WE CAN WORK IT OUT

The standard eight-hour day has been eroded. But with studies showing longer days don’t increase productivity, Helen Coffey asks, aren’t we moving in the wrong direction?

- Helen Coffey

“Working nine to six, what a way to make a living...” was mor the lyric Dolly Parton went for when she penned her famous antirat-race anthem back in 1980. And not just because five” has more rhyming opportunities. No, Parton was referencing the commonplace, standardised workday, consisting, for most humble employees, of a seven-hour shift with an hour’s lunch break in the middle – equating to 35 hours a week. This, she concluded, was a bit of a drag: lining a boss’s pockets for little reward or recognition, all while being passed over for promotion and having your best ideas nicked.

Today, however, many of us would be thrilled to find ourselves confined to a straightforward 9-5. Google co-founder Sergey Brin raised eyebrows at the beginning of March after writing in a leaked internal memo that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” – and that anyone working less than that was doing “the bare minimum”.

Even for those working in less highly strung environments, the stealthy creep of the “9 to 6” in many workers’ contracts, requiring an extra five hours of work per week for seemingly no extra pay, is making the 9-5 feel like a distant dream from a golden age.

According to the Office for National Statistics, average weekly hours have actually gone down over the past 30 years in the UK – from 38.1 hours a week in 1992 to 36.5 in 2024. And yet, anecdotally, the majority of my friends and peers are now contracted to do a 40-hour week as standard.