Why can't we have a four-day work week?

Shortly before my holiday in Greece, I read about the Greek philosophy of “leisure” in the book Friday is the New Saturday: How a Four-Day Week Can Save Capitalism. The book focuses on the economics of the four-day work week, and that particular chapter discusses the potential economic value generated if everyone had an extra day for leisure. Leisure could mean lying around, going to the cinema, or playing tennis—activities that are already good for the economy as they fuel consumption. But in that chapter, the author focuses on the ancient Greeks’ concept of "noble leisure," which involves intellectual exercises and self-realisation beyond life's basic necessities. Aristotle regarded this type of leisure as the ultimate goal of human behaviour.

This promotion of leisure led to scientific discoveries and artistic creations that we still admire today. Euclid founded geometry. Pythagoras came up with the Pythagorean theorem and much more. The ancient Greeks named most of the stars, planets, and constellations of the northern hemisphere. We are also fortunate to have the Homeric poems and the tragedies by Sophocles, Euripides, and other great playwrights.

I finished reading Friday is the New Saturday as my plane began its descent over the islands of Greece. The lights on the islands against the pitch-dark sea looked like constellations in the sky. My company doesn’t offer a four-day work week, though it does provide fully remote options. I consider myself lucky to be able to spend two weeks with my family on holiday without taking too much time off work.

In Week One, we stayed in Athens—longer than most people usually spend in the city. We took it slow, working and chilling during the day to dodge the heat, and only going out in the evenings. One day after work, I went to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus to watch Rigoletto (one of Verdi’s most famous operas) as part of the Athens Epidaurus Festival, where various performances are staged in ancient theatres. I walked along the foot of the Acropolis toward the theatre. Around me, the warm night buzzed with joy as I moved through a crowd of chattering, slightly tipsy people also headed to the show. Suddenly, the imposing wall of the theatre loomed ahead. The collapsed roof had not been repaired, leaving windows open at the top and stones uneven with weeds growing on them. Yet the excitement of the audience truly brought the theatre back to life. We filed into the well-lit space, climbed the stairs to our terraced seats, and took pictures of the incredible building while waiting for the opera to start. It was surreal to be sitting there after a day’s work making PowerPoints.

This leisure activity felt so well-earned (let me ignore for a minute that, by Aristotle’s definition, amusement is considered “rest”—valuable, but distinct from “leisure”). It took me a whole year of soul-crushing job searching to land my current job, which allowed me to watch an opera in an ancient Greek theatre while still earning a day’s salary. For a moment, I could feel like a noble Greek citizen, even though I’m more like a wage slave who, back in ancient Greece, would have been working for the citizens so they could enjoy their noble leisure.

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Please don’t take that as downplaying the actual miseries of slaves. My comment is the self-lamenting of a middle-class youth anxious about the decline of the middle class. Slavery has been largely eliminated in today’s world (though not eradicated, a point I will address later), and that is major progress for humanity that we should cherish. On the other hand, while the social status of an average working person today is incomparable to that of a slave, what about the economic value they generate?

Our freedom is limited by our income and wealth. A Chinese saying goes, “钱不是万能的，没有钱是万万不能的,” which I have liberally translated as, “Money is not omnipotent, but without money, you are impotent.” Although it seems like we have total freedom to dispose of our income, we have very limited control over where we spend it. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2024, private renters on a median household income could expect to spend 36.3% of their income on an average-priced rented home in England.¹ That ratio was a jaw-dropping 8% in the 1960s.² Things aren’t much better for those climbing the property ladder. In 2024, mortgagors spent an average of 20% of their income on mortgage payments, with a house price-to-earnings ratio of around 8 (in England and Wales) compared to 5.05 in 2002.³ These expenditure goes straight from your pay check to landlords and banks.

What about the rest of your disposable income? You think you can choose where to buy groceries, where to eat out, and where to buy clothes, but as private equity firms buy up more and more of our high streets, we stand to suffer from a more insidious form of monopolisation. Since private equity firms don’t change the names of the businesses they buy, you might not even notice the change of ownership. Here are examples of High Street names owned by private equity:

Where we eat: Wagamama, Rosa’s Thai, Pho, Byron Burgers, Burger King, Tortilla, Pizza Express, Pret A Manger, Gail’s

Where we buy your daily necessities: Morrisons, ASDA, Boots

Shopping: Debenhams, Liberty, Body Shop, Waterstones, WH Smith

So what if private equity firms own them? What exactly do they do? In a nutshell, they use pooled funds and borrowed money to buy companies, operate them for a few years, and sell them for a profit. On paper, that doesn’t sound bad, but in reality, they trade the company’s long-term development for short-term gains. Restructuring, layoffs, and price increases are their usual tactic, harming the interests of consumers and employees. What’s more absurd is that the debt they take on to buy the company becomes the responsibility of the acquired company itself, rather than the private equity firm. Some acquired companies end up bankrupt while the private equity firm walks away free (albeit sometimes suffering a loss). That’s what happened when Body Shop went into bankruptcy. You can also read about how Debenhams never recovered from private equity ownership.

