The vast majority of companies taking part in the world’s largest trial of a four-day week have opted to continue with the new working pattern, in a result hailed as evidence that it could work across the UK economy.
Of the 61 companies that entered the six-month trial, 56 have extended the four-day week, including 18 who have made it permanent.
The findings will be presented to MPs on Tuesday as part of a push urging politicians to give all workers in Britain a 32-hour week.
How cool, it works!
Great, so no need to make it the law then is there? Simple competition among those who do it and those who don’t will make the thing that works the standard.
The only argument in favour of making it a legal requirement is that it doesn’t, in fact, work.
Parkinson’s law In action
I don’t know if anyone is studying this trial in detail, but if they are I bet the single most effective change will be that the number of endless, time wasting meetings for the sole purpose of stroking middle management egos have been massively reduced.
As a matter of interest does anyone have stats on whether work from home was a success or not? I’ve heard (confirmatory bias naturally) that productivity dropped lithically.
So, will this mean 4 ten hour working days to maintain the 40 hour working week mantra, or is it 4 eight hour days with a 20% salary cut?
I work in the manufacturing industry.
We used to work 4 days + Friday up until 1pm , a fairly common weekly schedule for similar businesses.
After the last recession, and as a means of cost cutting, we decided to move to a 4 day week. For the business, it has had its’ upsides and its’ downsides.
It took several years to drum it into the heads of suppliers and customers that we weren’t available on Fridays. Something that we still have the odd issue with, other than that, we still do a 39 hour week, just over 4 days instead of 5. Starting earlier is advantageous for most as rush hour traffic is avoided and cutting lunch hour to 30 minutes is hardly a sacrifice.
The business gets to save the energy to heat a large factory, and we all enjoy a long weekend.
Unless someone chucked a large wodge of cash my way, I would be very reluctant to change back…
“I don’t know if anyone is studying this trial in detail, but if they are I bet the single most effective change will be that the number of endless, time wasting meetings for the sole purpose of stroking middle management egos have been massively reduced.”
This is exactly what happened with one trial. They brought in some consultants who looked at how things worked and improved things. Because the public sector doesn’t do what a lot of companies do as a day-to-day thing of just making small improvements. They’ve found something like a 10% improvement, but the employees get to keep it. And get a pay rise. Nice.
One of my things with the sort of organisations doing this is that many of them are charity, quango, government. I know there’s a robotics firm in there, but how many of those are there? I’m wary when people say it works for some bloated charity that no-one has a financial stake in. Who loses the Lamborghini and the trophy wife when it fails or gets that if it works?
“In consultation with colleagues, they opted to take Fridays off, and extend the working day to 8am-5.30pm on the other days of the week.”
36 hour production week pushed into 4 days then…
And the other Shining Example is a bank.. Goodie..
Bloke in Brum,
“It took several years to drum it into the heads of suppliers and customers that we weren’t available on Fridays. Something that we still have the odd issue with, other than that, we still do a 39 hour week, just over 4 days instead of 5. Starting earlier is advantageous for most as rush hour traffic is avoided and cutting lunch hour to 30 minutes is hardly a sacrifice.
The business gets to save the energy to heat a large factory, and we all enjoy a long weekend.”
I think that works in manufacturing. As you say, factories always did longer Monday to Thursday and short Fridays (I presume because of the Friday afternoon lemon issue). I also think in anyone’s working day, there’s a certain amount of spin-up time. People come in, they talk to people, have coffee, get their brain in gear. I find if I work longer for a day that 10 hours is more effective, that I’m motoring for longer.
The thing with services is that there’s a certain amount of having people around to do things. The CEO decides on Thursday PM to do a new campaign at the weekend, needs advertising, website changes, someone to prepare notes for the branches. Maybe people are taking it easy as it’s Friday, but at least they’re around and can do the various approval stages.
Nurses enjoy a three day week, the slackers! Productivity probably takes a hit towards the end of those 12.5 hour shifts though.
Gave up on reading that after the second paragraph, wherein I found the “research” was “organised” by a pressure group lobbying for a four-day week. You could have knocked me down with a wren’s feather when I read their “findings”.
