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‘What we will’:
Work hours and high-carbon leisure
activity in the UK
Abstract
Working time reduction (WTR) has long been proposed by the degrowth movement as a policy with multiple dividend potential in the face of ecological and economic threats. A growing body of empirical research has established a positive relationship between work hours and carbon emissions, but estimates vary and there is not yet clarity between mechanisms which depend on income, and those which do not. This paper estimates the effect of work hours on flights, an increasingly popular high-carbon leisure activity, using a large set of panel microdata from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS). We find no effect between work hours and domestic or international flights, whether income is controlled for or not.
Robert Magowan Public Administration S2281694
Supervisor: Max van Lent 10/1/2019
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1. Introduction
A reduction in working hours is increasingly cited as a potentially useful instrument for countries to lower ecological impacts while maintaining, or even increasing, the quality of life, leisure and employment (Coote, Franklin & Simms, 2010; Jackson, 2017; Kallis, Kalush, O’Flynn, Rossiter & Ashford, 2013). The policy has also arisen as a social response to a stagnation in the long-term decline of work time in many industrialised countries (OECD, 2019; Messenger, 2004), and a perceived failure to reap the benefits of increased productivity in the form of leisure (Skidelsky, 2019; UNEP, 2008, p.81). This political revival in working time discourse was recently highlighted in the UK, where concerted policy advocacy encouraged the Labour Party to include in its manifesto for the 2019 General Election a commitment to reduce average full-time working hours from 42 to 32, with no loss in pay (Labour, 2019). “We should work to live, not live to work,” argued the party’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell (2019), echoing the 19th Century labour movement slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” (Foner, 1975).
What the ‘what we will’ of a 21st Century working time reduction (WTR) might look like however, and its ecological implications, are a matter of ongoing debate. Juliet Schor (2010) first elucidated two now generally accepted mechanisms by which long work hours might increase ecological and carbon footprints. The first, the scale effect, operates linearly through income and growth in the economy. Ceteris paribus, more work generates more output, using more resources, and more income, permitting greater consumption. The compositional effect meanwhile relates to a change in the materials intensity of household activity brought about by work hours. This is most frequently based on the time budget theory of Becker (1965). Those poor in time will opt for more time-saving choices, many of which – in transport and food preparation for example – are more energy-intensive (Devetter & Rousseau, 2011; Jalas, 2002). The effect also involves social dynamics which may encourage a ‘work and spend’ cycle (Schor, 1992) and conspicuous consumption (Devetter & Rousseau, 2011). Others point out that WTR in high-income countries could still see work time reallocated to popular energy-intensive leisure activities, such as travel (Druckman, Buch, Hayward & Jackson, 2012; Pullinger, 2014; King & van den Bergh, 2017). “To put it metaphorically,” as Kallis et al. (2013, p.1560) write, “the office lights may be off, but those of the hotel room will be on.”
As the interest in and policy relevance of WTR has grown in recent years, efforts to establish an empirical base for this relationship has expanded, particularly among the degrowth school of
3 ecological economics (Kallis, Kerschner & Martinez-Alier, 2012). At the macro level, major panel analyses of high-income countries (Knight, Rosa & Schor, 2013), developed and developing nations (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson & Clark, 2015) and US states (Fitzgerald, Schor & Jorgenson, 2018) have all found a strong and positive relationship between work hours and ecological indicators, including carbon emissions. These studies model a disaggregation of GDP into work hours, labour productivity and employed population percentage. By controlling for labour productivity and employed population (among other determinants of ecological footprints) they provide evidence of a scale effect, and by controlling further for GDP per capita they strip out income and identify (to varying degrees) a compositional effect. Shao and Shen (2017) on the other hand find for the EU-15 that beyond a certain threshold of low hours, further WTR may deliver no or even negative environmental benefits. At the micro level, Fremstad, Paul & Underwood (2019) connected US household consumption baskets with carbon intensity of goods, to find a work hours elasticity of emissions of approximately 0.3. This is greater, and statistically distinguishably so, from their finding for the wage elasticity of emissions, which they argue is evidence of a small compositional effect at play. An elasticity of 0.3 however is significantly more modest than Nässén and Larsson’s (2015) finding in a similar study for Swedish households and most country-level estimates. Devetter & Rousseau (2011) build on the efforts of Jalas (2002) to connect work hours to a limited set of energy-intensive and conspicuous consumption habits, including owning a dishwasher and eating out frequently. Their model controls for income quartiles (thus indicating a compositional effect) but only conducts a rather crude comparison of atypical versus standard work hours as the independent variable. Melo et al. (2018) meanwhile find no relationship between subjective or objective ‘busyness’ and aggregated indices of pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs), using longitudinal microdata for the UK.
