Would society work better on a 4 day week?

sollar

We have 450,000 people unemployed and 1.8 million working. Would people support a 4 day week which could see us back to full employment.

We might even be more productive working less days.

Rabble Rabble

The problem is that office workers work a role for 5 days, and then stop for the weekend. Offices close down. You cant replace a guy for 1 day a week. It would have to be 3+2, or 4+3 if this was to work at all. And that doesn't work for offices which are closes at weekends.

As for factories - some do shifts of 12 hours for 3 days ( 36 hours). 4 Shifts = 6 days. And overtime on the 7th, sometimes.

For retail and service ( hairdressing, bar staff), people often work 4 days, or 6 days, or what they want. If it is on the rota.

So it already happens.

But for Office work, it cant work. It would mean a 20% reduction in the pay of one guy, another getting that 20% and having to get up to speed with what the first guy was doing every week. no-one would take him seriously.

Liam Byrne

I've often wondered this, but considering that (a) some people decided to work even longer hours despite simultaneously choosing to have a family (as distinct from raise them) and (b) the idea won't work now with people already having loans that are too large, and the additional millstone of the bank debts, it's too late to put it forward.

Like everything that got lost during the takeover of society by rampant/greedy capitalism and corrupt politics, society has lost out.

sollar

If the working week was 7 days then it might be more realistic to have people working 3 or 4 days per week perhaps with a longer working day.

All offices, factories, retail etc open 7 days a week with people working between 30 and 40 hours a week over 3 or 4 days.

It would give people more free time and it would also eliminate the rush that people tradionally working 9 to 5 face being unable to get to the bank, dentist etc without taking time off.

cavedave

There have been attempts to control when people can work for thousands of years. The Romans had laws about when carts could operate to try reduce traffic. The Lex Iulia Municipalis restricted commercial carts to night-time access to the city within the walls and within a mile outside the walls.

If you read the futurists of the 70's Buckmeister Fuller and such they widely predicted we would work either very short weeks or not many years. It turns out most of the efficiencies they predicted have occurred but not the massive increase in leisure time. We could live a 1970 standard of living for around 15 thousand a year or half the average wage or roughly working half the time we do now. But few of us do. I think this is because people enjoy being busy

the happiness comes from the rushing around. We feel better chasing the tails, even if we never catch them

ilovesleep

I think it would be a great idea but as someone else said it would have worked if the government didnt lump us with debt.

Sleepy

There's a lot of practical problems with this in terms of structures of the modern workplace which have already been mentioned but a lot of people seem to be missing the fact that since a large of part of our real economy are knowledge jobs dealing with software development, financial services, pharmaceuticals etc.

A very large proportion of our live register have come from the construction and retail sectors. The lads in the former are sparks, chippies, plumbers, plasters etc. Many of them left school without Leaving Certs or having put less effort into it than they would have had there not been the lure of big money in the construction trades. The (predominantly) girls in the latter while more likely to have a degree are still unlikely to be qualified in the right area to work in the areas of our economy where there is real activity.

The Public Sector is already too large for the size of our country and any realistic expectations of tax revenue so perhaps some job-sharing there might be possible but the likely drop in productivity from this sort of arrangement isn't overly desirable from either a cost basis or a quality of public services one.

It might be a nice idea in theory, and perhaps one that could be worked towards for the next generation through better allocation of education resources and higher relative rewards for the wealth generating sections of the workforce versus non-wealth generating. But I can't see the last part of that going down too well with the left!

thebman

What about those of us who like our jobs? :P

My job is my hobby so if I had a 4 day week, I'd continue what I currently do and continue doing it in my spare time after work.

Probably end up setting up my own company out of boredom to fill my day and end up leaving my current job :P

Anyway this plan has a problem because employers could keep the same number of people employed and split them to cover the week if we had to have 7 day weeks in which case no unemployment reduction will occur.

jimmycrackcorm

I work in private sector IT so basically a four day week would bring me back to working a 40 hour week and I'd spend my fifth day researching. I think Google implement this plan - their engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time on private projects. Seems to work well for them.

RichardAnd

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

I work in private sector IT so basically a four day week would bring me back to working a 40 hour week and I'd spend my fifth day researching. I think Google implement this plan - their engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time on private projects. Seems to work well for them.

That's a bit of a myth. The engineers are allowed to work on private projects but ONLY when their primary work is finished. There's alot of PR that tries to paint Google as some sort of quirky, workers' paradise but really, they're no different than any other MNC.

hallelujajordan

sollar wrote: »

If the working week was 7 days then it might be more realistic to have people working 3 or 4 days per week perhaps with a longer working day.

All offices, factories, retail etc open 7 days a week with people working between 30 and 40 hours a week over 3 or 4 days.

It would give people more free time and it would also eliminate the rush that people tradionally working 9 to 5 face being unable to get to the bank, dentist etc without taking time off.

