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The 4 day week
V1m
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21242782
Has the time come? I'd suggest that the "normal" 5-day week is an artefact of factory requirements that no longer reasonably apply to the huge majority of jobs.
Has the time come? I'd suggest that the "normal" 5-day week is an artefact of factory requirements that no longer reasonably apply to the huge majority of jobs.
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The alternative - which dominated the pre-WW1 and post-1950 world - is that instead of shorter work-weeks, people put that freed time toward shorter days, more flexible schedules, more holidays, or (predominantly in the post-1950 world) longer and longer schooling and retirement. If people pursue individual flex-time, then there's no mass adoption of Friday in particular off, and so no four-day week.
So four-day weeks don't seem likely, simply because the coordination seems unlikely, unless perhaps as the Islamic world completely industrializes a couple of decades from now. Already a number consider Friday a half-day, the way Saturday was a half-day before it disappeared completely.
Seems to work for banks and utility companies.
Why would working 4x 10 hour days instead of 5x 8 hour days necessitate this?
Places that only run 5 days a week only do so because lots of other places do as well.
Also because standard hours (in my experience) are 9 till 5:30, so there's slightly less time in four days of 8 till 6.
Tacking on two or three hours into a workday doesn't change how long a typical work day feels very much, but having an extra day off is huge. And among other things, it gives you a day off during the week, making it significantly easier to get into government offices, doctors offices, dentists, etc.
It never works out though, permanent staff are constantly overworking on promise of days off. :I
On the plus side, if you work a hellish 3 days (or 4
It helped that I was able to come to work one hour early and then leave and hour later, so I didn't feel like my entire evening was killed.
The only time I see that pattern is with nurses, doctors, firemen... basically all the jobs with 24/7 manning. Their work schedule is not one I would want (24 hour shifts).
I had a professor a few years back who was telling us that, IIRC, South Korea has pushed hard on people to work from home more and more, to the benefit of all.
Are you factoring in 1 less lunchbreak...?
We saved a lot on child care expenses and let us move a lot of chores like laundry and grocery shopping out of the weekend, so Saturday and Sunday were more relaxing instead of trying to get shit done and run around. Plus, one less day of having to get up, get ready, commute in, etc made a big difference...for me it was about an hour and a half more time.
I actually got more done too, because there was less beginning and end of day fuckoff time, and less of a chance I'd be getting working hard in the afternoon and then it would be time to get home, or I'd have to stop what I was doing to get something else done that had to be finished by the end of the day.
It was really the only thing I liked about my old job, and I was disappointed I had to give it up when I quit.
The biggest downside is that with ten hour days, you really feel like you are working, home, then going to bed...but for me having every weekend be a three day weekend mostly made up for it. It DID make the work-week fly by.
A lot of places around here do 'summer hours', where in the summer it's 4x9 and then a half day on Friday. It's less common since the economy tanked though, because employers don't need to offer those kinds of things to retain people anymore.
Telecommuting is odd, because it seemed like that's the way everything was going about a decade or so ago, but then places stopped doing that and even made people working from home come in. I can see why that's necessary some places, but realistically between Skype, e-mail, and the VPN I can do about 95% of my work from home just as easily as I can from my desk here at work. If I only came into work one or two days a week, I could probably do everything I can now.
5 day week, 9 till 5:30:
8.5hrs a day
42.5hrs a week
5hrs total lunch (if we assume a 1hr lunch break)
37.5 working hours a week
4days week, 8 till 6:
10hrs a day
40hrs a week
4hrs total lunch
36 working hours a week
The argument being made here is that you would offset that lost hour and a half through the improved efficiency. I was pointing out that any business which bills hourly would have to up prices if they moved to this scheme.
If I were in another line of work, I'd only enjoy an extra day off if it was unusual; when I worked flexible hours it was really useful being able to go to the bank or government buildings when there weren't long queues. If everybody else gets the same time off, that advantage is lost.
Most places I worked just had 11 hour 10 hour workdays. 8 to 7. Or whatever. With a one hour unpaid lunch.
