The current economic system entails an organisation of work that is exploitative, leading to long working hours and negatively impacting workers’ health and well-being. Despite historic reductions in working time such as the eight-hour day and the five-day week spearheaded by organised labour movements, over a third of the world’s workers work more than 48 hours a week. Simultaneously, the pursuit of GDP growth and increased productivity have failed to translate into a fair distribution in labour share of income, free time, or well-being contrary to Keynes’ nearly century-old prediction. Working time falls unevenly along existing lines of inequality, penalising women economically as they often opt for part-time work to manage an unequal share of unpaid care work, and remaining longest among workers in poorer countries, whose labour facilitates reduced working time in the Global North through unequal exchange. As a structural labour market reform, working time reduction (WTR) without a corresponding reduction in pay reduces unemployment and increases the labour share of income, creates conditions for greater gender equality, improves well-being and health, and relieves ecological pressures through lowered emissions. In particular, the four-day week is presented as a favoured model that shows promising socio-ecological well-being outcomes and which carries strong democratic appeal. WTR is an integral part of a post-growth framework, going beyond a productivist logic, and seeks to transform the organisation of work – to work less, and more meaningfully – while improving human well-being within planetary boundaries.
