One of the ideas that has captured many peoples’ attention amid the flurry of proposals ahead of the economic roundtable is the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ vision of a four-day working week.
The peak union body argued that working less could actually be productivity enhancing, although the studies behind those claims aren’t too rigorous.
While many Australians would certainly welcome a three-day weekend, Jim Chalmers has made it clear that working towards a national four-day working week is not on the government’s agenda, while reaffirming Labor’s commitment to flexible work.
Employer groups have been scathing, and it’s not likely to be a big discussion point on day two of the three-day roundtable.
Clearly not on board with the treasurer’s “open hearts and open minds” approach to this week’s talkfest, the Australian Industry Group’s chief executive, Innes Willox, called the four-day working week idea “another populist, anti-productivity thought bubble”.
Willox calculated that at the current dismal rate of productivity growth it would take 26 years to get to the point where we could drop a day’s work without going backwards economically.
But as the ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, explained to the Conversation’s Michelle Grattan: the labour movement doesn’t expect a revolution in the working week to happen overnight.
“To be clear, we weren’t asking for a change to the workplace laws for the government to do something,” McManus said.
“We were raising this in the context of a discussion both around productivity and around AI as an important part of the distribution of the benefits of productivity growth or, for that matter, productivity growth out of less jobs, out of AI.”
The longer arc of Australian history has been towards shorter working weeks and longer holidays. But that progress stopped a few decades back, settling on the current set-up of a 38-hour full-time job, two-day weekend and four weeks’ paid leave.
But there has been progress in other ways (assuming “progress” is working less – many believe hard work is an end in and of itself).
For example, since the turn of the century, the share of full-time employed Australians who say they work longer than 50 hours weekly has gone from 25% to 15%.
Meanwhile, part-time work has flourished, fed in particular by a surge in women entering the jobs market. (Which means households overall are probably working harder.)
Since the turn of the century, the female employment to working-age population ratio has climbed from 50% to over 60%, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
(The equivalent workforce participation rate for men is just under 68% and hasn’t moved much over 25 years.)
Of course, the working from home phenomenon that emerged with Covid has been a revolution for many, particularly working families. Thankfully, employers are on board and hybrid work looks set to stay.
But to many Australians juggling work and other commitments, time still feels like the greatest luxury.
In which case, why shouldn’t the reward for lifting productivity growth be fewer working hours for the same pay?
Some fascinating research earlier this year by Rusha Das, an economist at the Productivity Commission, showed we would have a three-day working week today if we had collectively decided in 1980 to spend all the productivity gains of the following decades on leisure time instead of higher incomes.
Das calculated that Australians used only a quarter of the productivity “dividend” from the past 40-plus years to work less, while we banked the remaining three-quarters as higher income.
“We have largely traded it for higher incomes, and more and better stuff,” she said.
One of the great things about a more efficient and dynamic economy is that it can give us more choices about what we want to do – how much more we want to buy, how much more we want to work and how much more we want to devote to family, hobbies or helping others.
This may be getting ahead of ourselves – we have to raise our economic speed limit before we decide how much faster we want to drive.
But we’d be mad to limit our thinking to the notion higher productivity is all about generating more income.
The ACTU’s four-day work week proposal is a good reminder of that.