These last findings represent the limited empirical basis on which conclusions can be drawn on the relationship between work hours and high-carbon leisure activities. Despite this, recent WTR advocacy – in the UK at least – has identified keenly with the policy’s potential for environmental impact. It has cited compositional effect theory alongside scale effect findings, obscuring the substantial difference in WTR policy that the two effects imply: one maintains overall incomes, the other does not. In this context – and that of a political and business environment in which policies and social attitudes regarding work may evolve rapidly – it is important to better establish evidence on the practical realities and mechanisms behind these relationships.
To that end, this study narrows in on a single, high-carbon leisure activity as its dependent variable: air travel. Holidays abroad are raised throughout the literature as an understudied potential rebound to the positive impact of WTR on ecological degradation (Druckman et al., 2012; Pullinger, 2014; King
4 & van den Bergh, 2017; Jalas, 2002). Leisure flights are one of few rapidly increasing contributors to carbon emissions in industrialised countries, with aviation emissions doubling in the UK since 1990 whilst total emissions reduced by a third (Committee on Climate Change, 2016). Their mitigation potential therefore far outstrips that of the most often discussed pro-environment behaviour changes, including the (non-)use of time-saving household appliances (Wynes and Nicholas, 2017). The holidays that leisure flights permit are also closely related to income, time use, wellbeing and positionality (Higham, Cohen & Cavaliere, 2014), each of which are central to the WTR-ecology debate. A single measure of flight frequency can therefore provide substantial insight to the specific lifestyle choices and societal patterns that underpin carbon footprints and could ‘make or break’ different forms of WTR policy implementation (King & van den Bergh, 2017). Analysing flights directly, instead of through input-output estimates of carbon emissions derived from time use or expenditure data, also removes the room for error and uncertainty that exists due to categorisation, data availability and variation across individuals and infrastructure (Druckman et al., 2012).
Our question then is: do an individual’s work hours affect their number of flights, and to what extent is this contingent upon income? Section 2 describes the policy and political context in which the UK discussion on WTR has taken place, including the blurring of the important distinction between the scale effect and compositional effect. Section 3 outlines in more detail the theoretical framework for a relationship between work hours and flights before discussing the relevance of flight travel to the WTR debate and hypotheses for the relationship between it and work hours. Section 4 describes the data and methodology of this paper and the models to be employed. Section 5 details the results and Section 6 concludes with a discussion of limitations, implications and opportunities for future research.
2. Background to the UK policy context
On 23rd September 2019, the UK’s Labour Party, the largest political party in Western Europe, announced its support for a reduction in average full-time working hours from 42 to 32 (BBC, 2019). The Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell declared that a Labour government, if elected, would achieve the goal within a decade, and “with no loss in pay” (CITE). The policy of working time reduction (WTR) can claim an illustrious pedigree in British social movements and economic history, from the eight-hour day movement to Keyne’s (1930) predictions of a 15 eight-hour week, from Bertrand Russell’s (1976) praise for idleness and Lafargue’s (1907) ‘Right to be Lazy’.
5 The McDonnell announcement then, and its headline refrain that “we should work to live, not live to work,” was something of a return to form. It marked the end of a near half-century predominance of a politics of working time that was largely devoid of emancipatory ambition, limited instead to the more sterile auspices of health and safety (as in the European Union’s Working Time Directive [Blair et al., 2001 p.73]) or blunt macroeconomic policy (as in France’s Aubrey Laws [Estevão and Sá, 2008; Skidelsky, 2019, pp.31-34]). Over the same period, the consistent downwards trajectory of average work hours per full-time employee that the UK had experienced following the Second World War stalled, almost completely (Stirling, 2019).
The drivers of the return of working time politics in the UK can be found amidst an academic agenda called variously ‘post-growth’ or ‘degrowth’ in its resident field of ecological economics. Following the global financial crisis of 2007-08 this literature simultaneously captured the imagination of European social movements and became a subject of serious practical consideration in political and economic thought (Jackson 2009; Kallis et al., 2012). Its principal concern, put simply, is with an economy that is not capable of distributing ever-greater material wealth through ever-continuing expansion (ibid.). WTR in this school of thought was originally conceived as a means to ‘managing without growth’ (Victor 2008). It is at once a policy instrument used to stymie economic growth and its environmental impacts, and a two-pronged mitigation technique against the risk of social and political instability that this incurs. It mitigates firstly against a loss of wellbeing, by reducing overwork and allowing more time to pursue wellbeing through leisure, even where there is less gross income available to pursue wellbeing through consumption. It mitigates secondly against the risk of unemployment brought about by voluntary reductions in consumption and production, by distributing fewer available hours of work more evenly among the population.
