Time has come for four-day workweek
Three-day weekends are lovely, but four-day workweeks can be intense.
For those lucky enough to enjoy Labor Day weekends, as I do, there lurks the reality that a full week’s worth of work will need to be compressed into four days. I know I’ll still meet my deadlines; it will just take more concentrated effort.
Most office workers will do the same, which begs the question: If we can get our work done in four days, why not permanently add Monday to the weekend? We could finally make those Garfield comic strips about hating Mondays a thing of the past.
Employers and governments have experimented with fourday workweeks for decades, but the changing nature of work is making the idea more viable. Some industries can afford to focus on accomplishing tasks rather than how many hours someone worked.
Psychologists have long known, after all, that people don’t work a full eight hours. In a 2016 survey, United Kingdom office workers admitted that they probably stay on task a little less than three hours a day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, eating, smoking, browsing websites and searching for new jobs.
Proponents of the four-day week argue that if people only work a fraction of the assigned 40 hours, then why not concentrate that work and promote a
better work-life balance? Experiments have shown that when people have more time for themselves, they work harder when on the job.
A wealth management firm in New Zealand, Perpetual Guardian, put the four-day week to the test this year. The company's founder, Andrew Barnes, brought in a human resources professor from the University of Auckland to measure what happened.
“They worked out where they were wasting time and worked smarter, not harder,” the professor, Jarrod Harr, told The New York Times in July. “Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time, and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks. Their actual job performance didn’t change when doing it over four days instead of five.”
Employees, for example, found ways to reduce two-hour meetings to 30 minutes. They developed ways to signal coworkers not to distract them. But the real motivation was Barnes paying his employees the same salary for 32 hours as he did for 40 if they did the same amount of work.
Barnes’ experiment should not be confused with France’s 35-hour workweek. The Socialist Party’s goal in 2000 was to force French companies to hire more workers, not boost productivity. France’s shorter workweek lowered unemployment, but businesses ended up spending more, according to academic studies.
Some jobs lend themselves more to shorter workweeks than others. Job search site Flexjobs.com analyzed 50,000 job postings and identified those where a four-day week could make sense.
Unsurprisingly, they were mostly white-collar, task-oriented positions, including sales, information technology, health care, education, accounting, marketing and human resources.
“Companies are competing in a tight labor market, and in order to attract and retain top talent, they need to better meet employees’ expectations … and at the top of that list is the desire for work flexibility,” Sara Sutton, founder and CEO of FlexJobs, explained. “We have seen and expect to continue seeing the flexible job marketplace diversify.”
If an employee has a work quota, then the number of hours spent in the office makes no difference. And if an employee is paid by the piece of work, then why not hire the person as an independent contractor instead of an employee?
This where utopian visions of a four-day workweek can end in a sweatshop dystopia.
Many people dream of working for themselves, but as a former freelance writer, I can testify that running a small service business is tough. And the early results of the so-called gig economy, where people work on short-term contracts, are disheartening.
People forget the benefits that an employer provides, from health insurance to retirement plans to legal protections, until they have to pay for them. Ask any taxi driver, especially those with ride-hailing companies, how much money they make. Not very much.
Visit TaskRabbit.com and post a job for a handyman and watch the gig workers bid each other down to an unsustainable fee. When there are limited buyers of labor, and plenty of workers, the value of labor plummets.
The construction industry has long employed independent contractors, paying them by the job rather than the hour. Exploitation is far too common.
That’s why workers formed unions, fought for better treatment and now celebrate Labor Day. A shorter workweek may make sense, but only if workers can protect their wages and benefits.