Actually worked out well, because we were able to service our west coast customers better and were large enough that we didn't lose anything being open a different number of days than people worked.
11 hours, with a 45 minute drive each way did make it kinda a long day.
Not everyone has to work the same 4 days.
The leisure industry would have to be restructured as well, if they can't rely on weekends being peak hours. Could be good for them, could be bad.
Yes. If everyone had their own third day off, I'd never know if a given client or vendor would answer the phone when I called. Annoying.
Also, I work 5x11 hour weeks, so this conversation doesn't really apply to me.
And even now then same question everyone asks is "Why the Hell are we here for half the day we finished all our work Thursday."
If thanks to technology and your talent you can earn your salary in 3 days, than yay for you. If you are a lazy bastard you will have to work longer hours.
Of course there's the problem of the company saying "nu-huh, you only produced (x-3) because we say so", but that's what we are supposed to have laws for.
Hell, my current job has me in at 6am to get a report out at 8:30...and then I generally don't have jack shit else to do save sporadic editing/HTML work. I could easily accomplish my entire job from home and in maybe, 4 total hours each day.
The shift was terrible (5am to 5pm), but the 4 days off were so goddamned sweet.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I have never, ever, worked an office job whereupon finishing what was expected of me sooner than expected that I wasn't given more responsibilities that should not have been mine. And, sooner than later, those extra responsibilities simply become yours, without any impact on your pay or title. Because, well, you're there, are you not going to do what your boss tells you to?
I think the majority of jobs don't lend themselves to this kind of production metric, rather than it being the exception. I mean, I work in software development. Judging programmer output is notoriously difficult, which is to say nothing of QA, design, management, legal, usability, PR, sales, and whatever else the people in this building do. I don't think we have a single job here that could be effectively assigned a weekly quota.
I think the real problem is less that we have 5 day work weeks and more that we (particularly in the US) have this fetishization of work. You're not a good worker, no matter how well you do your job, unless you work a lot. The fact that you can finish your work to a high standard in 40 hours doesn't mean much if everyone else on the team works 45, 'cause then management wants to know why you aren't working those 5 hours like everyone else. People don't take vacations--when their job actually gives them a reasonable allotment of vacation days in the first place--and work overtime as a matter of course rather than the exception.
My employer is fairly forward-thinking on most things (schedules are pretty flexible, time off is pretty good and not hard to take, there are a lot of employee perks, etc) but I've still heard managers a couple of levels up from me talking about how they feel like people should be at work at least 50 hours a week. And yeah, some weeks it takes 50 hours or more to get the job done, but the expectation that you should just be at the office an extra couple of hours a day and/or on weekends really rubs me the wrong way. Employers in general have this expectation that employees should put their job first and life second. If you don't love being at work, you'd damned well better pretend to. They're better about that here than at other jobs I've had, but it's still there. As is the expectation that personal affairs not take precedence over The Job. At my last job people would be looking down their nose at you if you had the bad grace to take an hour off in the morning to go to the doctor because you were sick or injured (and God forbid you take the Whole Day).
For salaried office workers, its nominally 42.5 hours (9-530, half hour lunch). But really more commonly its probably like a bit more on either side: 9-630, 830-6, etc. I'd be surprised if the average salaried office worker doesn't already work closer to a 10 hour work day (50 hrs a week) than an 8 hour work day (40 hrs a week). My work doesn't pay me enough for what I do so I can get by with ~45 without an issue but for everyone like me there's probably someone approaching 60.
My wife works 12 hour shifts (registered nurse), 3x two weeks, 4x one week ((36x2+48)/3 = 40). But really its more like 13 hour shifts because they need to hand off patients and give report and potentially document. So really even when she's on a 36 hour week, its really 40 and when shes on a 48 hour week its 52.
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My wife loved going to the 10-hour day; not only do you get an extra day each week off, but you come in earlier and leave later, missing rush hour traffic both ways.
I'm sure a 4 day week would work fine in a lot of offices, but in the service industry it would be crippling staff-wise.