Sure, let's have a shorter working week

We’ve no problem with everyone gaining more leisure time. It is what has been happening these past couple of centuries as the increased wealth and income of free market capitalism leads to people choosing exactly that. True, the choice has oft been to reduce household labour more than market but then that’s the choice people are making so why shouldn’t we run with that - the people get what the people choose sounds like a decent enough outcome to us.

We would also note that absolutely nothing in this field is going to make sense without considering the basic human economic unit, the household - it is not the individual.

That doesn’t mean we support every such proposal of course:

A four-day week in the public sector would create up to half a million new jobs and help limit the rise in unemployment expected over the coming months, according to research by the progressive thinktank Autonomy.

The report points to the German Kurzarbeit scheme as an example to follow and then misses the two important points of that very scheme.

Firstly, Autonomy says that those working fewer hours should lose none of their income and that’s not how the Germans do it at all. They, correctly, note that if the workers are getting these shorter hours for free - at no loss of income - they there will be a certain excess of demand. Such schemes are costly and it’s only by distributing that cost around all involved, employers, taxpayers and workers, that we’ll gain the optimal amount.

The other mistake, and it’s a biggie, is where Autonomy says this should apply. From the German justification:

And companies retain firm-specific human capital, while avoiding the costly process of separation, re-hiring, and training.

It works if highly skilled labour, that difficult to find and hire or train once done so, is retained. So, the lads at Autonomy suggest that:

Aside from potential lay-offs, hospitality, retail and the arts are already associated with low productivity, stagnant wages and insecurity, with any further damage to these sectors likely exacerbating these problems.

The scheme should be applied to sectors where none of those hold true. Insecurity is, of course, the other way of describing how easy it is to hire and fire in the sector. Further, there’s the blinding silliness of looking to subsidise low productivity jobs. It is their destruction and replacement with higher productivity ones that drives the increase in the wealth of the nation. Higher productivity and wealth being what allows us all to take some portion of that as greater leisure, as we have been these past couple of centuries.

Sure, subsidising jobs for luvvies gets the luvvies on side but we need a better justification for spending £9 billion than that.

This plan is just another example of people not understanding the very issue they hope to discuss. Tsk, must do better.