Campaigners last year called on MPs to enshrine the right to a four-day week in law after hailing the results of the UK pilot as a “major breakthrough”.
Other countries have also been testing out the idea. Emmanuel Macron last month had to postpone a labour summit to discuss the idea because too many participants were on holiday.
Sounds nice. But how many immigrants will you need to do all the work left undone??
France already has a 35 hour week, which is more or less 4 days.
Sarkozi introduced tax free overtime to encourage people to work longer hours because – quelle surprise – output was/is low; long waits for product and delivery.
The clever idea was that by cutting hours, businesses would be forced to hire more people – reduce unemployment – to maintain output. Businesses said… Non merci.
And since many of France’s public holidays fall on Tuesdays and Thursdays, people taking ‘ponts’ is commonplace. If the holiday is on Thursday, they bridge the Friday to the weekend. If it’s on a Tuesday, they bridge from the Sunday over to Wednesday.
If the same amount of output can be done in 4 days as 5, then there are too many workers. Fire up to 20% of the workforce and get productivity up.
This pont business has been a feature in the UK for decades
Friday is now part of the weekend for most office workers, as is Monday
Look at the traffic heading to holiday home and holiday hotspots: it peaks on Thursday evenings on many weekends in the summer
I regularly drive up the M5, Monday croust time at cullompton devices is full of families with school age children , in winter it can be busy too, especially in December
Agreed, Fridays are dead quiet in my office, as are Mondays. Of course, all those WFH are genuinely working and not just extending their weekend…
I have an even better suggestion. How about a zero-day week for MPs?
Amazing how many people think desk jockeying is working. I think you’ll find most of the people actually working in the UK do five day weeks. Many of them 6. That’s the majority. You’d find what would happen if they started to do 4 when the country collapses.
Roll on AI when the parasites can be taken outside & shot in the car park. Al;though you’d probably have to do home visits to get all of them.
BiG
Zero pay for zero day??
That would be an added bonus, and also fairly represent performance-related remuneration.
In my father’s day, Saturday morning was part of the working week. He never really shook the habit. Even in the ’90s, he’d often pop in for an hour or so at the weekend “to pick up the mail” or something.
JuliaM – most people seem to have been stealing a wage on Fridays since the lockdowns.
We have huge resistance from office based staff who no longer want to come into the office.
We have huge resistance from office based staff who no longer want to come into the office.
But you can see where that’s going to end up, Steve. Eventually employers will try to arrange that they don’t need to come into the office at all. I imagine that’s already started.
Reduce the compliance burdens of the administrative state to a reasonable level and most of us could probably only work 3 days…..
Christina McAnea’s a looker isn’t she? Why are al these people either a Jock or a Paddy?
BiS – it certainly has.
Trouble is most work is not actually performing any useful purpose
As squawk box says, a significant proportion is simply internal or external compliance
Some of it useful, most not, with layers of management justified to deal with it
squawkbox said:
“Reduce the compliance burdens of the administrative state to a reasonable level and most of us could probably only work 3 days…..”
Yup.
And to rub it in, it’s the public sector pen-pushers who are making our life shit whilst demanding a 4-day barely-working week for themselves.
In local government everything shuts down on “Bank Holiday Tuesday”. It’s even explicitly called that. When I first started receiving emails “office will be closed on Tuesday for the bank holiday” I wondered if I had an error in my calendar.
Is your economy stagnant? Have we got a solution for you…
jgh: My church recently scheduled an afternoon event for the Friday before a Bank Holiday because a couple of the members are (low-level) government employees and it would mean they’d be able to attend. This was understood without question.
Do Brits not already have the right to a 4 day workweek?
You just . . . work for 4 days.
Are are they demanding the ‘right’ to have the state kill people who won’t agree to associate with them if they don’t work 5?
Ah, Agammamon. It’s the bit where they want to “work” 4 days, but get paid for 5 that’s raising hackles.
And rightly so….
When I entered the salaried workforce in the mid nineties I was told that Friday afternoon was a wind down period when nobody worked.
When I was in IT services in the last decade someone who joined the company was amazed that we were all working on Friday afternoon.
Personally I find Fridays my busiest day because I try to wrap up the work I planned to do all week.
What I’m getting at is that stealing a living on a Friday is nothing new or exclusive to the parasite sectors.