Nothing makes sense about working hours without household labour
Emma Beddington is merely the latest to miss the damn point here:
I studied economics for a brief, inglorious time 30 years ago – with about as much understanding as a pigeon, actually – but the one bit that stuck was John Maynard Keynes’s assertion that, in future, we would work 15-hour weeks.
So, why hasn’t it happened then? Which is to miss the point that it has happened.
Absolutely nothing will make sense about working hours unless we include household - and unpaid - hours in our calculations. Yes, we leave the house to go work for The Man. No doubt being expropriated of the value of our labour and so on. We also work inside the house without The Man. Childcare, cooking, cleaning, fixing the gutters, digging the veggies, go back a little further and spinning the yarn, weaving the cloth and strangling the pig.
The actual change in working hours in the (near) century since Keynes wrote is that male market working hours have fallen, female market working hours risen. And male household hours have fallen and female household have fallen off a cliff. One estimate we’ve seen is that the weekly labour hours required to run a household have fallen from 60 in about that 1930 to 15 today. The nett effect is that all have very much more leisure than back then.
We have another name for this, it’s the economic liberation of women. Exactly the thing which has allowed women to come out of the kitchen and take their place in government, business, the media and even the military. We think it’s absolutely great too.
The 15 hour week has already happened. It’s just that it happened in that household labour sector, not the market one.
And, well, it just shouldn’t be that difficult to work this out. The Keynes essay does talk about the charwoman, no?
As we have done before we suggest a little test. Talk to some doctors (obviously not professionally, as they don’t see patients any more) and ask how many cases of housemaids’ knee get treated these days? Many more cases of tennis elbow we’re sure, but a vanishingly small number of housemaids’ knee. Well, there we are then.
Tim Worstall