Degrowth and post-growth theorists have attempted to demonstrate how a reduction in work hours would reduce ecological degradation in developed economies of today. Juliet Schor (2010), building on the work of Nässén et al. (2009), set out most clearly the two main mechanisms: the scale effect and the compositional effect as discussed above. The first is directly and linearly related to growth: working hours are expected to contribute to the scale of the economy. Ceteris paribus, more work generates more output, using more resources, and more income, permitting greater consumption. In this view, shorter work hours are an alternative to higher incomes (Schor, 2013, p.10). WTR in post-growth literature and the scale effect it proposes is therefore an occasionally implicit, but consistently fundamental, challenge to the rationale of growth. Where growth in labour productivity would traditionally be expected to deliver an increase in output and wages, WTR presents an alternative: to
6 stabilise output instead. As Schor (2010, p.10) writes, “the key issue here is controlling aggregate demand, and through it, the volume of production”.
The compositional effect on the other hand is more ambiguous towards growth. It proposes that consumption choices and leisure time use are related to the number of hours worked. Typically, longer working hours are expected to encourage and even lock in unsustainable (high-carbon) consumption and leisure behaviours (Jalas, 2002; Schor, 2010). The principal rationale for this is that time, not just income, as Gary Becker (1965) first observed, presents a budgetary constraint to households and individuals in exercising consumption preferences. Those who are poor in time will therefore opt for time-saving activities, many of which are more energy-intensive in nature.
The New Economics Foundation think tank was the first UK policy institution this century to set out a comprehensive case for a shorter working week in its 2010 report, ‘21 hours’. The basis of its case is the degrowth premise that there is “no credible, socially-just, ecologically-sustainable scenario of continually growing incomes for a world of nine billion people” (Coote et al., 2010). The report sets a decarbonised economy “not dependent on infinite economic growth” as the first of three goals (ibid. 2010, p.5). It relies heavily on the post-growth and degrowth literature of Jackson, Schor and Victor to make the argument that WTR offers a chance to, on the supply side, stabilise output and, on the demand side, to ‘break the cycle’ of a modern hyper-capitalist model that locks-in pressure to “live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume” (ibid. 2010, p.17).
Many policy advocates of a shorter working week have since employed this literature to support their arguments.Autonomy, a think tank established in 2017 to consider the future of work, regularly cites key degrowth-WTR papers Nässén and Larsson (2015), Knight et al. (2012) and Fitzgerald et al. (2018) in making the environmental case for WTR (Stronge, Harper & Guizzo, 2019; Frey 2019). One publication, covered extensively in domestic and international media – including on the front page of the Daily Star tabloid (Autonomy, 2019) – concludes that WTR is required to deliver an “unprecedented decrease in the economic activity that causes GHG emissions” (Frey, 2019 p.6). Its own calculations, resulting in the suggestion of a 9-hour week if WTR was to be relied upon in isolation, were based entirely on the scale effect and its linear relationship work hours, GDP and GHG emissions (ibid.).
As the momentum for WTR advocacy and its ‘multiple dividend’ potential has built in the UK, however, the central, degrowth-based case for limiting consumption has been sidelined. Improvements in mental and physical health, democratic participation, justice (in the distribution of leisure time), gender equality (in the distribution of home and care work) and even labour productivity now form the more comprehensive and disparate case for a ‘multiple dividend’ WTR. Part of the reason for this
7 seems to lie in attempts to broaden the popular appeal of WTR by political and campaign groups, and the perceived limitations this places on expounding degrowth logic. The attachment to growth and association of it with social progress is deeply embedded in British political economy (Jackson, 2010), and remains so even among many of the transatlantic ‘new left’ economists who are seen as the ideological architects of the Labour party’s policy development since 2015. “A politics of de-growth has not yet been invented that will carry the public,” said one (Guinan, cited by Beckett, 2019). The consequence of this is that WTR advocates have more or less rejected the scale effect entirely. Autonomy (Stronge et al., 2019), NEF (Harper and Martin, 2018) and the Labour Party (2019) have all called explicitly for WTR with no loss in pay, and they make (reasonable) claims to the effect that productivity could be maintained. Together these two characteristics eradicate the scale effect. Maintaining both aggregate wages and production levels under reduced hours entails an effective increase in hourly wages and labour productivity (output per worker hour), making up for the loss in hours. This returns the net ecological impact – under the scale effect at least – to zero.
