OK, I guess it would be interesting to conduct a survey and see what %, out of people currently working a 35/40-hour week, would choose to work four days instead of five on the same salary, or stay working five days a week with a 20% pay rise. With stagnating wages and high inflation, I suspect the majority of people would opt for the latter.
But it's all entirely academic unless you can come up with some reason why employers should suddenly give all their staff a 20% pay rise. I mean, if you can, brilliant!
I agree that would be interesting, although to me the availability of a realistic choice is the thing. If some people want to work more to accumulate more cash in order to buy more things, let them, but let others be able to choose to work four days a week within a society where this does not mean you cannot make a decent living, and where working five days is not often necessary in order to simply survive. It's certainly not because most people are so unbelievably productive over five days, that 'full-time' = five days of seven/7.5 hours; it's not that they could never do the same amount of work in four days. Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows very well how much time at work most people waste. So why is a working week five days long, when the amount of actual work hours done are so often so few? And why does one not have the option to do all one's work for the week and then go home when it's finished, even if that happens to be Weds afternoon? Because, I suppose, everyone knows the whole thing is a sham, but no-one can say it/act on it without fearing for a massive pay cut. It keeps people in a permanent state of infancy, through fear.
Unpicking some of the most deep-rooted dogmas within our society is of course incredibly difficult, but a starting point is to look at how people conceive of this thing called work, within the context of the single life they are ever going to have. The ideology of work that people are encouraged to have is quasi-religious - to take just one example, 'hard-working' is seen as a positive adjective, which is obviously ridiculous without even asking
what it is that one is doing / the idea that work is of itself good for society is unbelievably noxious - and very rarely interrogated. Without deconstructing this at first, it's difficult to get very far. Why do human beings acquiesce with a system where they spend so long doing tasks that are often extraordinarily banal and often very pointless, and which generate so much anger? Which can perhaps most obviously be seen in the vitriol that so many working people reserve for the unemployed, and for badly-treated workers trying to improve their conditions etc etc. So much of it is essentially saying 'I suffer, so why shouldnt' you?!'
I think it's possible to imagine a better society in the future (which of course may never practically happen) which would look at 20th/21st century work practices and ask, from outside of these dogmas, 'why did these people dislike themselves so much...?'
believe me, i am totally aware of the utterly stupid profession i stumbled into, so much for that journalism degree!
