Every hour that we work less is one hour more that we have for political and democratic engagement, one hour more to take a breath and one hour more to discover our individual and shared interests. The collective 4-Stunden-Liga (4-hour-league) argues in their contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series that a four-hour workday for everyone, with full wage and staffing compensation, paves the way for the democratic appropriation of our time.
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Employers’ associations and politicians in Germany are once again in agreement: We all have to work longer hours, more days per week, and well into old age. Instead of “lifestyle part-time work,” we are expected to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Germany as a business location. Enough with the daydreams of work-life balance and a 4-day workweek!
The drumbeat that has been going on for months is the overture to the planned abolition of the 8-hour workday by the CDU/CSU/SPD coalition. The goal is the near-total subjugation of our daily rhythms to the unpredictable fluctuations of capitalist labor demand. The growth crisis of the capitalist economic model is to be overcome at the expense of workers. If the reform goes through, shifts of up to 12 hours per day will be possible. However, too little work is not the cause of economic and political upheavals; more work is not the solution. On the contrary.
Friedrich Merz and his supporters are waging a class struggle from above and a right-wing culture war against anything that suggests emancipation or progress. In doing so, they are pursuing an anti-democratic agenda. After all, democracy requires time, yet we already have too little of it, and it is to be further curtailed.
The connection between democracy and time becomes clear even when considering democracy in its bourgeois, parliamentary form, in which citizens periodically cast their votes and then return to the sidelines. That democratic conditions cannot exist without time is all the more undeniable when we understand democracy comprehensively as collective self-determination. Given this understanding of democracy, a radical reduction in working hours is the order of the day. The 4-hour workday for all, with full wage and staffing compensation, is a concrete utopian project aimed at deepening democracy. The resulting costs can be covered by a massive reduction in capitalist profits – that is, a redistribution of socially produced wealth.
Democracy needs time
Bourgeois-liberal democracy emerged from revolutions against the feudal order and aristocratic rule. It is based on a parliamentary system of representation in which, by definition, all power emanates from the people, but the limits of this exercise of power are narrowly defined. Even bourgeois-liberal democracy – closely linked to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production – actually requires much more of our time than the 40-hour-plus wage-labor society allows us.
Going to the polls as an informed voter takes time! Critically observing political institutions as the democratic sovereign takes time! Following the news, reading or listening to analyses on the radio, and discussing them takes time! Organizing independent cultural activities, keeping civil society vibrant, volunteering at sports clubs, and being active in political parties, associations, and unions – all of this takes time. Raising children who are to become responsible citizens themselves takes time. Caring for the sick and the elderly takes time, so that the promise of human dignity is at least minimally fulfilled.
Undemocratic social order
Yet even now, many workers are suffering from an increased workload, stress due to staff shortages and sick leave, and working overtime – much of which is neither recorded nor compensated. Sick leave due to mental health issues is on the rise, and many workers cannot imagine managing to hold out until retirement age under current conditions. What remains of ‘free time’ is reduced to mere regeneration for the next workday.
If, as the CDU/CSU/SPD plan, the 8-hour workday is abolished, the last reserves that still support the ideal of a reflective public sphere and broad participation in civic life – however futile the belief in this ideal may be – will disappear. The long-weakened ability of unions and other collective interest groups to organize as a counterweight to market-driven democracy is hardly strengthened by extending the workday. There is a lack of time and a lack of faith in the possibility of changes won through collective struggle. It is already crumbling at every turn.
However, even parliamentary democracy with an 8-hour workday is far from being a true democracy. The problem runs deeper, for this democracy itself rests on a thoroughly undemocratic social order.
Dispossession of time
Bourgeois democracy divides society into the sphere of politics, where formal equality among political citizens prevails. And into a private sphere – the economy – where a system of property dominates everyone’s lives, forcing the vast majority to sell their labor power and giving a small minority the opportunity to extract everything from the labor of others and appropriate it as profit. In the economic sphere – the reproduction of social and intergenerational life – we are not equals with equal rights to have a say.
The capitalist property system pits all wage earners against one another and subjects them to a system of permanent dispossession of their time. In employment relationships, there is no self-determination or democratic participation – the employer’s right to direct grants others the authority to decide how our time and labor are used. A lack of autonomy in the work process leads to everyday experiences of powerlessness and external control. This lays the groundwork for authoritarian movements to flourish – self-aggrandizement through the denigration of others arises where recognition and self-determination are denied.