Some advocates were explicit about this to the growing audience interested in WTR and its prospects for the UK. NEF marked a significant change in tack from its approach earlier in the decade, arguing that “the aim of most endeavours to reduce working time should be to maintain existing levels of pay,” meaning it “will therefore not lead to lower levels of consumption per se” (Harper and Martin, 2018 p.9). It went even further in 2019 proposing that WTR form part of a package of policies aiming to increase demand to stimulate investment and solve the UK’s “productivity problem” (Stirling, 2019 p.2). But others such as Skidelsky (2019) and Autonomy (Stronge et al, 2019) still use evidence on the scale effect of WTR’s ecological impact, even when arguing in the same publications for a policy that would rule out the scale effect.
More generally, the implication for WTR studies of an increasingly interested policy and business world is that the relatively simple mechanism of scale cannot be relied upon to deliver the huge mitigation of carbon emissions that advocates have long-suggested could occur. A WTR which rejects the existential challenge to economic growth forces the thornier question of leisure and consumption, the choices of households and individuals – the “what we will” of the eight-hour day movement – to the fore. How will this newfound time be ‘spent’? That this aspect is politically important and evidentially unclear is increasingly recognised in the literature (Kallis et al., 2013).
8 As described above, the traditional two mechanisms by which work hours are hypothesized to affect carbon and ecological footprints are Schor’s (2010) scale effect and compositional effect. The same theoretical framework is the reasonable place to begin for the relationship between work hours and particularly high-carbon activities, including flights. The basic causal relationship is illustrated in Figure 1, with (A) indicating the scale effect and (B) indicating the compositional effect. Note that some descriptions of the scale effect account for it as the aggregate of the two, enveloping the compositional effect within (Fremstad et al., 2019).
Figure 1
Hourly wage Income
Flights Work hours
3.1 Scale effect and flying
With regard to income (A2), whilst a liberal tax regime for aviation fuel has allowed for the remarkable proliferation of ultra-low-cost flights, the trend in industrialised countries towards ‘hyper-mobility’ (Høyer, 2000) appears reserved to a frequent-flying wealthy minority (Graham, 2006). In the UK typically half the population does not fly at all in a given year, while 70 per cent of flights are taken by just 15 per cent of the population (Department for Transport [DfT], 2014; Murray et al., 2018). Budgetary constraints are listed by infrequent flyers as the main reason for their relative stasis (Graham and Metz, 2017), and there is considerably greater propensity for frequent flying at medium and high income bands (Brand and Preston, 2010; IATA, 2018). Together this suggests that flying conforms to theoretical expectations: income enables greater high-carbon consumption (Jackson, 2017). It is posited (Schor, 2010; Knight et al., 2013) that an increase in work hours leads, through hourly wages remaining constant, to an increase in incomes (A1 of Figure 1). It may seem a strong assumption to make in a largely salaried economy, however the scale effect findings referenced in the introduction on the scale effect do tend to support the existence of such a mechanism. Our expectation therefore is that testing for the scale effect will reveal a significant and positive relationship between work hours and flights through income.
Time use & consumption (A1)
(A2)
(B2) (B1)
9
3.2 (Beckerian) compositional effect and flying
With regards the compositional effect, longer work hours increases the “relative scarcity of time” (Devetter & Rousseau, 2011, p.342). Becker (1965) observed that time, as well as income, presents a budgetary constraint to the exercising of consumption and time use preferences. Rational households with less time will engage in activities and buy products which save them time, which are then expected to be more carbon intensive; intuitive examples include transport and food preparation (Jalas, 2002). Flight travel’s speed makes it an obvious time-saving activity relative to other modes of transport. Evidence for this as a driver of consumption is reflected in traditional transport geography analysis (Davidov et al., 2006) and to a degree in survey data, which shows UK tourists consider minimising travel time among the most important factors in holiday travel decision-making after cost (Hares, Dickinson & Wilkes, 2010). It is worth noting that flying’s emission intensity is of course a natural and direct consequence of this: resource-efficiency suffers at the hands of time-efficiency. Shorter working hours should thus devalue the saving characteristics of flying (while the time-cost of a train journey decreases), and lead to lower-carbon choices.
