Such as in the health service?
Not sure what you mean.
Here are the conclusions from the report:
Conclusion
A criticism of the above proposals is that they set up bureaucratic and collective mechanisms for achieving outcomes which should be left to the market. This is based on the argument that competitive markets allow workers to ‘choose’ how many hours they want to work, just as they allow them to ‘choose’ how much they want to be ‘trained’ for different jobs and pay levels. Since the choices have to be made within the limits set by measurable productivity, no obstacles should be placed in the way of automation and other efficiency-improving innovations. In this idealised world there are no market imperfections or public goods.This Report proceeds from a different set of premises.
1.The reduction in hours is both desirable ethically and desired by most people. Even though some people are compelled to work shorter hours than they want to, most people are compelled to work longer hours than they want to.
2.Mechanisation does not ‘automatically’ produce a reduction in working hours. It may lead to ‘technological unemployment’, with some people doing no work, and others working the same hours asbefore at lower wages. The argument that, in the long-run, mechanisation will create more jobs for more people at higher wages needs to be taken on faith. There are many suspect links in the chain of arguments supporting this contention. An important one is theuncertainty of measuring outputs in services. And even supporters of the benign scenario acknowledge that there will be heavy transition costs.
3.Historical experience is less of a guide to the future of working hours than one might believe. The reason is that since the Industrial Revolution the main effect of machinery in reducing hours of work has been in the extractive and manufacturing sectors, and these are vanishing parts of advanced economies. Today, services dominate. Productivity gains in large sections of the service sector are harder to achieve than in manufacturing and may not always be desirable anyway. The latter is true of all those 54 services where personal supervision, personal interaction within companies, and ‘person-to person’ provider-client relationships guarantee the quality of the service. Thus, the old ‘automatic’ route to the progressive shortening of hours (which was never as automatic as market enthusiasts claim) may be partly barred. Thought needs to be given as to how to restore at least some part of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, by investing in manufacturing start-ups and renewable sources of energy. This is the essence of the argument for a ‘Green New Deal’. The British have always had a genius for mechanical invention-the British industrial tradition has revolved round the production of ‘useful things’, and it is wrong that so much of it should be channelled into financial innovation.This does not mean, though, that workers in the hard-to-automate sectors of the service economy should not benefit from the productivity gains in other sectors. But this requires some mechanism for transferring income from inherently high productivity to inherently low productivity sectors of both the private and public economy. The expansion of the caring professions, to give one example, should be properly financed by the more highly automated sectors. The role of the state will therefore be more important in securing hours reduction than it has been in the past, both for financing automation, training workers for its use, and securing a fair distribution of its fruits.
4.Individuals choose how much to work but within the limits set by the institutions of a particular society. These include the market system, but they also include cultural norms and the ways in which power and wealth are distributed inside and outside the market. At present, the rules governing employment are largely set by financial logic. This is inimical to a civilised reduction in hours. There is therefore a strong argumentfor setting up countervailing institutions to ‘nudge’ society in a direction which science and technology makes possible, and which is also desired by most people. A balance will need to be struck between what workers want from employment and whatemployers can afford to give. The game can be played for lower stakes than at present, but the stakes must not be so low as to bankrupt an economy which still largely relies on private enterprise to ‘deliver the goods’.
5.Policy should keep constantly in mind the goal of reducing ‘necessary’ labour effort. This, rather than unlimited growth in consumption, was the chief promise of mechanisation. Material wealth is the means to a better life, not the better life itself. We have made the growth of GDP an end in itself -an offence to the gods, but also to the planet whose trustees we are. Policy can do little to make us good; but it can help us to choose wisely for ourselves and for the generations to come.
https://progressiveeconomyforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/PEF_Skidelsky_How_to_achieve_shorter_working_hours.pdf