history of labour.
One hundred years later, we continue to ponder over the same question: why do we work so hard? The question is especially interesting since a century ago the perspective seemed quite different. Machines would finally free us from the burden of manual labour. They would make us rich, productivity would increase, and, in the end, humans would have more time for themselves.
Legendary British economist John Maynard Keynes expressed this dream most vividly. In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren”, he predicted a 15-hour workweek in 2030. Three hours a day would be enough to satisfy the “old Adam” in most of us, Keynes perceived.
Well, 2030 has almost arrived. And we still are a long way from 15 hours. Today, machines are producing with unprecedented accuracy. And we now have AI which can write, code, analyse, translate, and summarise. And yet the workweek continues to persist at its familiar length, almost what was set by Ford over a century ago.
Perhaps Keynes assumed that as we got richer, we would automatically prefer leisure over consumption. It appears that humans are much more complex. Even Ford contended that leisure might actually spur consumption and business activity. Thus, the five-day workweek was a product of technology, increased productivity, social pressure, and business calculation. But an odd thing happened after that. While productivity continued to increase, the length of the workweek didn’t fall in anything resembling the same speed. This is because productivity presents a choice. The additional productivity created through technology can either lead to leisure or consumption of goods. There’s no economic law here. Perhaps this is what Keynes missed in his prediction. He predicted material abundance would decrease our desire to work. But it could equally increase our expectations.
In 2019, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, gave us another vision of a utopian future. Thanks to AI, we might work only three days a week and four hours each day — a 12-hour workweek only — in the near future, Ma perceived. Technology should give human beings more time to enjoy being human, he argued. Seven years later, this might sound too optimistic. But perhaps Ma, like Keynes, was looking at the technology and forgetting one thing about human nature. AI can minimise the time needed to do a task, but it doesn’t automatically reduce the amount of work society decides is worth doing.
However, there’s proof that shorter weeks work. Among several experiments worldwide, there’s one done in Iceland from 2015 to 2019 that included more than 2,500 people. Their working hours were decreased, but not their wages. And the results they achieved included increased work-life balance and well-being of those workers.
AI has revived the traditional bargain. This month, Bernie Sanders and Representative Mark Takano have introduced a bill in the US that will provide for a 32-hour workweek without any drop in income or benefits. It’s crucial not because it means that the four-day workweek is guaranteed but because it addresses a simple question: Who gets the advantage of the technological revolution? OpenAI has even offered to test 32-hour workweeks to provide a worker with an “efficiency dividend” that comes from increased productivity due to AI.
So, is Keynes right or wrong? Well, he may well have been wrong about the number of working hours. A 2022 research paper in Economica entitled “The 15-Hour Week: Keynes’s Prediction Revisited” by Nicholas Crafts from the Universities of Sussex and Warwick concluded that Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour workweek will not come true. However, there’s an interesting point that the author makes: expected lifetime leisure and home production in Britain increased significantly between 1931 and 2011, helped partly by longer life expectancy and longer retirement. Thus, Keynes may have been wrong on the number of weekly working hours but was on target regarding the overall direction of human development. The benefits, however, didn’t come in an idealised format of a 15-hour workweek.
Moreover, to many people, work is more than simply earning money. Through work, people derive meaning, purpose, an identity, friendship, and even order. Even Keynes understood that once the problem of scarcity was overcome, humans would have another one: what to do with the newfound free time?
This is perhaps more difficult than one would think. Perhaps the biggest problem with the idea of a four-day week is not technological but rather social and psychological. Economic success has been defined for the past century as producing, earning, and consuming more. However, we are perhaps inefficient in figuring out how much is enough. AI will change this balance of forces. It will allow us to become dramatically more productive. Whether this productivity results in an additional billion dollars of production or an additional day of human life is again a social choice.
The four-day workweek, thus, is not just a reform in the labour market. It’s a discussion on what kind of progress we wish to pursue. A hundred years prior to Ford’s revolution, the industrial labourers worked for very long hours. Thus, as we mark a century of the five-day workweek, the most intriguing discussion is not whether Thursday becomes the new Friday. It’s whether, after a century of extraordinary technological progress, we have finally learned what all that progress is for.