On the other hand, consumption of flight travel is rarely an end in itself but rather an enabling expenditure (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). The activities it enables, such as holidays and visits to family and friends, often involve a significant time investment, contradicting the time-saving nature of flight itself. This is reflected in data on the constraints to travel, with EU-wide data showing that for working-age non-tourists, “work or study commitments” is a distant but clear second to financial reasons for not participating (Eurostat, 2019). There is some credence then to the theory that “consumption in the affluent industrialised countries may be increasingly limited by time rather than by money” (Jalas. 2002, p.113). If so it implies a potential operation of the Beckerian effect in the opposite direction (i.e. where a reduction in hours would lead to more holidays), although it is likely to be limited still to the minority of income brackets for whom the cost constraint is less relevant.
We should also draw attention to an important characteristic of the UK. As an island nation, international travel is naturally a more arduous and, currently, prohibitively expensive task to complete without aviation, certainly compared to continental European countries. Even domestic flight (16% of the UK’s total traffic (Civil Aviation Authority [CAA], 2018)) can involve traversing the Irish Sea to reach Northern Ireland, and Belfast International airport is one of the busiest for domestic traffic (CAA, 2019). The Becker element of the compositional effect depends on time-variant consumption choices and a rational exercise of preferences. But as referenced above, cost remains the principal determinant of tourism decisions for UK travellers (Hares et al., 2010). That non-flight travel to international and some domestic destinations was not an extant or financially feasible choice in the minds of travellers is even more likely to have been the case a decade ago, when environmental
10 awareness of the impact of flight travel was low and in decline (DfT, 2014). Taken together, we therefore expect the time scarcity element of the compositional effect to be limited for domestic flight, and even more so for international.
3.3 (Social) compositional effect and flying
The dynamics behind the compositional effect position can be taken further than Becker’s neoclassical perspective in various directions. Schor (1992) expands the conceptualisation of the relationship between work and consumption to a ‘work and spend cycle’ “in which employees become locked into a fixed cycle of fixed hours and rising consumption,” (Knight et al., 2010 p.92). This is driven not only by material wants but also the social value of work and the cultural significance of the income and consumption it permits.
The first aspect to consider is the entrenched cultural and institutional significance of the ‘normal’ five day working week (Coote et al., 2010). Wheatley, Hardill & Philp (2011) describe how managers internalise the goals and policies of their organisation and set longer hours than employees would necessarily like. Workers may not entirely choose their hours therefore, and so can succumb to a degree of work and career commitment – and the lifestyle returns that come with it – that they would not otherwise have chosen. At the same time, income is a significantly more positional good than leisure (Solnick & Hemenway, 2005), meaning it can be expected to drive the positive choice (or indeed meek acceptance) of longer work hours instead of more leisure (Arrow et al., 2014, cited in Fremstad et al., 2019). The peer-effect of work and consumption as mainstays of time use can drive participation in these same pursuits, in order to be taken seriously as a member of society (Jackson, 2017). This can take place through ‘conspicuous consumption’ of highly visible and positional goods (Veblen, 1994) or even ‘conspicuous work’ (Collewet et al., 2015) – both of which serve to signify one’s place in society and affirm a sense of belonging.
Further, an increase in production time (work hours) implies an increase in ‘enjoyment time’ (Cogoy, 2004), whereby the material intensity of leisure activities increases to account for the greater expenditure of energy at work. Conspicuous consumption or conspicuous work can operate also in this compensating mechanism, serving to make up for the lack of free time which might otherwise confirm social status, such as leisure or ‘associative commitments’ (Putnam, 2000). A compensating mechanism such as this implies we should expect firstly that fewer work hours correlate with higher subjective wellbeing, which there is empirical evidence for (Angrave and Charlwood, 2015; Kasser & Brown, 2003), and that this wellbeing serves to negate the need for high-carbon consumption. A final compositional effect pathway is related to carbon ‘soft’ but high-wellbeing activities (Kallis et al., 2013), such as reading, spending time with the family, and even sleeping (Druckman et al., 2012).
11 Often these can be time-costly and not positional nor immediate in their utility, however they may be correlated with greater subjective wellbeing in the long run (Kallis et al., 2013). The empirical expectation here is that high-carbon leisure activities are undertaken less frequently simply because they are surplus to requirements of the ‘good life’ (Skidelsky, 2019). Claborn and Brooks (2019) find strong support for such theory in finding a significantly positive relationship between work hours and the environmental efficiency of wellbeing. This occurs through a small decrease in ecological footprints but mainly through a substantial boost to wellbeing.
