- A shorter working week in the public sector (with no loss in pay) is badly needed: burn out, work-related poor mental health and bad work-life balance plague public sector staff across organisations.
- A 32-hour week in the public sector is not just desirable for worker wellbeing and for reducing the costs of burn out and presenteeism; a 32-hour week would also create hundreds of thousands of jobs and establish a new standard for all employment in the UK.
- It would create between 300,000 and 500,000 new full-time equivalent jobs in the sector.
- Public sector employment takes up a relatively high proportion of employment in Wales, the North of England and Scotland – entailing that a 32-hour working week would benefit regions that have felt the hardship of austerity most.
- Such a policy is eminently affordable and achievable: on Autonomy’s conservative calculations a 32-hour week could cost around £9bn, but the true figure could be much lower at around £5.4bn.
- The conservative £9bn figure is only 6% of the public sector employment salary bill and just over 1% of the total government spending budget.
- In addition to the public sector pioneering through its own working practices, we outline how procurement strategies aimed at private sector partners can encourage broader change across the UK labour market.