The 22-Hour Work Week: Productivity, Automation, and the Redistribution of Time

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

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Author's Note

This paper exists because of Goal 2 (22-hour work week) (22-hour work week):

Work 22 hours max. Keep your pay. Choose your hours. Work from home.

That goal did not emerge from policy analysis. It emerged from watching people die on schedule. From watching a man work sixty hours a week to pay a mortgage on a house he never sees, to feed children he never holds, to maintain a marriage that collapses under the weight of his absence. He is doing everything right. He is loyal. He works hard. He provides. And the system he is loyal to, works hard for, and provides through is extracting roughly fifty percentage points of his productivity growth as profit while handing him back fourteen. He is not lazy. He is being robbed in broad daylight by an arrangement so familiar it looks like nature.

The automation already did the work. Labour productivity in OECD countries has increased roughly 400% since 1950. If those gains had been shared as reduced hours rather than captured as shareholder returns, the standard work week would already be under 20 hours. The 22-hour target is not aspirational. It is the hours-equivalent of the productivity that already exists, if gains were shared.

But this is not merely an argument about hours. The extra 20+ hours per week freed by reduced work is the precondition for everything else. You cannot run a direct democracy (Goal 1 (direct democracy) (direct democracy)) with citizens who work 40 hours, commute for 10, and have nothing left. You cannot build community emergency response (Goal 13 ($29 emergency ring) ($29 emergency ring)) with neighbours who never see each other. You cannot have mateship when every structure that let you see your mates has been replaced by a subscription service. The 40-hour week is not just inefficie