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If you want to read more about private equity, you can find an in-depth article cited at the end.⁴ But now I have to return to what I really want to talk about: our time. Most of it is spent working for the benefit of landlords, private equity firms, monopolistic corporations—in short, the super-rich. Since European countries and the US passed 8-hour workday legislation in the first half of the 20th century, we have barely made any progress in shortening working hours, contrary to the predictions of economists from the last century.

John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930:

In quite a few years – in our own lifetimes, I mean – we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed […] I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today. […] For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!⁵

A fifteen-hour week! How ironic—what seemed like a foreseeable future in 1930 looks like a daydream today. And Keynes wasn’t the only economist who made such predictions. If you read Friday is the New Saturday, you will see that it was the consensus among most 20th-century economists that our working hours would decrease significantly.

But they didn’t. What is the problem? Is it because our productivity stagnated? No. Between 1948 and 2025, productivity in America rose fourfold (and it must have risen even more in developing countries)—Keynes’s prediction was bang-on. However, an 86% increase in productivity between 1979 and 2025 only led to a 32% increase in hourly pay.⁶ The average worker did not get a fair share of these productivity gains. We could have worked the same hours and enjoyed a higher real hourly wage (real purchasing power accounting for inflation), or we could have worked fewer hours. Neither happened, because the fruit of our labour was added to the basket of the super-rich.

In Friday is the New Saturday, a poignant paragraph helps us understand the appalling extent of inequality.

Jeff Bezos has a fortune estimated to be $150 billion – $150,000,000,000. His fortune is thirty times larger than the richest man in the world in 1955. It was always hard for me to have a perspective on very large numbers. My mind cannot grasp them. […] A worker with the median income in the UK would need to work 3.7 million years. Lucy, the Australopithecus, lived 3.5 million years ago. Even spending all that money is mission impossible. If I spent £1 million every day, it would take me 310 years to squander Bezos’s fortune.

£1 million a day for 310 years. Why on earth does one need so much money? If Bezos’ wealth were distributed to the 700 million people living in poverty (on under $2.15 per day)⁷, they would each get about £162 - enough to turn their lives around.

A lot of the people living in poverty are in a de facto state of slavery. There is no legal slavery anymore, but there are still tens of millions of people held by violence or the threat of violence for economic exploitation. This is the focus of Kevin Bales’ brilliantly shocking book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Bales’s study covers various forms of new (or disguised old) slavery around the world in the 1990s, from Brazil and Mauritania to India. Here, I would like to talk about the debt-bonded brick kiln workers in Pakistan, as their situation is probably most comparable to that of an average working professional in developing or developed countries.

Nominally, nothing stipulates a master-slave relationship between these workers and their employers. But the workers, including children, had to work for over twelve hours a day in hazardous conditions, wearing sandals against the 130°C heat while shoveling coals on top of the kiln and risking a fall into the kiln with no chance of survival. The mechanism that kept them enslaved was not just violence (although horrendous violence was sometimes used, which I’m not going to describe here), but forever piling-up debt. These families are poor farmers who lost their land and sold themselves into debt for food and shelter. They then fell into the hands of the kiln owner, who dictated the piece rate for the bricks—a rate that was just enough to keep them from starving.

On average, families are paid 100 rupees ($2) for every thousand bricks they produce. […] If not thwarted by rain, the family might earn 700 to 800 rupees ($14 to $16) in a good week. But the costs of the minimum essentials needed to keep a family alive are exactly this amount. On weekly earnings of 700 rupees, a family of four or five can have a bare diet of wheat roti (flat, unleavened bread), vegetable oil, lentils, onions, and sometimes a few other vegetables. […] This exact balance of income and living costs sinks the family deeper and deeper into debt. If the work goes well the family breaks even; but any accident, illness, or natural loss due to rain makes the family lose ground. […] “The idea,” he (a former kiln owner) explained, “was that the worker should never have a single spare rupee in his hand so he can run away.”

