The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
A GREEK WEEK
A new law wants people to work for six days out of seven. But to what end?
BACK IN 1930, when John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a hundred years, most people would be working for 15 hours a week, did the economist imagine how wildly wrong he would be? Not that there haven’t been stalwart efforts by certain European countries, like Spain, Belgium, Germany and Iceland, to experiment with encouraging workers to have a life outside work and find meaning in other avenues and pursuits. But even as these places institute the four-hour work week, the pull in the opposite direction — of overwork and constant hustle in pursuit of the corporate profits at the end of the rainbow — remains strong as ever.
The most recent illustration of this is Greece’s new six-day work week legislation which, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis hopes, will help boost the national economy’s productivity. That he has described the initiative as “growth-friendly” (a phrase about as meaningful as other business jargon like “personal development” and “self actualisation”) should be enough to set alarm bells ringing — as indeed they are, with Greek workers wondering what will happen to their hard-won legal protections in a country that already has the longest working hours in Europe.
The larger question confronting Greece, and the rest of the world, is this: Productivity, yes, but to what end? With the proliferation of “bullshit jobs” — characterised by anthropologist David Graeber as those which could disappear and leave the global economy utterly unaffected — it has become harder and harder to tell what work matters and what doesn’t. Should workers really have to give up more of their shrinking leisure time to fill up reimbursement forms and sit in meetings that could have been emails? For Greece — as indeed for others — it might be useful to go back to what Aristotle once said, that “the end of labour is to gain leisure”. A six-day work week puts paid to any hope of the latter.