I found through Swami, an essay by Bertrand Russell where he wants everyone to work less, so that others would have a chance. He wants people to spend more time on ‘leisure’. He claims that the only reason why there were still poor people was that the rich were sitting on their asses, consuming, but not working.
Early twentieth century Britain seems to have been filled with such philosophers with too much time on their hands wondering what poor people would do when they had a lot of time. Russell had Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Orwell to name just a few, for company.
There are, however, two problems with the idea of everyone working less.

Firstly, when you indulge in leisure, it creates work for someone else. Preparing idli was a hard grind (No pun intended. If you don’t know what an idli is and didn’t get the pun, forget it) for your grandma(Assuming that your grandma did prepare idli. Mine did.) If your grandpa was rich, he would have hired a cook to make those idlis. Now that idli mixes are available, your wife (or you – adjust according to gender/ distribution of household work) has much less work. It takes very few people to manufacture those idli mixes, and so probably your cook’s grandson is unemployed. And your wife too has started working. Probably you should be working just four hours a day so that the cook’s grandson whom you have displaced can work?
But the cook’s grandson is not unemployed. He is working as a waiter at the restaurant you frequent now that you have lots of leisure. Or probably he is the ticketing clerk at the movie hall. Or something. You find that you and your wife have to work the full eight hours to pay for your leisure, and that your leisure ?ime activities have ended up creating lots of work for a whole lot of people.

Then there is the second problem. How are you going to stop people from converting their hobbies into work? A 19 year old guy has a hobby. So does he sit quietly and indulge himself? Oh no. He goes and starts a company. (Then he creates work for a whole lot of people. And the stock market goes up, but that is another story ).

Russell philosopher though he was, fell for what economics knows as the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy. He assumed that there is a fixed amount of work which everyone has to share. The mistake was understandable. The Britain of his time was hidebound and rigidly hierarchical. He was a prisoner of such a society without realizing it. He could not imagine a dynamic and continuously changing society and his aristocratic disdain for work shows up in his socialism.