I devoured this slim book in a single sitting. In this short book that reads like a manifesto, Will Stronge and Kyle Lewis argue several important points on why we need shorter working hours and why now is the right momentum to undertake this change. Our Monday to Friday workdays and 40 hours per week of work hours are the legacies from the twentieth century. There have been many changes that make the current workdays becoming less relevant. The most important factor would be the technological improvement that increases the efficiency and efficacy of our works, but there are other factors that Stronge and Lewis introduce throughout this book. Much of the points being discussed here and the data used to support the arguments are derived from the experience in the Global North, but they would also make interesting case studies for the situation in the Global South.

In the past, Marx has argued about how the notion of time for labour-intensive processes devoured freedom from workers. In a capitalist society, Time has become the centre of our everyday’s life, with contracts that dictate certain hours of our lives to be dedicated to works. But the reality is, there were times when we are forced to work overtime to fulfil obligations to our employers. In some parts of the world, it is even common for employees to work with zero-hour contracts with no guarantee for them to continue holding the job position. The case of a high level of unemployment and job insecurity in our society is in some cases the by-product of our long working hours that might actually be unnecessary due to technological advancement.

Stronge and Lewis make interesting points on how the working time reduction does not come naturally with progress in technological advancement. In the past, the decrease in working hours happened due to strikes by workers and trade union members to put pressure on the government and their employers. The authors’ view challenges the Keynesian belief that growth will precipitate fewer hours for production and a reduction of working hours until less than fifteen hours by 2030. While challenging the unsustainable nature of growth, the authors’ also hold in check that socialism cannot guarantee better ‘work-life balance’ for workers as the experience of work would barely be different from the capitalist world that they attempted to abolish, workers will still work long hours even though the control over the means of production has changed from the capitalists into the socialist government. How should then we mitigate this situation?

The authors then provide arguments that would please feminists and environmentalists alike, that is by reducing working hours to four days a week there will be so many benefits to gain. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been increasing pressure for women who work from home to do domestic chores, caring for the children at home, while also performing their professional duties at work. There are many supportive data from the UK and OECD countries that the authors included here, which offer some points on why women are the most vulnerable with this Covid-19 pandemic, especially with the majority of jobs such as medical staff and teachers are held by women, that will put pressure on them to work harder. There is also a lengthy discussion on the need to change our approach from capitalism into sustainable degrowth, which includes changing our metrics into alternative modes of living, based on principles of sharing, conviviality, care and the common good. It’s time to question Adam Smith’s concept of continuous growth and the position of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of success for the economy.

In my opinion, there are some positive outcomes to advocate fewer working hours in some industries, especially to mitigate employee’s well-being during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. If we could be honest, most of our workers today are paid not based on the amount of time they spent working, but rather by the amount of time they spent being present in their workplaces. 9 to 5 work hours, five days a week have become an established norm, despite the fact that we might spend less than that time to complete our works, or there might be time between those hours spent for scrolling on social media, reading news, or extended lunch hours. The modern workforce is by no means a slacker generation, but there might be something to evaluate from our current working environment and Stronge and Lewis have made some good points explaining why and how we could achieve this goal of greater work-life balance.

A concise of view of how work has shaped our lives, and what it might mean if we started to reconsider the moral value supposedly inherent in paid employment. So ingrained is this perspective among most of us that it's difficult to imagine otherwise. For the authors, less work entails an equitable distribution of labor and an actual "work-life balance"; indeed, this concept would cease to exist. At the risk of using a buzzword, I was looking forward to a more "intersectional" analysis, especially in the chapter in gender and work. I'm disappointed that there was little mention of the relationship between race and capitalism. Individuals in the "care" and service professions, as well as those more likely to find themselves in precarious economic situations--in the U.S., at least--are overwhelmingly racialized people. Then again, this discussion is perhaps beyond the scope of this book; at least, that's what I'm telling myself.

If nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic has definitely changed many people’s relationship to their work since March 2020. If you’re not working remotely (and now fighting to keep it that way), then you’ve sloughed through terrible and traumatizing working conditions in the last 18 months or struggled with unemployment. Overtime capitalizes on this labor disruption and argues against the 40-hour work week. The authors put words and arguments to a lot of my own feelings of frustration and limitation within my day job’s traditional schedule and offer a better way to work and value our time. (Someone send this to my boss please.)

I included Overtime in my summer preview for Book and Film Globe: https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/eight-books-to-take-you-into-fall/

Thanks to NetGalley and Verso for the ARC.

Time well spent is liberating. Time as a phenomenon, when expended according to one’s own volition is delightful. Time allowed to lapse at a pace that is not dictated by the whims and fancies of a third person is fulfilling. Thus, even a great degree of time spent idling away is time fruitfully utilised, provided the act of doing ‘nothing’ is purely voluntary and bereft of, and uninduced by all conditionalities. Unfortunately not many of us can lay claims to enjoying a spell of time, the likes of which has been alluded to above. Unless we are sitting on a pile of inherited wealth, and our names happen to be Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.

In their slim book, “Overtime” Will Stronge, Director of Research at Autonomy, an independent, progressive think tank focusing on the future of work, and Kyle Lewis, co-founder of Autonomy, make a stirring and candid argument for a shortening of the stereotypical five day working week. Adroitly and assiduously banking on three or key critical ‘planks’, the duo posit a case for a four day working week. However for this seemingly radical concept to materialize, there needs to be fostered the realisation that treating such a potential change as radical is indeed the biggest folly. A paradigm shift needs to overcome the attitude and intent of the employers. The employees need to be invested with the necessary pecuniary security and there ought to be no compromise whatsoever in their payouts in a transition to such a scheme.

Writing for The Conversation, Anthony Veal, Adjunct Professor, Business School, University of Technology Sydney, evaluated the four-day working week experiment instituted by the epitome of progressive nations, Iceland. As Veal illustrates, in reality the studies involving Reykjavík City Council and the Icelandic government. The trials covered 66 workplaces and about 2,500 workers revealed that “workers moved from a 40-hour to a 35- or 36-hour week, without reduced pay.” In actuality a shift to a four-day working week should have ideally compressed the total number of weekly work hours by seven or eight hours instead of just four hours. Even so there is no denying the fact that the single greatest upshot stemming from the experiment has been the demonstration that, where there is a conviction, there can be implemented a reformist working mechanism.
Spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, initiatives similar to that of the Icelandic experiment are being proposed by other nations too. For example as Stronge and Lewis illustrate, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has exhorted businesses to allow employees to put in a four day week but without any accompanying loss of pay. New Zealand’s extraordinarily popular Prime Minister Jacinda Arden as well as her Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin have also expressed a keen desire to institute the four-day week arguing that such a move would result in the enjoyment of a greater degree of work-life balance.

One invariable outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the phenomenon of working from home. Touted as being a democratic and ‘flexible’ arrangement of ‘discharging one’s responsibilities, working from home is neither democratic nor flexible. Under this arrangement there is an unfortunate but inevitable erasure or obliteration of the critical line separating the personal from the professional. Allowing the office to intrude into your living room or turning a blind eye to its roving presence within the confines of your bedroom can cause incalculable damage to the human psyche. Increased cases of work related depression, physical conditions such as Recurring Stress Injury are all too common. “A study carried out by the Mental Health Foundation suggested that among those working from home during the pandemic, an extra 28 hours per month were being worked on average, with clear negative impacts on health and well-being.”

