SECOND OPINION:A four-day week would become accepted by all in time
THE LONG QUEUES waiting to enter the Working Abroad Expos reminded me of the links between unemployment and health which receive little or no attention from policy makers.
Having no job is seen as an economic problem, yet it damages physical and mental health, causing heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety and accidents.
European research shows that mortality rates for men double in the five years after redundancy. Another study in 26 EU countries found a direct correlation between joblessness and mental health.
An Institute of Public Health 2011 report concluded that unemployment causes ill health and suffering.
Central Statistics Office figures show nearly half a million Irish people are now signing on, with more than 300,000 having no work at all.
Most of these are probably, as Thoreau put it in 1854, leading “lives of quiet desperation”, with all the health problems that accompany despair. An unemployment problem of this magnitude is not going to be solved with a few thousand IT and pharmaceutical jobs. Ireland needs a radical change in the way work is organised. Available work needs to be redistributed. We need new laws to make a four-day week the norm, and the work previously done on the fifth day and overtime redistributed among those with no job.
This requires a mindset change where a full-time job is four days. In the 19th century, most adults worked 15-hour days with a half-day off every week. My father worked a six-day week until about 1960 when the five- and-a-half day week became the norm.
When I started my career in the old health board, I worked every third Saturday morning until the five-day week was introduced in 1976.
World's Workpublished an interview in 1926 with Henry Ford in which he outlined plans to change from a six- to a five-day working week in all his car plants. Ford was thinking about profits and not just being nice to his workers. He wanted to sell more cars.
His theory was that the more leisure workmen get, the greater their wants. These wants soon become needs and families spend more. People working a five-day week consume more goods than those with a six-day week.
As Ford pointed out, “No towns were as poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked 15 and 16 hours every day and desired only a corner to lie in and a hunk of food”. People in those days had no time to cultivate needs.
There is a complete imbalance between work and leisure in Ireland. Many people are overworked, others have no work or are underemployed. This is senseless.
More than 1.8 million people in Ireland have jobs and most of these are organised around a five-day week. Many employees get a lot of overtime. There is something wrong with a system where some people have 60 hours work a week and others have none.
Unemployment could be eliminated nearly overnight if everyone with a job changed to a four-day week and the spare hours were redistributed among those with no work. Single people would have four days’ wages to live on and couples’ eight. No one would be allowed overtime until those who want a job have one. The benefits to individuals and society would be immense; more leisure, less anxiety and less childcare expenses, to name just a few. Everyone would have enough to live on with something left over for leisure pursuits.
A four-day week will be resisted just as Henry Ford’s proposal was resisted by most industrialists in America who predicted the economy would collapse.
It did collapse during the Great Depression, but not because of the five-day week. After the second World War, the five-day week became more common and is now accepted everywhere. A four-day week will also be accepted in time. Do the sums.
The wages now earned on the fifth day, or from overtime, are being spent on taxes or subsidising family members in financial difficulty. No one is happy. Most people would willingly change to a four-day week if they thought this would mean secure jobs for their families and friends.
A four-day working week will not suit the IMF, whose policies are based on unsustainable economics and working until you drop dead. At the very least, we need to debate the way work is organised. There must be a healthier way than the current system.
Dr Jacky Jones is a former regional manager of health promotion with the HSE