Let’s Give Some Serious Thought To a Four-Day Week
A number of companies recently evaluated the idea of a four-day week in exchange for lower wages.
There is growing support from the public and private sector that the solution to the crisis could lie not in working more, but in working less, but more productively.
This is an idea I have written about before, and is one that now sounds more and more like a possibility: after all, the five-working-day week is an artificial convention that can be modified. Experiments carried out around the world seem to show that reducing the time we spend working has its merits: Swedes were more productive and motivated, as were Microsoft employees in Japan, along with people working at Target Publishing, Unilever and UK supermarket Morrisons. A British think tank, Autonomy has launched a nationwide campaign arguing that as we approach the end of the pandemic, a shorter working week would produce a healthier society with lower levels of unemp
The Day - Thank God it s Thursday: The four-day workweek some want to bring to the U S
theday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Day - Thank God it s Thursday: The four-day workweek some want to bring to the U S
theday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
One solution to pandemic unemployment? Working less Quartz 2/5/2021 © Provided by Quartz
Around 90 years ago, president Franklin D. Roosevelt found the US in a similar state to most pandemic-hit economies today: beset by a severe economic shock and rising unemployment. One of his solutions was a radical one: to ask people to work less, so that more people could work.
When companies signed the Presidency Reemployment Agreement in 1933, they agreed to wage brackets and price caps. But they also agreed to shrink the working week of their employees.
Artisans, factory workers, and mechanical workers, for instance, would work a maximum of 35 hours a week through the year, their employers promised, down from the usual 45-50; clerks, accountants and sales staff would work no more than 40. Businesses that signed up would be able to advertise their involvement in the national recovery with a poster featuring a blue eagle and the words “We Do Our Part.” (“Those who cooperate in