The Four-Day Work Week

[AnBr]

reasonstobecheerful.world/spain-four-day-work-week-national-government/

Most experiments with four-day weeks have been motivated by corporate self-interest. That could be changing.

More than a century after Chicago factory workers won fixed labor protections under the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” the work week is once again evolving.

Companies have recently been experimenting with four-day weeks in the hope that a shorter week will ultimately improve their bottom lines. But the concept broke new ground last month, when Spain announced it will become the world’s first country to trial a four-day working week. The three-year, €50 million ($USD60 million) pilot project will launch in September.

Under the plans, an estimated 200 to 400 Spanish companies will voluntarily take part in the project by reducing their employees’ working week to 32 hours while keeping their salaries the same. The government will compensate participating businesses for any higher costs incurred by the changes, such as the need to hire additional staff or to reorganize scheduling and shift patterns. That investment will be financed through Spain’s share of the EU Coronavirus Recovery Fund.

[pnwguy]

May 5, 2021 15:07:01 GMT AnBr said:

reasonstobecheerful.world/spain-four-day-work-week-national-government/

Most experiments with four-day weeks have been motivated by corporate self-interest. That could be changing.

More than a century after Chicago factory workers won fixed labor protections under the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” the work week is once again evolving.

Companies have recently been experimenting with four-day weeks in the hope that a shorter week will ultimately improve their bottom lines. But the concept broke new ground last month, when Spain announced it will become the world’s first country to trial a four-day working week. The three-year, €50 million ($USD60 million) pilot project will launch in September.

Under the plans, an estimated 200 to 400 Spanish companies will voluntarily take part in the project by reducing their employees’ working week to 32 hours while keeping their salaries the same. The government will compensate participating businesses for any higher costs incurred by the changes, such as the need to hire additional staff or to reorganize scheduling and shift patterns. That investment will be financed through Spain’s share of the EU Coronavirus Recovery Fund.

Most US hospitals have gone to 3 day-12 hour shifts for floor nurses years ago.  It cut out 1/3 of the patient hand-off transitions where the next shift nurse might miss out on issues a patient needed attention about.  And with 4 days of rest, the strain of the longer days wasn't so acute.

[goldenvalley]

California state employees have had the option of 4 ten hour days for a while now. I don't know about productivity loses (insert lazy state employee tropes here) but it made traffic going downtown a less congested on Mondays and Fridays. I don't know that the option was available to all state employees.

[Bact PhD]

The Atlantic has an interesting take on this:

www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/

The 89 people who work at Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools, are used to having an unconventional employer. Everyone’s salary, including the CEO’s, is public. All employees work remotely; their only office closed down six years ago. And as a perk, Buffer pays for any books employees want to buy for themselves.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that last year, when the pandemic obliterated countless workers’ work-life balance and mental health, Buffer responded in a way that few other companies did: It gave employees an extra day off each week, without reducing pay—an experiment that’s still running a year later. “It has been such a godsend,” Essence Muhammad, a customer-support agent at Buffer, told me.

Miraculously—or predictably, if you ask proponents of the four-day workweek—the company seemed to be getting the same amount of work done in less time. It had scaled back on meetings and social events, and employees increased the pace of their day. Nicole Miller, who works in human resources at Buffer, also cited “the principle of work expanding to the time you give it”: When we have 40 hours of work a week, we find ways to work for 40 hours. Buffer might never go back to a five-day week.

At a moment when the future of work is being decided—when businesses are questioning the value of physical office space and when lower-paid workers are agitating for better treatment as the economy reopens—what worked for this small, somewhat quirky tech company might be much less radical than the rest of the American workforce has been led to believe. People who work a four-day week generally report that they’re healthier, happier, and less crunched for time; their employers report that they’re more efficient and more focused. These companies’ success points to a tantalizing possibility: that the conventional approach to work and productivity is fundamentally misguided.

“We live in a society in which overwork is treated as a badge of honor,” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, an author and consultant who helps companies try out shorter workweeks, told me. “The idea that you can succeed as a company by working fewer hours sounds like you’re reading druidic runes or something.” But, he said, “we’ve had the productivity gains that make a four-day week possible. It’s just that they’re buried under the rubble of meetings that are too long and Slack threads that go on forever.”

Hmmm. Considering that some of this was discussed a lot nearly a half-century ago, is this for real? Maybe for real for the desk jockeys but less so for the service workers and the schoolteachers?

[goldenvalley]

School is interesting in terms of work weeks. A school day, week?, was apparently based on some sort of industrialized factory setting where all students are supposed to be poured into a mold and come out educated. I've been thinking about this increasingly as I see students in COVID times described as "behind" in their education. They are where they are because an extraordinary event interrupted what has been the norm. It's time to re-examine how we work.