Thousands of UK Workers To Take Part In Four-day Week Trial (theguardian.com) 49
AmiMoJo writes: More than 3,000 workers at 60 companies across Britain will trial a four-day working week, in what is thought to be the biggest pilot scheme to take place anywhere in the world. Employees from a wide range of businesses and charities are expected to take part in the scheme, which will run initially from June to December, including the Royal Society of Biology, the London-based brewing company Pressure Drop, a Manchester-based medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk.
It comes as the push for companies to adopt a shorter working week -- crucially with no loss of pay while aiming for higher productivity -- gains momentum as a way of improving working conditions. The pilot is being run by academics at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Boston College in the US, in partnership with the campaign group 4 Day Week Global, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and the Autonomy thinktank. Launching the trial to examine how such employment patterns might work at a broad range of companies across the economy, the participation of 3,000 workers means it is larger than a previous pilot in Iceland by Reykjavik city council and the national government that included more than 2,500 workers.
It comes as the push for companies to adopt a shorter working week -- crucially with no loss of pay while aiming for higher productivity -- gains momentum as a way of improving working conditions. The pilot is being run by academics at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Boston College in the US, in partnership with the campaign group 4 Day Week Global, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and the Autonomy thinktank. Launching the trial to examine how such employment patterns might work at a broad range of companies across the economy, the participation of 3,000 workers means it is larger than a previous pilot in Iceland by Reykjavik city council and the national government that included more than 2,500 workers.
4 day week (Score:2)
For the last 2 years I've had a job working 4 days a week and I'm not sure I could go back to 5.
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A lot to be said for it. A 3 day weekend every week can make a huge difference in your quality of life. You could resent your job a whole lot less too.
Sadly, in the tech business a lot of people would like to go from 6 days a week to 5.
This would be great. What's the family impact? (Score:2)
Trying to think this through a bit deeper...
Re: This would be great. What's the family impact (Score:2)
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I vote for four 8-hour days.
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It's not 4 10 hour days, it's 4 8 hour days.
https://www.euronews.com/next/... [euronews.com]
I tried to get my last 3 employers on with this... (Score:3)
During the job offer negotiations with my last three employers, I asked for a 4-day workweek. I even offered to take a 20% pay cut. They all acted like I was a crazy man.
I have since quite full-time employment in favor of running my own business. Now I work 7 days a week. Haha.
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Next job interview I do I'm going to suggest a 4 day week. A lot of people get into that by contracting, but I think it's possible to do salaried now.
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When I last interviewed one HR department pretended to be able to compromise and allow 30h/w to get me to interview but when they chased me after they insisted on 37.5h/w - I got a job elsewhere 2 weeks later. 4 months later I've been asked twice by the same HR department if I'd reconsider and they're now prepared to do 30h/w. I've ignored them.
All those companies in industries with staff s
If you get higher productivity (Score:2)
Employers do not hire because they've got money, they hire to meet demand. Yes, they will sometimes seek to create demand, though more often than not tha
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there will be loss of pay. That's how supply and demand works. If workers are more productive you need fewer of them. You'll let some go (or at the very least not replace them when they retire/quit) and that'll increase the labor supply. More supply means less demand means cheaper prices. In this case "prices" means "wages". That's how capitalism works.
Interesting take. There's another force at work, competition between employers. Say I'm producing $20 of value an hour but only getting paid $10. It's worth it to some competing employer to hire me away at $11 an hour. It's then worth it to my current employer to counteroffer $12 rather than go through the hassle of hiring and training someone new. Over time, this leads to wages converging towards marginal productivity.
These will interact and I'll leave it to a real labor economist to explain how. I think i
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If workers are more productive you need fewer of them.
The crucial fact you are missing is that productivity is going up because people are working fewer hours. If workers are more productive and at the same time working fewer hours, you will need fewer, the same, or more of them, depending on the details.
For example if hours go down by 20% (5 days to 4 days), and productivity goes up 25%, then the amount of goods or services produced per worker will stay the same.
Why not three? (Score:2)
Why not a three-day workweek? It is much more efficient.
With a four-day workweek, you are stuck with a building for seven days, but you use it for four. You're using the building for barely half of daytime hours (57%), but you're paying for all of those hours. Worse, you get 20% less work out of your employees, so you need to increase your employment by 25% to make up for it, which means you need to lease 25% *more* space for the same amount of output.
By contrast, with a three-day workweek, companies ca
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I don't see how this makes any sense. You'd have to move the company to being open 6 days a week to get your benefits. And if you did that then 50% of your employees would never work with or see the other 50%. That's a huge problem. With a 4 day workweek you simply stagger that 1 day across 5 days a week with different employees off on different days of the week. So your employees overlap 80% of the time.