Struggles have always been waged around the fundamentally undemocratic order of bourgeois democracy, especially regarding its organization of time, because interests clash irreconcilably: For some, the extension of working hours promises greater profit; for many others, the reduction of working hours promises the preservation of their own labor power in the sense of maintaining physical and mental health, the preservation of their own jobs, improved financial circumstances through labor scarcity, and a higher degree of self-determination.
Time for democratic negotiation
We have never democratically decided on the structures that produce this conflict of interests. We have never negotiated the distribution of property; we have never collectively determined that some must perform physically and mentally harmful work while others are primarily engaged in intellectual labor. There has never been a vote on how much time some spend raising children, managing the household, and preparing meals, and how much time others spend on wage labor or leisure activities.
At the same time, the problems we face are enormous: climate catastrophe, rising fascism, persistent patriarchal violence, and the brutal marginalization of minorities. If we want to address the undemocratic structures at the heart of these problems, we need more time – for democratic negotiation about causes and solutions, and for experimenting with truly solidarity-based forms of social life.
Radical reduction in working hours
A radical reduction in working hours provides the means to overcome the undemocratic contradiction at the heart of bourgeois democracy and to achieve genuine collective autonomy. Every hour less wage labor per day, every hour less time spent under someone else’s control, is one more hour for us – this corresponds to the political economy of the working class.
A radical reduction in working hours is the concrete utopia of a good life, one that provides direction and enables the collective reappropriation of our time. Genuine democratization means that we decide how we work and produce, and how we want to raise and care for our children. To achieve this, we must limit the time spent on wage labor.
The 4-in-1 perspective highlights the equally necessary spheres of activity in our lives – in addition to approximately 8 hours of sleep, wage labor can take up a maximum of 4 hours if there is to be sufficient time left for parenting, care work, and reproductive labor, political work, as well as cultural work and personal development.
The need for time is universal
A look at the history of the struggles for time shows what is possible and offers hope for the struggles of today and tomorrow. The 8-hour workday, for example, was a global project of the organized working class, because the need for time is universal. In the United States, 8-hour leagues were founded in various locations in the 1870s, with the 8-hour day as their central demand.
The fact that we celebrate May 1 internationally today as a day of struggle for the working class traces back to struggles to reduce working hours. One hundred years after the French Revolution, on July 14, 1889, socialists from around the world gathered to found the Second International. They resolved to join the American Federation of Labor’s plans for a worldwide demonstration on May 1, 1890. The central demand of this worldwide demonstration was the 8-hour workday.
When the October Revolution profoundly transformed Tsarist Russia in 1917, the young Soviet government became the first country to introduce the 8-hour workday just one month later – followed by many others, including Germany, Austria, and France.
Acts of self-empowerment
In the struggle to reduce working hours and in the resistance against the restriction of one’s own time lay – and still lies – an act of self-empowerment. The international struggles for shorter working hours were intertwined with the expansion of democratic forms of participation. In Germany, the 8-hour workday became law for the first time in 1918, when the November Revolution– driven by the ideas of council democracy – overthrew the monarchy.
These movements pushed through every reduction in working hours, no matter how small, in the face of resistance. There would never have been a good time to reduce working hours if people had allowed themselves to be intimidated by doomsday scenarios of economic collapse. History thus teaches us that the boundaries of what is possible can be shifted. Knowledge of past struggles and the vision of a better future – despite all adversities – help to expand the realm of the possible.
The 4-hour workday for all
We counter the current economic upheavals and political attacks with a radical focus on needs and the time requirements of life in all its diversity. For extending working hours would mean a dramatic rise in exhaustion, illness, and accidents on the one hand, and a rapid rise in unemployment on the other, since there are not enough capital-driven activities to utilize the full potential of the labor force. The cracks in social cohesion and bourgeois democracy would deepen.
Concrete utopias help counter this disregard for society and inhumanity by opening up a horizon of hope and the capacity for action. A radical reduction in working hours is one such concrete utopia. Every hour less work is one more hour for us – for political and democratic engagement, but also for taking a breath and discovering our individual and shared interests. The 4-hour workday for all, with full wage and staffing compensation, points the way toward a democratic appropriation of our time. Capital foots the bill.