If a worker died with debt still left to pay, that debt would be inherited by his wife and children. The kiln owner could also sell entire families simply by transferring their debt to another kiln owner. When that happened, families were forced by armed guards into trucks and driven to remote parts of the country.⁸

You might be shocked to learn that such atrocities still existed in the 1990s. And the situation isn’t much better today. You can check out Anti-Slavery International if you want to read more on the subject. What I want to emphasize here is that forced work is not as far from us as you might think. When a powerful group has too much market power, it can arbitrarily raise the price of goods (monopoly), depress the price of labour (monopsony), and trap people in endless debt (think of mortgages inflated by soaring interest rates). Before you know it, you’ll have lost control over all your time because you must work constantly to make ends meet. This is happening even to the middle class in developed and developing countries—an extremely alarming sign.

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However, all is not hopeless. The pandemic gave people new perspectives on remote work and working hours. Hybrid working has already become the new norm, and there are companies like mine that allow fully remote and flexible work. More and more people have started to see a reduction in working hours as a tangible future possibility. Some companies and government departments have trialled the four-day week and reported positive results. Friday is the New Saturday calls for a state-led, legislated reduction of working hours so that the four-day work week can be implemented across the whole economy—critically, without a reduction in salary.

It’s time to take our time back. Remember the widening productivity-pay gap I mentioned before? There are two ways to increase our hourly wage: increasing our real wage or reducing our working hours. There is tremendous value in campaigning for the latter as well as the former. A four-day week is a clear win for workers with tangible results, while it is harder to guarantee an increase in real wages given our lack of full control over inflation.

With more time comes more freedom and the right to choose. You could spend the extra day working overtime for more money, start a side hustle, spend more time with your family, or simply lie around. Once it becomes a consensus that everyone should have three days to themselves every week, it will be very difficult to take that away. Can you imagine going back to a six-day week?

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Let’s return to ancient Greece. During my stay in Athens, I walked around the Acropolis almost every day and visited most of the archaeological sites at the centre of classical Greek life, gradually piecing together a picture of this ancient civilization from dusty building foundations, fragmented mosaics, collapsed walls, and all the artefacts curated in museums. I was dazzled by the beauty from over two thousand years ago and by the lovely thoughts the ancient Greeks had put into completely non-utilitarian things. They had a coin-operated vending machine to dispense holy water and an allotment machine (kleroteria) to randomly select jurors.

However, in classical Greece, 40% of the society were slaves. It was the slaves who made it possible for the citizens to enjoy their noble leisure. The size of the citizen population was around 6 million—less than the population of London today. Look at what they achieved with only 6 million people. The rise in productivity and the material abundance in the world should have allowed everyone to enjoy noble leisure like a classical Greek citizen, but we are not there yet because the privileged always want to keep their privilege at the cost of everyone else and the progress of human civilization. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote (it’s so brilliant, I’m going to quote at length):

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.

The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. […]

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

Remember Russell’s remark that “The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice”? In the past, they justified it with religion and birth right. Now, when those spells have stopped working, they tell you that if you work as hard as they do, you will become as rich. They also tell you that the only way to prove your value in a society is to spend and consume. If not, you are an unworthy poor and should not receive any state support.⁹ So when you are working around the clock, head heavy, eyes bloodshot, remember this is not the natural state of the world. Hunter-gatherers spent around 15 hours per week working, and that was enough to keep them well fed, content, and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies.¹⁰ Why are we working such long hours?

I wrote most of this article on a Tuesday, a flexi-day I took for working condensed hours; the inspiration for this article arose when I was on holiday in Greece, made possible only by remote work. I love these perks, but I’m greedy for more because I know I could do so much more if I had the time.

Now, take a moment to think about what you would do if you had one extra free day per week. Think hard until it seems almost true, and believe that it will be—if we campaign for it.

1. Private rental affordability, England, Wales and Northern Ireland - Office for National Statistics

2. Is the UK Rental Crisis Set to Get Worse? - Economics Help

3. Accredited official statistics; Chapter 2: Housing costs and affordability

House price earning ratio equals house price divided by annual income.

4. The Counterbalance – How finance drives monopoly: Private Equity

5. Gomes, Dr Pedro. Friday is the New Saturday: How a Four-Day Week Can Save Capitalism. Flint. Kindle Edition.

6. The Productivity–Pay Gap

7. Global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill

8. Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. University of California Press, 2000

9. Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. McGraw-Hill Education (UK), 2004

10. The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week