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The View | How a four-day working week and ‘quiet quitting’ can help tackle climate change
- In Asia, the ethic of hard work has metastasised into mental and environmental issues, and shorter working hours will require a massive mindset change
- As the rest of the world has shown, working fewer hours brings happiness and productivity, boosts consumption, and is part of the business solution to climate change
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“Quiet quitting” is gaining notoriety in businesses. A recent Harvard Business Review study looked at employee ratings of their managers and concluded it was a reaction to bad managers. Quiet quitters, it said, are those who “reject the idea that work should be a central focus of their life”. I would suggest that they are simply making a personal choice devoid of workplace influence.
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Indeed, doing less collectively may be part of businesses’ answer to climate change and pollution. Around the world, the four-day working week is growing in popularity alongside the economic theory of degrowth, which focuses on sustainability and individual and social well-being.
The link between shorter hours and employee happiness is not new. Henry Ford cut the six-day week in his car factories to five in 1926; Kellogg’s cut the eight-hour shifts at its cereal plant to six in 1930. The results ranged from happier workers to safer workplaces. Today, companies across the world are increasingly embracing a shorter working day or week.
The UK has embarked on the world’s biggest four-day week trial, with thousands of workers on full pay being studied in a six-month trial that ends in November. In Iceland, which started trials in 2015, 86 per cent of the workforce have moved to shorter hours or have the option to do so. Spain and Belgium are following suit.
In Japan, amid official encouragement, companies such as Hitachi are introducing a four-day week while others, like Panasonic, plan to do the same. But the option of a four-day week does not always guarantee a reduction in working hours and, in some cases, can mean a pay cut.
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The concept tends to be viewed from the perspective of individual well-being and corporate human resources – and not so much as an environmental necessity or a path to a more sustainable economy. Its acceptance, accordingly, is linked to socio-economic conditions.
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