“We must abolish the 40-hour work week”

The screen shows a bright room in an old building. Teresa Bücker (38) is in the home office in Berlin for the video interview. The influential journalist’s first book, «Alle_Zeit», has just been published. Bücker is a much sought-after and experienced interlocutor. After a brief discussion about the golden autumn light, we move straight to the subject: time. For the feminist root of social injustice and solution of social problems.

Mrs. Bücker, does the hair on the back of your neck stand on end when you hear the expression “time is money”?
Teresa Bucker: Yes. Those who only compare time with money do not have a balanced life. We no longer see what other values ​​time has.

Time that is not used in an economically feasible way in our meritocracy is not worth as much.
At school, children learn to use time efficiently and to regard time pressure as normal. What they don’t teach is that it can be good to consciously take your time and use different speeds in your own life.

For you, power is linked to time. How?
time is power Democracies depend on people having free time that they can translate into political engagement. If people don’t have this time, power imbalances arise.

What do you mean?
There are groups that cannot get involved politically. Like people who work in shifts. Or parents or caring relatives who combine paid work and care work. They also hardly have the opportunity to participate in the evening or to take an afternoon off. The point of view of these people is missing from the public debate. This is a democratic problem.

One parent can take care of another…
Absolutely, but in doing so a parent gives up his own time need. Typically, men often take more of this time and women submit.

The traditional division of roles is also visible in part-time activities.
It would be important to realize in the partnership that the interests of both of us are equally relevant. Sometimes one can pursue his or her own interests alongside the family, sometimes the other. However, one should not depend on a personal gift of time in a partnership to get involved socially or politically. We cannot ignore the fact that there are people who only care for relatives and raise children.

How can you give everyone the time to participate?
There are different instruments. A relief for parents is good childcare that is affordable and covers not only working hours, but also free time or time for commitment. Get on …

… Just a moment: Is it good to leave the child in the nursery longer so that the parents can treat themselves?
It should be kid friendly, that’s for sure. But parents should also have free time. If we push parents to the brink of exhaustion, they cannot be good parents or good employees in the company. It is important to all of us that children and parents are doing well. Because without children there will be no society: there will be no future people who buy products and use services.

What other levers are there?
We need to abolish the 40-hour work week. Short-time working shows people: you are more than just a person who has to earn a salary.

Women are asked to accept a higher workload.
If we have a world where everyone works full time, volunteering and community engagement will collapse.

Let’s assume everyone worked less. What kind of utopian society do you envision?
First of all: It is feared that a reduction in working time will lead to the collapse of production and the no longer performing important activities. But today’s working hours are very unevenly distributed in a society. Some work very long days, others cannot find a job at all that will earn them a good income. So it is about an equal distribution among all people living in a country, so that material wealth is distributed more fairly.

The work in a company can also be done with reduced working hours…
… and we all get more free time. This is important to strengthen social cohesion. It would revitalize any society and make it more innovative if we not only cultivate exchange professionally, but extend it to other people.

How many hours count as full time?
For example, if you look at people’s preferred working hours, they are less than 30 hours in Germany. People believe that with the free time they can do everything on the side. If we divide the existing work more fairly, we can already approach the 20-hour working week.

The so-called care work – raising a child, taking care of elderly relatives – is done free of charge in private. This is an eyesore.
Care work must be recognized as real work. Then you can talk about how much work is actually too much. If you combine a full-time job with this care work, you get an amount of work that is dangerous for your health.

Many mothers will say: I voluntarily put my work aside, I like to be with the children.
Many of us enjoy our work and are passionate about it – and still want to be paid for it. One can also enjoy parenthood; I do too But it’s insulting when only one parent says it. And it is typically always the mother who takes the time for the children and therefore suffers a great financial disadvantage.

We need to dig deeper into the issue of payment. In your view of society, care work is rewarded. At the same time, working hours are reduced by full pay. How do we finance this?
The care work that is being done now is actually already part of the economy because we depend on the care of children and the elderly. If we refuse private care work, it must be financed from taxes.

We therefore burden all members of society more heavily to implement this corporate design. However, this means that each individual has fewer financial resources.
The money would be distributed differently, but we see in many countries that the expansion of childcare has increased economic output, for example because it has brought many mothers back into the labor market. If men now reduce their workload to be more involved in childcare, but mothers return to the labor market earlier, economic output may increase, increasing the overall tax volume and allowing even more money to be distributed.

What does the term timeliness mean?
Timeliness is achieved when everyone has a similar amount of free time that they can use for their interests. To me, the term also implies that there is still a significant amount of time left that we can use. Personal development depends on free time.

Younger generations don’t seem to find ideas like yours utopian. To have more self-determined time, they forgo full-time work and career opportunities.
I find the development disturbing that shorter working hours are seen as an individual thing to treat oneself to, as one would treat oneself to an expensive holiday. We look back on a long tradition of labor movements that have achieved achievements such as shorter working hours, paid vacations or paid sick days. We need the political awareness that good working conditions and good living conditions always arise from larger movements.

According to a recent referendum, everyone in Switzerland works until the age of 65 and then enjoys their “earned retirement”.
It would do us good as a society to find a fair approach to retirement. And recognizing that it may not be the place for all our dreams, and that things we really want need a place in the present too.

Do you have to live in the moment?
It sounds so trite. But you can’t catch up on a lot of things. If I don’t have time to cultivate friendships, they won’t suddenly be there when I’m 70. I need time for these things. Or if I push my health to the limit my entire professional life, I might be there when I retire and not much of my health remains.