Four Day Week

InTheory, if all of the overpaid and overworked plebs worked a FourDayWeek, the extra work would be sufficient to employ 20% more people.

Net result, 20% less income, 50% more leisure time and 20% higher employment.

Nice theory.

Why 50% more leisure time?

Presumably, the assumption was that the two-day weekend constitutes leisure time, and would increase to three days. However, on the same assumption, the 20% employment figure should be 25%.

Of course, it also assumes that there are 20% (25%) more people willing and able to do the work.

This is the reasoning behind the 35-hour week legislation in France a couple of years ago. After a lot of hard work to implement it in business, it appears that no real jobs were created. Instead, many companies used it as an excuse for streamlining their business processes, and as a result some were even able to lay off staff. Other companies, especially small ones, are in difficulty because they can't streamline, can't afford to hire, and can no longer meet dead-lines. Of course, for the workers who haven't lost their jobs, it's very pleasant to be able take extra days off regularly. -- RomanStawski?

Also, any expert would have been able to tell you that reducing the work week to 35 hours was too little too late. To even begin to have an effect, it needed to be reduced to 32 (30?) hours.

Note that some companies already implement short weeks, such as the KelloggWorkWeek. Some examples include bank tellers at Royal Bank of Canada and IIRC regular workers at Kellog.

Another variation of this is the 10 hrs/day for 4 days - giving the same amount of time worked, and still getting the 3 days off. For some people, this would be a win-win situation. For others, a hardship. However, there are times when I'd prefer to have the extra day off. -- PeteHardie

A popular option at my company, before the layoffs started this past summer, was a 9x9 schedule, nine hour days with a three day weekend every other weekend. -- BrianMcCallister

From what I understand, this 9x9 or 9/80 schedule is fairly popular among US defense contractors. --MikeSmith

My current contract is for 30 hours/week, but how I do it is up to me. When the weather is nice, I work 5 six-hour days. If I skip lunch, I can leave the office at 2 PM, and it's a wonderful thing... During the winter, I tend to work four 7.5 hour days and enjoy the long weekends (and more importantly, avoid driving in the miserable Chicago winters. This FlexTime is great. -- SeanOleary

The biggest problem with a four day work week is that I might want to work more than four days. Perhaps I don't want a 20% reduction in pay. Perhaps I'm ambitious and hard-working. Who is the government to dictate how many hours I can work, what my employer can pay me and place such difficult restrictions on my employer than he is penalized for allowing me to work more and make more, if I want to?

I see the biggest problem as one not of government rules and regulations but of working culture. In some situations and for some people, 20 hours per week would be enough. Others, 40. Others, 80 or more. Some employers are also the same. But you only get full benifits of employment if you are a "full time" employee at 40 hours a week. Too many more and you're a costly expense to the company (unless you're salaried).

It seems rather inflexible for a company with 50,000 employees to demand that all of them work 40 hours a week. Not all job requirements are the same. Not all workers are the same. For instance, shouldn't Joe be compensated more since he does more work in 40 hours than Ted does in 40? Perhaps Joe should be able to work just as long as it takes to do the actual job and be paid for the actual job and not the time he spent doing it. It would seem that was the original *concept* of salaries.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I just don't feel the answer is "government". Government rarely improves things and we see how well government intervention and control over every aspect of the market and employment worked in communist Russia (and everywhere else communism has failed). I tend to believe that if the government removed so many of the constraints they place on employee->employer relations when it comes to time and money, both employers and employees would be much better off.

I HaveThisPattern. I work 32 hours in 4 days. I like my 3-day weekends a lot. I quibble with some of the numbers at the top of the page though. Of course it's hard to know how much extra employment for otherwise unemployed individuals is generated by employed individuals working less, for various previously-mentioned reasons. But my main quibble is with the 20% reduction in income quoted. This is a 20% reduction in gross income. But the relationship between gross and net income is not linear in many tax jurisdictions. A 50% marginal tax rate is not uncommon, which means that regardless of total tax rates, any adjustment of X in gross income results in an X/2 adjustment to net income. This of course depends on local tax brackets etc. So it may well be more accurate to say that by working 20% fewer hours, your take-home pay is still only reduced by 10%. A bargain if I do say so myself.