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I don't see how this makes any sense. You'd have to move the company to being open 6 days a week to get your benefits.
Yes, hence using the facilities 20% more than before.
And if you did that then 50% of your employees would never work with or see the other 50%. That's a huge problem.
Not necessarily. It depends on the business. Most companies of nontrivial size have multiple groups of people who don't meaningfully interact anyway. For example, let's use Microsoft as an example. They have an OS team. They have an Office team. They have a cloud computing team. They have a computing hardware team. They have the Xbox team. They have a developer tools team. They have a server tools team. With the possible exception of the upper
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You just took muddy water and poured more mud in it. Makes no sense.
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Managers suddenly having to justify all their time.
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If Microsoft needs 24x7 cover to deal with a single server or even several going down then they are doing it wrong, very wrong indeed. That's the whole point of virtualization/cloud you don't give a monkeys when a server goes down. It becomes something you will fix tomorrow when you get into work. If you are doing full cloud like Microsoft Azure then it becomes you might fix it next week.
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For example, let's use Microsoft as an example. They have an OS team. They have an Office team. They have a cloud computing team. They have a computing hardware team. They have the Xbox team. They have a developer tools team. They have a server tools team. With the possible exception of the upper management, none of these teams would typically interact meaningfully with one another except in rare circumstances.
First of all, we're talking about Microsoft here, they famously have substantial interaction between certain divisions which gives them an unfair technical advantage, like when their office products have used internal functions which differ from the published API functions literally only by not including delay loops. So the whole argument that they don't get together regularly is somewhat diminished by discussing Microsoft. But second, it's not true that there isn't regular interaction between seemingly dis
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Maths & logic aren't your strong points, are they?
Ah, the ad hominem attack. That means you don't have any better ideas, but you're bound and determined to not even consider anything different from what you're used to.
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Why not a three-day workweek? It is much more efficient.
I know this wasn't entirely serious but for the same reason most companies don't work three shifts a day. If the capital costs were that important, you'd see swing and graveyard shifts.
Worse, you get 20% less work out of your employees, so you need to increase your employment by 25% to make up for it, which means you need to lease 25% *more* space for the same amount of output.
This is where I think the whole story falls apart. If I'm going to pay workers the same amount, I'm going to expect the same amount of output. If they're working 20% fewer hours, that means I expect 25% better productivity. That's an enormous increase. I'd be nuts to not demand some of that productivity now, keep everyone wor
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Why not a three-day workweek? It is much more efficient.
I know this wasn't entirely serious but for the same reason most companies don't work three shifts a day. If the capital costs were that important, you'd see swing and graveyard shifts.
Not really. Most companies that do those sorts of things are either companies that have unusually high facilities costs (e.g. manufacturing) or non-stop service requirements (e.g. hospitals, hotels) that could not otherwise be met without having people work at night.
And the exceptions to that are mostly places like Walmart, where they have to have the building lit up to do restocking at night anyway because of the infeasibility of doing that while large numbers of customers are present, but they can steal
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Actually, in the paragraph below that, when talking about a three-day workweek, I based it on the assumption that employee benefits (including pay) would be proportional to the reduction in work, i.e. if people work 40% fewer hours, they would each be paid 40% less.
TFA mentioned that workers would be working four days "with no loss of pay." So this experiment has them being paid the same.
If you wanted to offer everyone 60% time jobs to work three days, knock yer socks off. In the US, you might run into labor law issues. We have so much regulation which ties benefits to 30 hours a week jobs. If you do the sensible thing and schedule everyone for 24 hours, you may get some pushback that you're trying to avoid paying benefits. Which you probably are.
The reason is because working more does not necessarily translate to increased output. Hiring two software engineers that work 25 hours per week will get you a lot more output than one software engineer who works 50 hours per week (assuming those engineers aren't moonlighting for another company).
I actually don't thin
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Actually, in the paragraph below that, when talking about a three-day workweek, I based it on the assumption that employee benefits (including pay) would be proportional to the reduction in work, i.e. if people work 40% fewer hours, they would each be paid 40% less.
TFA mentioned that workers would be working four days "with no loss of pay." So this experiment has them being paid the same.
If you wanted to offer everyone 60% time jobs to work three days, knock yer socks off. In the US, you might run into labor law issues. We have so much regulation which ties benefits to 30 hours a week jobs. If you do the sensible thing and schedule everyone for 24 hours, you may get some pushback that you're trying to avoid paying benefits. Which you probably are.
Yes, I've been saying for years that businesses who employ people part time should have to pay a percentage of benefits, so if you're working 20 hours, they should have to pay at least half benefits. Unfortunately, the folks who write the laws are looking out for their rich buddies and trying to leave loopholes for them, so that's probably never going to happen.
But regardless, the law doesn't tie benefits to a particular number of hours so much as that it requires benefits beyond a certain number of hours.
