Jeremy Corbyn Wants to Talk About Reducing the UK's Working Day to Six Hours

Let's be honest, anything post-lunch is a write-off. Nothing great was ever achieved after a meal deal. Shit gets done between 11am and 1pm.

Clearly Jeremy Corbyn knows this, and has said he'll discuss proposals to reduce the working day to six hours. To put that in perspective, the average working day in the UK is 43.6 hours a week, or 8 hours and 40 minutes a day.

This isn't just a lazy person's fantasy, it makes total sense. The short working day has been supported by many psychologists and academics, who say it's better for worker's productivity, happiness and long-term wellbeing. Some other European countries have started trialling this, and early reports show workers are more focused and company profits have even increased. While doing a Q&A with Daily Mirrorreaders, Corbyn was asked what he thought about introducing a similar policy in the UK. He said, "I don't know if I could quite get my job done in only six hours a day but it's something we will be discussing in our recently launched Workplace 2020, the biggest conversation the UK has ever had on the workplace and workers' rights."

Workplace 2020 is a Labour initiative aimed at increasing workers' rights and encouraging trade unions. When Corbyn announced the scheme at the May Day rally in London, he said it was necessary because the UK "is one of the most unequal of modern economies".

Famously, Sweden reported it was moving to a six-hour work day in 2015. Employers at a Toyota centre in Gothenberg, Sweden's largest city, said that staff were happier, the company had a lower turnover of employees and profits went up after it had implemented the reduced hours a decade before. The results there encouraged other companies to try cutting down, and eventually it took off.

However, some psychologists have suggested that implementing six-hour days could increase stress. "The risk is that people may work more intensively and try to cram more work into a shorter period of time which would increase rather than reduce pressure," Gail Kinman, professor of occupational psychology at the University of Bedfordshire, told the Independent.

This may contradict what we're seeing in practice, though. A year's worth of data from Svartedalens nursing home in Sweden, which implemented the six-hour day, compared staff at Svartedalens with a control group at a similar facility. It showed that 68 nurses who worked six-hour days took half as much sick time as those in the control group. And they were 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two-week period. "If the nurses are at work more time and are more healthy, this means that the continuity at the residence has increased," researcher Bengt Lorentzon said. "That means higher quality [care]." And of course, nurses were 20 percent happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time.

Seriously, please do this thing. Make us happy.

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