Four day week

The tax on private schools is going to pay for free school meals ?

National expenditure does depend on tax receipts, from all sources and public borrowing. Printing money with no back up of government bonds or foreign loans to finance it simply causes inflation and no increase in public or private benefit www.economicshelp.org/blog/634/economics/the-problem-with-printing-money/

I worked a four and half day week thirty years ago. As far as I'm aware it's always been quite common for manufacturing companies to do this but that is misleading as we still worked the same hours as a five day week, just four longer days. It seems to be that the Labour plan is more about hours than days.

"The next Labour government will reduce the average full-time working week to 32 hours within the next decade," he said.

As an outsider looking in, this looks like a reasonable aim. I have posted before about one of the founders of my last school who was a leader in the movement

""persuading 300 or 400 of the leading merchant princes of Manchester to allow the clerks and warehousemen to have a half holiday without any reduction in pay."

which other towns and cities soon followed. We don't now believe we should only have Sundays off or that people should work from six in the morning 'till 10 at night. The world did not collapse with this reduction of working hours or with a further reductions.

No one , but no one, is suggesting that this would happen immediately.

It was Keynes who famously predicted that by 2030 we would (or perhaps should?) all be working 15-hour working weeks. He argued that the nature of industrial development was such that ever more efficient and productive technologies would reduce necessary labour time while providing abundance for all. The main thrust of Keynes’s argument makes sense: with each gain in productivity we could have worked less, enjoyed more leisure and let our machines take on more of the hard graft. Tragically, what actually happened is that once the age of full employment, high productivity and high wages was ended by the neoliberal consensus of the early 1980s, the dream of an even shorter working week became exactly that. (Guardian Thu 12 Sep 2019)

If we want everyone to benefit from the progress in technology, it's certainly something which needs exploring.

Wasn’t it Winston Churchill who first proposed the idea of a 4 day working week? Progress is slow it seems ....

MOnica Just being a nitpicker here, but taxation depends on national expenditure, not the other way round. The UK government can spend what it wants as long as it can raise the money in bonds, etc. The money can then be recouped in taxation; the proviso being that any investment (spending) results in greater productivity. The form of taxation, whether direct or indirect taxation, is up to the government. One of the biggest problems at the moment is that some of extra money released into the economy is being leaked out of the country via offshore taxation or buying imports.

growstuff quite agree, but as I understand it - and that is what my answer was based on, Maizie was suggesting printing money without the backing of bonds.

Printing money with the backing of bonds assumes that there are buyers out there prepared to buy them at the interest rate offered. If a country is recklessly printing money and trying to sell far more bonds than the market can bear and is considered financially safe then the interest rates they offer have to rise, often significantly, and even then buyers will be few. For example currently would anyone want to risk buying Venezuelan government bonds - at any interest rate?

Governments don't use taxation to build up some big counting house. They use it to redistribute wealth. For example, if the government raises money for a big infrastructure project, the money will then be spent on all sorts of things, including the materials used, the wages paid and the profit for contractors. All of that is taxed, but the government can decide who pays what proportion of tax - the workers, suppliers or the contractors.

Even with benefits, which most people see as government expenditure, the money is spent on something and taxes are paid on whatever is bought.

MOnica I agree on the whole, although I think QE didn't have the backing of bonds. It literally was printed money.

That is a ridiculously simplistic 'explanation', Monica. @10.54

It assumes finite resources available to buy. Which is highly unrealistic. While ever there are resources available to purchase there will not be inflation.

And I don't think that anyone can deny that there is plenty that needs doing in the UK to absorb extra money issued. We're looking at all sorts of areas, health, education, infrastructure, Green issues, such as improving insulation and investing in alternative energy sources, etc as the electioneering progresses.

Roosevelt's 'New Deal' was highly successful, did the same sort of thing as what is proposed now, and was a 'money printing' exercise... way back in the 1930s...

The UK government has issued some £2.4 billion in QE since 2008. It 'owes' a significant part of that to itself....

Once again, I repeat, state spending circulates in the economy, boosts spending and demand for goods, and most of it comes back to the government through taxation.

No, they wouldn't buy Venezuelan bonds. However, at the moment, people are still keen to buy UK bonds because they're seen as a safe investment. Japan's national debt is greater than its GDP, but people still buy government bonds at almost 0% interest because they're seen as a safe place to store money.

PS. I know my explanations are simplistic, but I don't feel inclined to write an essay. Sorry!

Maizies last sentence is 100% correct - provided it doesn't leak out into offshore accounts and/or imports.

I love the way that debates about economics always seem to come down to suggesting that a very mature, stable democracy with a reasonably stable monetary system using its own sovereign currency is inevitably going to end up like a country with a highly unstable and relatively new 'democracy', riddled with corruption, highly dependent on petro-dollars and subject to US sanctions because the US doesn't like the current regime... if it issues a few £billions more to invest in the country (not line the pockets of the wealthy) with a return through the tax take and increased productivity...