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I thought the productivity "gains" were based on a realisation that amongst many office workers there's a certain limit of useful work you get out of them and over time that useful work just gets stretched to cover a 5 day week. Shrinking the time to 4 days and 32 hours just condenses the work but nets the same productive output because there's less downtime. As many "crunch" type offices (should have) realised, you can ask for 150% out of your employees in short bursts, but after that sprint, you get 50% a
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Guess it never occurred to you that half the people would be off Mondays and the other half Fridays?
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Worse, you get 20% less work out of your employees, so you need to increase your employment by 25% to make up for it
No. To quote a previous Gardian article (linked to from TFA):
Pilot programs run by governments and businesses in countries such as Iceland, New Zealand, Spain and Japan have experimented with a four-day workweek and reported very promising results. According to pilot studies, workers reported anywhere from a 25% to 40% increase in productivity, as well as an improved work/life balance, less need to take sick days, more time to spend with family and children, less money spent on childcare, and a more flexible working schedule which leads to better morale.
The idea is that people who work few hours are more productve, so it doesn't cost employers anything.
Four days, but how many hours? (Score:2)
The article does not say it will be four eight hour days, only four days. Four ten hour days is four days, but still 40 hours. So perhaps this will work out like the four day week experiment in Iceland that average something like 38.5 hours.
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The point is reducing the number of work hours. Bean counters and managers are frightened of the thought that people are just as productive working 32 hours instead of 40.
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The point is reducing the number of work hours.
The article doesn't say that. Most of the coverage of the same experiment in Iceland didn't say that. and the average reduction in work time there was about an hour and a half. But it was touted as a four day work week.
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I don't get the shift (Score:2)
From TFA:
“Increasingly, managers and executives are embracing a new model of work which focuses on quality of outputs, not quantity of hours,” he said.
I've been working salaried for 35 years and that's always been the agreement. It's been about quantity and quality of output, not about hours. And that's why I'm exempt from overtime laws, because I can work fewer than 40 hours a week and still get full pay.
Maybe I'm just in a weird industry. In other jobs, do they really care how many hours you're in a seat and not about what you produce?
Why does this take a pilot? (Score:2)
I don't understand why this takes a coordinated pilot program. If I'm running a company, surely the employees and I can negotiate that we're going to run an experiment. We don't need to tell anyone and we don't need anyone's permission.
For example, my company is experimenting with meetingless Fridays. We're going to see how it goes and if we like the result, we'll keep it. Companies experiment with hours and working conditions all the time. Four-day work weeks is just one of those experiments.
The only reaso
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The only reason I can see is to broadcast the results
So you do understand.
Four?!?!? (Score:2)
Four days a week!??? The fucking slave drivers.
Been an option for a decade here (Score:2)
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Work 4 slightly longer days.
That isn't what this is. This is working 4 8 hour days per week, without a reduction in pay.
Nice for them (Score:2)
786 P&O workers are trying out the new 0 day workweek, since they lost their Freedom of Movement to offer service in EU ports.
CowMilkFree (Score:2)
Four tens would make a lot of sense as it would mean less traveling and more dollars spent on weekends.
If they could alternate days it could also relieve traffic on those days.
Alas what is the motivation for the execs?
They already get most Americans to work additional hours unpaid.
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Four tens would make a lot of sense
I really wish these articles would be specific about it right in the first paragraph. This is four eights, not four tens.
Alas what is the motivation for the execs?
Happier employees, leading to better retention and thus lower overall personnel costs.
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In previous attempts it was still a 40 hour work week so four tens.
Four eights would even be better but even more doubtful.
At the risk of sounding cynical Since when did employers at big biz care about any of that?
If they did the US work would not b working the longest hours in the world and four day weeks would already be an option
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Four eights would even be better but even more doubtful.
'According to the organisations running the pilot, employees are expected to follow "the 100:80:100 model - 100 per cent of the pay for 80 per cent of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain at least 100 per cent productivity".'
https://www.euronews.com/next/... [euronews.com]
At the risk of sounding cynical Since when did employers at big biz care about any of that?
You're asking me since when does big business care about reducing costs?
If they did the US work would not b working the longest hours in the world and four day weeks would already be an option
Inertia and culture, I would say. Notice all these trials (at least all the ones I've heard of) are taking place in Europe. It's going to take a while for the "work
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It was rhetorical.
Nice, so...both 4 tens and 4 eights have been tried, you have a point?
I worked for a large corporation in the naughts that offered a pilot where workers would do 4 tens.
I was annoyed that my position (IT) could not take advantage of it at the time.
I was less annoyed when after eight months they laid off many of the people who did sign up for the pilot.
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It's a trap!
you just work on your "day off" (Score:1)