Oh, and this…
“Ryle, of the campaign, said: “The economy doesn’t need us to be working five days a week any more. It was 100 years ago, the shift to a five-day week, and the economy’s transformed since then.””
Sorry, but you’re going to earn less. Same as I earn less if I do 5 days instead of 6, because someone pays me to do a side project.
Didn’t see many comments from customers of eg the citizens advice on how they found it.
I did a 4x10hr work week a while back, due to my commute being 1.5hrs + traffic each way for that job. I found the extra working hours were effectively free, as I would get home the same time if I left the office at 4pm or 6 – the extra two hours were either spent working or sitting in traffic jams. It was the client’s suggestion to reduce the commuting.
After a couple of months I had built up enough trust that I could and would do the work, that I could from then on work mostly from home. But I kept the 4x10hr schedule.
To be honest, I quite enjoyed the long weekends, but I wouldn’t be bothered either way if it happened again. I’d far sooner just work from home.
The only argument in favour of making it a legal requirement is that it doesn’t, in fact, work.
Here’s an argument in favour of making it a legal requirement – because wider society desires it. You or I may not agree with that argument but it is an argument. Extreme but illustrative examples: slavery worked; children employed at t’mill worked. Wider society ending those things made the businesses doing those things less competitive, but it was done because fuck that shit.
Taking a wild guess (I’ve no idea, just feels) but it seems likely to me that most improvements in working conditions have come about by laws – the impositions of the desires of wider society (vested interests, elfin safety, people of good conscience / virtue signallers, etc) – than have arrived by the natural organics of competitive labour markets.
I work in the manufacturing industry.
And you can do it with a manufacturing industry. It’s largely a self contained endeavour. Where you do have to interact with the outside world you can make suitable arrangements. But many of the companies want to do this are effectively services. Interacting with the outside world is what they do. They’re expecting the outside world to adapt to them. Good luck to them. Let’s see how that works out. Unless they’re in the public sector of course, where the outside world’s held hostage.
There are a lot of people earning wages for doing jobs that make no profit. I wonder how many of those 61 companies actually engage in wealth productive output?
France has had a 35 hour weeks for years. So successful has it been that Sarkosy years ago when he was President introduced tax breaks to encourage people to work longer hours.
Having lived in France I know there are long lead times to get things, shop shelves go unstacked for lack of staff.
The clever idea was that if everyone worked less then businesses would have to hire more people and thus reduce unemployment to get the same amount of work done. In fact businesses decided they would just accept reduced output and put their prices up to compensate. Unemployment runs consistently high … ~ 10% overall and around 25% for under 25s.
BiS ; “many of the companies want to do this are effectively services”.
True, but how would you class someone like Rolls Royce? They combine both high tech engineering and extensive services. Most manufacturers are some combination of both. No-one in this day and age can afford to ignore one area at the expense of the other. What can make it work is the ubiquity of the internet and the connectivity of mobile phones, which also allows the whole ‘working from home’ thing.
“The economy doesn’t need us to be working five days a week any more.”
What is he wittering about? Manufacturing (at least in large plants) moved to 24×7 because of the cost of stopping and starting assembly lines (mostly heating up large vats after letting them cool down).
Services (at least in the West) were almost all closed on Sundays until within my memory. Many are open now because of convenience.
Removing child labour was at least partly an attempt to increase wages by making the pool of workers smaller (pushed by employers who would be less affected by it). The morality of it was an excuse.
Rather like slavery actually – I note that England had removed slavery to being only offshore long before it started to stamp it out entirely. It also helped that putting slaves into a factory doesn’t seem to work as well as having them chop cane (much more to go wrong).
Where I live loads of public sector services are already on four* day weeks. The library has been closed all day Wednesday for decades, open for 37 hours total each week.
*Three and two halves, as they open Saturday morning.
Bootleggers and Baptist.
“ Removing child labour was at least partly an attempt to increase wages by making the pool of workers smaller (pushed by employers who would be less affected by it). The morality of it was an excuse.”
Yes. And child labor laws went into effect after most firms stopped using child labor.
@BlokeInBrum – “Starting earlier is advantageous for most as rush hour traffic is avoided”
But that only works if few people do it. If everyone switches to the new time to avoid rush hour, they’re in exactly the same amount of traffic as before.