In 2015 I released a book called The Refusal of Work. The book covered political thinkers who argued for a future in which the sphere of necessary work would be drastically reduced, leading to abundant free-time for all. Through progressive changes in how societies conduct, organise and distribute their labours, the hope is that humans will eventually be free to pursue their own ends. For the thinker André Gorz, this means time to live the ‘multi-active’ life, in which necessary work plays only a small part. For the philosopher, James Chamberlain, it means having time to think, for it is only thinking that protects us from “the ever-present threat of unthinkingly conforming to tradition or the ends of others”.

While it was inspiring to be immersed in these visions of liberation, writing The Refusal of Work eventually required me to turn away from the comforts of utopia toward the more prosaic world of present-day politics. As the sociologist Erik Olin Wright argued, any inquiry on ‘where we want to be’ must also be anchored in the trickier question of ‘how we get there from here’. On this matter, I finished the book with a negative conclusion: outside a pledge to reduce working time in the UK Green Party manifesto, “there exists no movement that currently has the potential to develop a politics of time”.

Cut to eight years later, March 2023, and I am sitting in a grand, wood-panelled room inside the Houses of Parliament, wondering whether I have dressed too formally. Sat next to me is Caroline Lucas, the politician who pioneered the Green Party’s commitment to reducing working time. Also in attendance are numerous Labour politicians and policy organisations, along with the co-authors and fellow researchers responsible for delivering the UK’s 2022 pilot of the four-day working week – a research experiment in which 61 organisations tried a four-day week for six months, without reducing staff pay.

If there were few signs of an imminent public debate on working time in 2015, in 2023 this is no longer holding. Numerous pilot studies of the four-day week have now taken place, all generating a swirl of media attention. At the launch event in Westminster, I felt encouraged by the level of detail in the questions being asked. How did the four-day week impact productivity in the manufacturing businesses? Did the staff use their day off to rest or to do something civic-minded? What might it cost to translate the four-day week to the public sector? Several weeks later, I presented the research at a similar event in the Wales Senedd, where the questions were just as encouraging. What additional challenges and opportunities were introduced by the devolved context?