Full Time could be Less

A full time job takes roughly 40 hours per week. This hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. The idea is that you spend your best hours to your paid job. Most employers do not want to touch this principle. After all, we are in a global competition. Indeed, but we are also in a global competition to attract talented employees. Some of these may appreciate the advantage of shorter working hours. It may be a good time to consider this. There are several reasons to do that.

1. The first reason is the generalised use of PC and smartphone at work. It has increased our availability and our productivity. Yet the gain in productivity has not been redistributed to the computer workers, but rather to the company shareholders. I remember in the early eighties the day we watched as youngsters the first PC’s with colour screens. We were convinced a full day’s work behind such a screen would make a man totally mad. Today, we can confirm this is the case. The mental fatigue of eight hours work @ the computer is enormous. Computer work damages your health.
2. A second reason is macro-economic. J.M. Keynes was convinced households needed sufficient money to keep the economy alive. Without consumption, production serves no purpose and economy is doomed. Today, we can say: households do not only need money; they also need time to consume. With increased time spent in traffic, too little time is left for households to spend money. Our consumption level has become less money-limited, and more time-limited.
3. A third reason is the nature of our work. A lot of jobs are no longer useful or productive in the strict sense. Increasing the number of working hours doesn’t lead to increased revenue. Some people can become more productive by being less in the office. We have become stressed and overactive and we would probably perform better if we had more free time.
4. A fourth reason is gender equality. After 50 years, the gender equality has not been reached yet. Yet can it be reached, as long as both partners in a household spend + forty hours per week to a job? It seems impossible to do this without the help of grandparents and this creates another inequality.
5. A fifth reason, related to the reason above, is the increased complexity of running a household. More about this in my blog time and energy in households.

The trend is towards a vaguer line between work time and free time. Work time gets mixed up with private activities and private time gets mixed up with work tasks. This is not a good trend. It would be good to have a society debate about all this. This point was already raised in my Dutch blog: “De geschiedenis van de vooruitgang” and in "Hoe beloon je een werknemer?".