This is already the case where it makes sense to the particular industry. We have many manufacturing plants in Ireland that operate on a 24x7 Shift system.

There is no barrier to making this happen across the board and I would argue that if it made commercial sense it would be happening ..

Atilathehun

In the four day week scenario, would the PS still get the half hour cheque cashing time off on one of the four days, and what about the christmas shopping time?

RichardAnd

Atilathehun wrote: »

In the four day week scenario, would the PS still get the half hour cheque cashing time off on one of the four days, and what about the christmas shopping time?

Only a small % of the civil service (which are only about 10% of the entire public service) get the half day Christmas shopping. Further, only the civil service get the 30mins of bank time and event then, only staff hired before 2004 get it. I suggest you read up on such matters before you make sweeping statements.

Anyway, to the matter of a 4 day week. I personally would happily work a 4 day week and work for 80% of my salary. The 9-5 Monday to Friday grind is monstrously inefficient in my opinion.

Permabear

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whatstherush

donegalfella wrote: »

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Working from home: A case study ;-)
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home

thebman

donegalfella wrote: »

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True I've worked multiple jobs where I had to travel for an hour plus a day to the office by public transport to do a job I could have done at home.

They even gave me a laptop in one job but I wasn't allowed take it out of the office

When in work, it had to have a Kensington lock on it and be locked away at night in a press.

And that was a company publicly talking about how much they were pushing working from home...

It seems many managers have problems letting go of the control of the office believing their staff won't do anything but if you assign someone a task, they will either get it done on time or not.

People can be just as idle in an office as they can be at home and mangers just need to get more comfortable with the idea. Requiring staff to be the in the office costs the business millions a year in costs and achieves nothing really as good staff will communicate whether they are over or under worked and if you don't have good staff, forcing them to commute won't help. It just makes them even less productive as they are tired from long commutes and you probably need different staff.

People should be able to get away with being in the office once a week for meetings at most as many of those meetings could be done through tel-conferencing although I admit it is a different thing to actually being a meeting as face to face vs phone always adds complexities.

Aard

France tried to reduce the workweek to bring more people into employment. It didn't work. They went from 40 hrs to 35 hrs, however most people were kept on the full 40 and paid overtime for the 5 hours extra.

Aard

Aard wrote: »

France tried to reduce the workweek to bring more people into employment. It didn't work. They went from 40 hrs to 35 hrs, however most people were kept on the full 40 and paid overtime for the 5 hours extra.

In my experience office workers were given longer holidays to compensate for the time. They still logged in from home and checked emails etc but as they had nominally been given a payrise (being paid the same for 35 hours as they were for 40) there were no real payrises for years until that had worked its way through the system.

sollar

donegalfella wrote: »

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If it was up to me thats exactly how i'd work. The 9 to 5 5 days a week is not a great system imo. I would much prefer to work 3 or 4 long days.

I'm home from work now but full of energy and could have happily stayed on for another 2 or 3 hours. But by friday after getting up all week, commuting, sitting in the same seat all week you just don't have the same motivation. Also by saturday night your starting to think thats the weekend nearly over work on monday.

I would even work more hours if i could do them mon to thu and have a 3 day weekend.

jester77

A 20% paycut for a 50% longer weekend. While a nice trade off that would leave you happier and probably healthier, a lot of business's couldn't realistically function with this model.

the groutch

apologies if this is dumbed down a bit, but bear with me

the fundamental problem, specifically with office work is the hours, the 9-5 ethic

what we need to for people's hours to be more spread out, eg. instead of 2 people working 9-5, have one work 7-3 and the other 1-9

the golden triangle means that alot of businesses who deal internationally would benefit greatly, sure those staring at 9am are starting when hong kong/tokyo is going home, and wall street is still open til 10pm our time

also if done on a large scale it could make a huge difference to dublin's traffic problems, lessening the "rush hour" effect

of course this is all a pipe dream

Aard

Other problem is finding people to work all afternoon and evening.

p1akuw47h5r3it

Aard wrote: »

Other problem is finding people to work all afternoon and evening.

i don't think finding that would be a problem, especially in this recession.

ArtSmart

yes. in fact i remember an economist suggesting a 2 and a 1/2 day wk - at the same pay as now. he was shuffled off rte - never seen or heard of him again - but the man was making a lot of sense to me. (people with time spend money etc etc -of course the Victorian in us would never allow it. )

ArtSmart

As a further note - money is a physical representation of an abstract idea - that's all - an idea. so if and when Europe and the US finally cut a 'new idea deal'* anything is possible. (currently described as 'restructuring' or other such language) until then, we're fcuked.

* I reckon in about two years. yes, i'm drunk

ArtSmart

donegalfella wrote: »

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agreed. (except for the Marxist thing. Marx, like his contemporaries, quantified labour in aggregate terms, as a factor of production, not 'per hour worked' = value of labour.)