Limitations of dependent variables
The shortcoming of energy use or emissions as the dependent variable, as described by Druckman et al (2012), arises from the combination of time use data with energy or emissions data. The categorisation process itself is a “partly arbitrary attempt to decompose every life” (Jalas, 2005 p.136) and cannot account for the more complicated way activities are conducted in reality, such as undertaking multiple activities at once. Similarly each activity even when conducted in isolation may result in quite different levels in energy use or emissions depending on the household instruments or preferences, even if the motivation (e.g. watch television) is the same (Druckman et al., 2012). The methodology also involves the exclusion of several categories (e.g. rent) due to the difficulties in allocating the emissions they entail to specific time uses.
Related to this, the Melo et al. (2018) study which sets PEBs as the dependent variable suffers from a detachment between the conscious statement of the undertaking of an environmentally beneficial activity and the absolute emissions associated. Firstly, the positive framing may encourage a desire for an ethical association with the PEB leading to overestimation by respondents. Secondly, the relative nature of many PEBs (for example, “take fewer flights when possible”) allow for positive PEB scores even if associated emissions remain high. Methodologically, the aggregation of 21 PEB scores into two indices also obscures the potentially inconsistent effects of individual PEBs. This is evidenced in the paper’s sensitivity analysis finding a negative relationship between subjective work-life balance and two specific PEBs, while the main models using indices find none. Both these PEBs – walking or cycling for short journeys and taking one’s own bag shopping – could theoretically be expected to correlate with time affluence through the Becker effect, given the physical and mental time cost involved in each. This paper instead considers a single activity rather than an aggregation as it gets ‘behind’ the outcome emissions figures (which may be skewed) and can assess more directly the relationship between work hours and specific activities.
12 Jalas (2002) combined the time use approach implied in the compositional effect with the traditional environmental rebound effect (Binswanger, 2001). Products and activities which deliver time savings (such as home-delivery meals or faster transport) must result in time spent elsewhere (Druckman et al., 2012). This is the risk identified by theorists and even one of the earliest exponents of the five day week, Henry Ford (1926, cited in Onstad, 2017):
“People who have more leisure must have more clothes. They eat a greater variety of food. They require more transportation in vehicles.” Applying this to flights, King & van den Bergh (2017) note the concept developed by Metz (2012) of a remarkable level of consistency in the amount of time spent travelling. They use this concept of a constant travel time budget to predict that travel time would only increase equivalent to the amount of commuting time that is reduced by WTR. However even the loss of one day per week of commuting time provides for a substantial increase in the number of flights taken in a given year, if this is how individuals decide to reallocate time.
Contrary to the above hypotheses, the social and cultural significance of flying in relation to work and prosperity risks putting aviation on a collision course with an ecologically-minded post-work agenda. Holidays abroad offer a temporary but substantial boost to wellbeing (de Bloom et al., 2008; Nawijn and Peeters, 2013), and in the UK the vast majority of these are (and only practically can be) taken via plane. Aviation has therefore been described as a ‘wicked problem’, destined for the ever-growing ‘too difficult box’ (Clarke, 2014) of emissions mitigation due to the obstacle of technological unfeasibility described above and the perceived political unpalatability of placing limitations on demand (Griggs and Howarth, 2018). To holiday is to escape, an image traded in air travel advertising material and a frequent flyer discourse that is socially embedded well beyond its own industry or communities of consumption (Randels and Mander, 2009).
To holiday is as close to ‘anti-work’ as could be, hence its contribution to wellbeing and use as a go-to signifier for pleasure. The escapist experience “may be one of the most frequently listed or assumed motive [sic] in tourism research” write Oh, Fiore & Jeong (2007, p.121) and travel psychology theory links this to the obligations, routines and stress of daily life (Mokhtarian et al., 2015) which for most revolves around the time spent in work. There is particular evidence of this escape hypothesis at play in urban living, as long-distance leisure travel is used to compensate for both the disadvantages and time-energy savings of density (Große at al., 2019; Næss, 2016), effectively operating as a traditional environmental rebound effect (Druckman, Chitnis, Sorrell & Jackson, 2011). Heinze (2000) goes somewhat further in hypothesizing escape theory as an attempt to compensate for a declining quality of life. This is particularly relevant given the ongoing urbanization of the UK and many other countries,
13 and the well-established relationship between high work hours and lower subjective wellbeing (Ryan et al., 2010, cited in Stronge et al., 2019). At the same time holidays match, in fact outpace, labour, in its commodification of time, evidenced most directly by the fact that individuals’ spending can be expected to increase when on holiday. The “commercialization of the calendar” (Schmidt, 1991) that consumer holiday culture inspires therefore sits in sharp contrast to the de-commodified, convivial leisure and care activities that WTR advocates envisage.