The authors of ‘Overtime’ bring to the attention of the reader an age old paradox that has assailed the unit of time. This paradox materializes when time is evaluated in parallel by the employee and the employer. From an employee’s perspective, every incremental unit of time not spent at work is an opportunity for embellishing and achieving one’s self actualization needs. By this logic time is freedom. However from a capitalist’s perspective, every unit of time lost in not producing a good or rendering a service is time unfairly and unproductively spent against which a great deal of money has also been expended in the form of wages. “All time is potential production time within a capitalistic economy.” To quote Marx, “the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his own life, and that, therefore, all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time…”

John Maynard Keynes once envisaged a time (by 2030) where spurred by the extraordinary and exponential efficiencies of technology, the number of labour hours would be dramatically shortened. This rapid reduction, according to one of the greatest economists of our time would pose a unique problem more epistemic in its nature than economical. Man would face a conundrum in trying to understand and contemplate in the additional hours available to him, ‘what should he be as a human being’. Keynes even had an imaginatively threatening name for such a problem – permanent problem of the human race.

However, not even a decade away from 2030, we as a collective humanity are nowhere close to attaining a state where we can luxuriate mulling about philosophical dilemmas and moral constructs. A yawning chasm in the form of income and wealth inequality has created a pernicious situation of distributional disparity. While the rich keep getting obscenely richer, the poor and even the middle class are sailing a boat of stagnation. The time for sanguine thinking is not yet visible on the horizon. However a four day working week might just be the panacea for bestowing the much needed ‘nudge’ in progressing towards a horizon of hope.

But the greatest benefit of a four-day week might shore up the process of a segment of the population that has been unfortunately, unerringly and undeservingly been neglected and stereotyped from time immemorial – women. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was found that, “77 percent of the workforce who have ‘high-risk’ jobs are women, and that women make up a staggering 98 percent of workers on high-risk jobs that are being paid poverty wages’. A report prepared by the authors’ own think-tank in tandem with another think tank named Compass, and the 4 Day Week Campaign, revealed the distinctly uncomfortable fact that “women are 43 percent more likely than men to have increased their hours beyond a standard working week during COVID.” The banishment of women to the kitchen not only seems to be a continuing tendency, but it seems to be a demeaning attribute foisted onto them despite the strides of progress made by them that sees them at the helm of many a Corporate Board. The ‘unpaid labour’ that women put in at home on an average is estimated to be worth a staggering GBP 449 billion according to 2015 data.

Italian and American scholar, teacher, and activist Sylvia Federici in a famous tract, Wages Against Housework, vociferously argued that there ought to be demanded by women who were subject to the ‘gendered cage of housework’, an appropriate payment. This payment was a talismanic gesture at denaturalizing and divorcing the taxing and repetitious chores of housework from the feminine. According to Federici, “it is the demand by which our nature ends, and our struggle begins.”

The authors also argue in closing that a four-day work week also abets the ongoing clamour for ‘de-growth’ and a frantic call for moving away from the metric of the Gross Domestic Product. A four-day work week would also stamp out a great deal of carbon footprint.

“Overtime” is an insightful and thought provoking book whose relevance is amplified by the peculiarly dangerous and unique time we are living through and in, right now.

(‘Overtime: Why We Need A Shorter Working Week, is published by Verso Books and will be released on the 14th of September 2021)

Thank you Net Galley and Verso Books for the Advance Reviewer Copy

I thought this was a good discussion about how long work weeks and long shifts are not beneficial to the work force and what can be done to change this. At least Europe has designated fiestas in the work day, wish that would happen here! This book was brief and I think just skimmed the surface of overtime work and burnout syndrome.

Recommended for the topic but did not feel like a complete book given the length, so much more could have been mentioned.

Thanks to Netgalley, Will Stronge and Verso Books US for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Available: 9/14/21

This was a decent overview of the issue of overworking and some things that can be done moving forward. It also goes into why reducing the workweek is beneficial.. I definitely learned things but it was incredibly short. It's almost not worth writing with how short it was, honestly. I felt it could have benefitted from some expansion on all fronts. A good survey of the concept and issues that can help familiarize you with the topic.