Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, has attacked the good people of South Cambridgeshire District Council for introducing a four day work week following a trial. The MP for North East Somerset labelled the idea an ‘idler’s charter’.
He added, somewhat slow-wittedly: ‘Councils need to remember they are providing a public service and the public expect it to be provided five days a week.’
There’s always a mean-spirited Rees-Mogg waiting in the wings to carp when progressive ideas approach reality
He doesn’t appear to realise that a four day week doesn’t mean that every council worker will now spend the whole of Friday tippling in the alehouse and playing shove ha’penny. What it means in practise is that a shift system is put in place. Efficiencies result.
The four day week used to be a fringe idea, but no more. Professor Brendan Burchell of Magdalene College, Cambridge is the academic behind a recent trial which involved 61 companies giving their staff reduced hours on the same pay. ‘Before the trial, many questioned whether we would see an increase in productivity to offset the reduction in working time – but this is exactly what we found,’ said the prof.
There are other practical benefits, says Burchell. For the Liberal-Democrat run council, a 30 hour week will save a lot of money.
Not only has the Cambridge trial been a success in the quality of the services being provided, it has also saved taxpayers a considerable amount of money that the council were having to pay for expensive agency workers because, before the trial, they could not fill vacancies.
For Burchell, this is a significant moment.
We will look back on this historic trial and realise that it was a key moment in improving the quality of life for employees, improving their health and allowing them to be better parents. I predict that many other branches of the public sector will follow suit; this model of the four day week has already been shown to work in many countries in the UK and worldwide.
So idling is good for the bottom line and for bodily health. Rees-Mogg seems unaware that religious leaders and philosophers alike agree that idling is also good for the soul. Though he identifies as a Christian, he’s clearly not read the Sermon on the Mount lately. If he had, he’d know that Christ wasn’t a massive fan of work. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin, yet I say to you that Solomon in his glory was not arrayed as one of these.’
Most of the great philosophers, from Socrates to Bertrand Russell, were idlers too. Socrates avoided conventional employment in favour of wandering around the markets of Athens teaching young men about justice and the meaning of life. Bertie famously argued for a four hour day in his essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’. And Marx of course argued for the right to ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner’.
When you look back on the recent history of work, you find that there’s always a mean-spirited Rees-Mogg waiting in the wings to carp when progressive ideas approach reality. Believe it or not, the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which modestly proposed that women and children between the ages of 13 and 18 work only 63 hours per week, took about fifteen years to make law, because so many laissez-faire MPs opposed it. Clearly these MPs hadn’t read Dickens.
And nor it seems has the headmasterly Rees-Mogg. This is not the first time this nouveau Puritan has promoted the work ethic. In May 2022 he guilt-tripped civil servants. ‘I do worry that the desire to take off Monday and Friday is an indication that people think that the working week is shorter than the reality is,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘One can’t help but be suspicious about the desire to work from home on Mondays and Fridays.’
Hum. One can’t help but be suspicious that the right honourable member protests a little too much. He used to run a fund management firm called Somerset Capital which played the capitalists’ trick of ‘investing’, i.e. making money by doing nothing. We know what Christ thought of the money-changers.
And in October last year a report in the Daily Record suggested that Rees-Mogg does a four day week himself. ‘The minister does not take a box on Fridays,’ advised a Whitehall email.
Well, he’s unwittingly stumbled upon a great phrase in ‘idler’s charter’. It’s a charter we should all sign up for. Merry King Charles already has, I think. He’s graciously granted us three days off in May. Huzzah! Time to get the maypoles out.
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