Growth in UK passenger numbers averaged 4% between 2011 and 2016, with an additional 18% forecast by 2030, or 33% if planned airport expansions lift existing capacity constraints (DfT, 2017). Globally, industry bodies predict a doubling of passenger numbers to 8.2 billion by 2037 (IATA, 2018). Even with the continuation of significant improvements in fuel efficiency, it has been estimated the sector would under such conditions use up one fifth of the world’s entire carbon ‘budget’ between now and 2050 if warming is to be limited to 1.5 degrees (Pidcock and Yeo, 2016). Decarbonising aviation is a considerable challenge, and despite widely published industry technological ambitions for over 20 years, there remains little scope for doing so at the commercial scale for many years to come (Beevor and Murray, 2017). While there are early signs of peak aviation demand in European countries such as Sweden (Swedavia, 2019), and new taxes across Europe (Valero and Baiter, 2019), neither Labour nor the Conservative party has similar intentions for the UK. The popularised notion of flygskam – ‘flight shame’ – may be limited in its impact on the choices of individuals who really matter: a recent UK survey found that 61% of respondents claimed they were willing to reduce their flying to protect the environment, but this fell to 36% among the most frequent flyers – even if they knew other people were also reducing (Murray, 2019).
To conclude, our hypothesis is that both the number of domestic and total flights taken in the last 12 months will bear a positive relationship with work hours when controlling for hourly wage (the scale effect). We expect a smaller but still positive relationship after controlling for overall income (the compositional effect). As a result of the different time-saving characteristics and social relevance we expect a weaker relationship for international flights than for domestic.
4. Data and method
We analyse the relationship between work hours and high-carbon leisure activity using a sample of UK individuals in the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS) and its predecessor, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The BHPS interviewed 5,000 households in the UK up until 2008,
14 before the new UKHLS began by interviewing 40,000 households in its first wave in 2009-11. 6,000 BHPS participants agreed to join the UKHLS for its second wave onwards. This survey in both iterations collects individual and household level data through a series of modules – some of which rotate – on a diverse and comprehensive set of topics such as demographics, economics, health, wellbeing and social attitudes.
We exploit the fact that in addition to the standard questionnaire, an environmental behaviours module included questions on the number of flights taken in the last 12 months (domestically, to Europe and outside of Europe) in both the final wave of BHPS (2008) and the fourth wave of UKHLS (2012-14). The question refers only to flights for leisure, holidays or visiting friends or family, and so does not include flights for work or business purposes (we call all of the former type leisure flights for our purposes). The outward and return flight and any transfers are together counted as one flight. Descriptive data on the proportions of all respondents who answered these questions for each category are shown in Table 1. Flights to Europe are the most popular of the three categories surveyed, with 31% of respondents having taken at least one and 5% three or more. Only 8% of respondents flew domestically in the last year. That 55% of respondents flew zero times in total reflects closely national statistics from 2010 and 2014 in which 53% and 52% had not flown at all in the last 12 months (DfT, 2010; DfT, 2014).
Table 1: Proportion of respondents who took leisure flights to different regions in the last 12 months
Domestic Europe Outside
Europe Total international Total 0 .92 .69 .83 .59 .55 1 .04 .18 .12 .21 .22 2 .02 .08 .03 .11 .12 3+ .02 .05 .02 .09 .11
Rounding means not columns may not add to 1. Number of observations: 56,503.