Not being an economist I think they are just about the right level growstuff and simple has to be truefully; there is no room for obfuscation.

When people talk about taxation, I think most people think about income tax and other direct taxes. In fact, income tax only accounts for about 25% of the government's income. It's almost impossible to live in the UK without spending money which is taxed somewhere or other.

Ideally, money should circulate around everybody, so that everybody has a chance to get their hands on some of it and enough of it for long enough to exchange it for whatever they need. The government can control what share of it certain groups of people get and what they do with it. A communist government will attempt to have total control, but there isn't a single genuinely communist government in the world. Most economies are mixed, to varying degrees.

The real difference between Labour and Conservative spending plans (neither of which is entirely what it seems) is that Labour would attempt to redirect wealth to the least well off (not necessarily the poorest), whereas Conservative plans would consolidate the position of the wealthiest and, almost certainly, make them even wealthier. Neither plan would actually "cost" the public as much as it seems in the way a supermarket bill costs a household.

I think both parties plans will do nothing but bankrupt the country and make the poor poorer and the rich richer.

When this idea or any similar idea comes up on Gransnet, the responses seem to divide between people that think it is a good thing to help make the lives of working people a little bit easier, and those that think this will be a bad thing in principle.

Examples of good outcomes from a four day working week can be given, employee loyalty, increased productivity etc. but those who are opposed to any improvement in peoples working lives will still shout "It won't work" because they just don't want it to work. They will find any excuse to put forward obstructions new ideas in order to protect the status quo.

Ilovecheese I said it wouldn't work, but that's because I'm a very practical person, nothing to do with I "just don't want it to work". You're assuming a lot and jumping to inaccurate conclusions.

Obviously I would like to make everybody's lives a bit easier but I know from the experiences of members of my family that the employee ends up working fewer hours but is expected to achieve the same amount of work as a 5-day week.

Why would you say that ilovecheese?
Most people are thinking of the pros and cons of it.

There are many ways in which people's working lives can be improved and I can think of some who would love to have the kind of job where they know they will be employed for five days a week and the security that goes with it.

Sparklefizz Isn't one of the advantages that can occur from shorter working hours greater productivity though, so that yes, the same amount of work can be achieved in a shorter time? Technological advances should help increase output, but this should be used to improve the lives of working people.

Callistamon I am sorry if I included you in the doomsayers, I apologise. I know what you mean about security of employment, but wouldn't a better work life balance be achieved by working four days instead of five.

I really don't know.
I do know that working flexible hours, as discussed above, works quite well but that means being flexible enough to stay late to complete work if necessary.

I do not think anyone has said 'it won't work' on an employee basis, or even an employer basis where the hourly rate of pay remains the same and employees are paid for the reduced hours they work.

But Labour policy is for them to receive the same total pay when their hours drop by 20% and no-one has shown how companies can keep profitable, sell in competitive international markets or even stay solvent and not go bust if their labour costs are suddenly increased by 20% plus the cost of employing, at the increased hourly rate, new employees,which will push their labour costs up further.

Most people do not work for highly profitable international companies. They work for small and medium sized companies, like the local central heating contractors currently overhauling our central heating system, a small company with high labour costs because all their employees are skilled gas and plumbing technicians. if the cost of having our work done, went up by 30% the chances are we would have decided to struggle on as we were as the cost of the changes would be too expensive.

Then there is the retail sector already struggling with high rents and falling sales. How would they cope if their labour costs went up 20%

It is not that I am saying it won't work, rather I am asking the question 'How will it work' what effect will it have on businesses? How can they be helped to deal with the inevitable problems.

Both Labour and Conservatives keep throwing out these headline policies but neither of them explain the problems that come with them and how they will deal with them.

No-one would buy a car without seeing it or without giving it a test drive and having someone mechanical give it a good once over. Why should we immediately accept that any policy thrown out by a political party will work if they do not show us how it would be implemented and how the dilocations it will cause will be dealt with.

As I said I wouldn't buy a car unseen, why should I buy a political party's policy sight unseen?

Ilovecheese Isn't one of the advantages that can occur from shorter working hours greater productivity though, so that yes, the same amount of work can be achieved in a shorter time? Technological advances should help increase output, but this should be used to improve the lives of working people.

Well, wouldn't that be lovely? Utopia, for sure. Unfortunately my relative had a nervous breakdown trying to cram a full working week into just 4 days in order to keep his job.

I don't think you can generalise Ilovecheese

It’s a non issue really, each organization will handle hours differently, some will pay overtime, some will have a rolling week. Reduction in hours has been happening for decades, because housing is so expensive many have 2 or even 3 different jobs, there is plenty of part time shift work for those that want it and a range of benefits for those that don’t or can’t.
The days of a job for life for one employer has long gone, a great many companies rely on part time or agency staff to cover business needs.