Source: British Household Panel Survey, Wave 18; UK Household Longitudinal Survey, Wave 4
Table 2 reports ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions of total flights on monthly income. This demonstrates a small but significant correlation between income and flights, though the number of children, qualifications and age are all closer determinants. The size of this relationship is surprisingly small given the extent to which evidence presented in Section 3 is
15 Table 2: OLS regression of total flights on monthly income
Following the approach of Fremstad et al. (2018) in their study on US households and emissions, the method allows me to estimate the following equations:
(1)
domestic flights
i=
β
1(work hours
i) + β
2(hourly wage
i) + β
3X
i+ ε
i (2)international flights
i=
β
1(work hours
i) + β
2(hourly wage
i) + β
3X
i+ ε
iwhere individual i’s number of domestic and international flights from the last 12 months is a function of their work hours (no. of hours “normally worked” per week), their average hourly wage and a battery of control variables (X). The battery is made up of confounding variables established by the literature (Fremstad et al., 2019; Rosa and Dietz, 2012; Melo et al., 2018) as determinants of household emissions: age, number of children, educational attainment. If the effect of work hours (β1) is greater than the effect of hourly wages (β2) in these models then we can conclude that not only is there a scale effect but also some kind of compositional effect at play. However given the two coefficients indicate different pathways towards flights this is only an indication and the difference itself cannot be assumed to be a measure of the compositional effect.
Alternatively, in order to establish more precisely the compositional effect only, we can simply control for income:
(3)
domestic flights
i=
β
1(work hours
i) + β
2(income
i) + β
3X
i+ ε
i (4)international flights
i=
β
1(work hours
i) + β
2(income
i) + β
3X
i+ ε
i16 Note that for models (3) and (4) that the coefficient for work hours (β1) will indicate the compositional effect alone. In both instances I run the equation as a fixed effects regression which allows me to account for unobserved characteristics of individuals whose data is recorded across both waves.
5. RESULTS
Model 1: Results (Domestic flights and work hours, scale and compositional effect)
17 Model 3: Results (Domestic flights and work hours, compositional effect only)
18 Model 4: Results (International flights and work hours, compositional effect only)
19 The results of all four models show no relationship between work hours and flights. Model 1 is the closest to demonstrating an effect of work hours, in this case on domestic flights controlling for hourly wage. The coefficient in this case is significant at 10%. Surprisingly, none of the models encounters a statistically significant relationship between income and flights. For domestic flights this may be related to the very small subsample of respondents who actually flew domestically. It also may relate to the variation in consumer characteristics of those who fly domestically, with regular travellers such as students skewing the results.
Allison (2009) has noted that fixed effects models may tend to provide more conservative estimates given their focus on within effects. It may be therefore that methodological revisions could result in a different finding.
20
6. DISCUSSION
These findings indicate that further research is to clarify why the high-carbon leisure activity of flying does not seem to relate to work hours in the same way that aggregate emissions have been found to. With the increasing interest towards WTR from both social movements and businesses now joining environmental movements, policymakers will need to be aware of the potential rebound effects (Jalas, 2002) of activities of high material intensity. Flight travel appears to be one for which the impact of yet is ambivalent, and that should be cause for concern for those seeking to reduce emissions quickly and substantially through WTR.
Analysis at the individual level instead of household can be justified on the basis that only those working over 20 hours a week are included, so won’t be as skewed by uneven distribution of work hours. However there could still be some skew as a result of partners driving consumption rather than individual characteristics as the model assumes. The study could be replicated at household level by amalgamating UKHLS data.
Further analysis might look to other high-carbon leisure activities as dependent variables. These could include driving or meat eating. Car miles is a variable recorded within the UKHLS data, however it does not distinguish between leisure miles and professional miles, and so assumptions would need to be made to calculate what proportion of these would form the dependent variable values. Kent (2014) also finds there are other powerful motivators to commute by car than just speed, so we should not expect this relationship to be any simpler than that of flights.
As many in the literature have argued (e.g. Kallis, 2013) the relationship between work hours and ecology is complex and contingent on broad economic infrastructure. As a potentially transformative policy, WTR suffers from inherent research limitations in that only past data can be analysed. Dominguez, Ullíbarri & Zabaleta (2011)1 for example find that the sharing out of work hours increases consumption – such results can be expected under a WTR policy implementation but not assessed through analysis on ongoing relationships such as this.
Finally it should be noted that analysis was only possible at two waves of the annual longitudinal UKHLS (or BHPS as it was previously) because environmental modules were only included in those questionnaires. None have been included since, though the UKHLS long-term content plan does state that environmental module will soon be included every two years (Understanding Society, 2019).
1 Dominguez, E., Ullíbarri, M. & Zabaleta, I. (2011). Reduction of working hours as a policy of work sharing in the face of an economic crisis. Applied Economics Letters 18(7): 683-686.
21 Given the extent of ongoing ecological degradation, and the potential severity of impacts this has both through direct effects and transformative policy change, it seems a more frequent and comprehensive record of such important data would be of use to academics and policymakers alike.
22
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