This week, many Australians will have an extra day off thanks to the Australia Day public holiday. But why shouldn’t every work week go for just four days?
That’s the question posed by the 4 Day Week Global campaign, who have announced a new international pilot program where companies are invited to give their workers a four-day week with no loss of pay for six months, to see if their business reaps the benefits of increased productivity from happier and healthier employees.
The trials will begin in the UK in June, with Australian and New Zealand trials kicking off in August. More details will be announced in coming weeks on how local organisations can get involved.
This comes as domestic support builds for a four-day work week. Victorian unions and crossbench MPs have called for a trial in the state’s public sector. The ACT has opened a parliamentary inquiry into the idea. Meanwhile, in the US, a key group of Democrats recently backed a four-day work week bill.
So, should companies and governments give this idea a go? Here’s what we know so far about the benefits and pitfalls of shortening the weekly grind.
We’re working ourselves to death
The average Australian full-time employee worked around 42 hours per week prior to the pandemic. That’s 4.5 hours over the standard legal maximum and three hours over the risk point for developing mental health issues — and most aren’t paid for this overtime. No wonder 26% of Aussies want to work less. Conversely, 16% want more hours, particularly those in insecure work. The pandemic has only made this distribution of hours more unequal.
Meanwhile, work is getting more intense. Research shows that self-assessment of how hard we work per hour has increased markedly in the last 30 years, particularly for some of the largest professions including teaching and nursing.
And all this work is taking a physical toll. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization found that prior to the pandemic, about 745,000 people died per year from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours — an increase of nearly 30% since 2000. That’s over a quarter of the deaths per annum caused by COVID-19.
Compressing the work week could give exhausted workers a much-needed rest, while prompting employers to more evenly distribute working hours.
Well-rested employees are more productive
Studies show businesses stand to benefit too. Stanford University researchers found overwork “leads to decreased total output” and that workers average productivity “decreases to the extent the additional hours they are working provide no benefit (and, in fact, are detrimental)”. Thus, modestly reducing working hours needn’t cost businesses any productive output – it may even increase it.
UK researchers surveyed 250 businesses operating a four-day work week on full pay, and found they made annual savings of $175 billion. Almost two-thirds of businesses reported an increase in staff productivity and an improvement in the quality of work.
Microsoft Japan’s four-day trial saw productivity jump 40%. Closer to home, New Zealand-based firm Perpetual Guardian’s trial saw “no drop in the total amount of work done”.
But it’s not all good news
However, it may not be immediately viable for all companies and industries. One-third of UK business trials did not see any productivity improvements, leaving them worse off.
It can be particularly difficult for businesses whose customers rely on them being available five or more days per week, for whom customer satisfaction dropped. This has led Australian business groups to oppose the proposal.
Some unionists and academics also worry that businesses could pressure employees to complete more unpaid overtime, which would particularly impact those will caring obligations. Others worry it could be a bulwark for businesses to further erode wages.
Pencil it in the calendar
Thankfully, there is a more flexible but often forgotten solution to increasing workers’ leisure time – increasing annual leave entitlements and the number of public holidays.
This would allow greater flexibility for employers and workers to negotiate when leave is taken, and businesses can still roster workers on public holidays if they’re willing to pay the penalty rates. The ACT Parliament’s discussion paper similarly floated allowing companies to keep their fifth workdays in exchange for additional leave.
Despite our ‘laid back’ reputation, Australia has a middling paid leave system. We offer permanent employees a minimum four weeks of annual leave, but many European countries guarantee six. Combined with public holidays and additional leave offered by companies to attract talent, many workers get 52 paid days off per year — that’s one per week.
If Australia added one extra day of annual leave and one new public holiday per year, most Australian states would hit the 52-day target within a decade.
Change the date and add some more
I support changing the date of Australia Day, because there are far better days to celebrate our national achievements and reflect on remaining injustices than the beginning of British invasion and the dispossession of Indigenous land. But given the diversity of our population and breadth of our history, it is difficult to pinpoint a single alternative.
Mabo Day and NAIDOC Week deserve national recognition. If Christmas and Easter garner multiple public holidays, why not Eid Al-Fitr and Rosh Hashanah? Given the significant number of Australians with Chinese heritage, why not commemorate Chinese New Year? And given men’s sport commands multiple days off in Victoria and NSW (not to mention a horse race), why not add one for, say, the AFLW Grand Final?
State and federal governments could add more public holidays that recognise our cultural diversity with the stroke of a pen. Those who refuse to do so are, to paraphrase Bob Hawke, bums.
Is a four-day work week preferable? Is it even viable? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
“a more flexible but often forgotten solution to increasing workers’ leisure time – increasing annual leave entitlements and the number of public holidays.”
Increasing annual leave is obviously a way to do that. Increasing the number of public holidays, not so much. By definition a public holiday is not flexible. And the suggested candidates illustrate further problems. Each of them is only going to appeal or be relevant to a fraction, and sometimes a small minority, of Australians. How is it a good idea to impose yet more religious holidays on the nation? Who in their right mind wants that?
Far better to get rid of all public holidays. They are nonsensical. A few hundred years ago it was realistic to expect almost everybody to stop work on certain days, although even then there were exceptions; nobody has yet developed a cow that understands the idea of a day off. Today we live in a society where a public holiday is no such thing for all essential workers and for a great many businesses that provide goods or services that the public still demands even if it is a holiday. The covid epidemic showed no signs of respecting our Xmas and New Year shutdown. And so on. So let’s privatise public holidays. Add those days onto everyone’s annual leave allowance and let each of us take the days we want when we want. Stop imposing them. Free the people!
Anyway, it’s very disappointing Crikey seems to be ignoring National Argue Interminably About What The 26th January Holiday Is Really For And When It Should Be Held Day. If we are going to have any public holidays at all, today should be one.
One of capitalism’s most durable – most necessary – myths is that it has reduced human toil. Wrong. Prior to capitalism’s dark satanic mills of the 19th Century, the tempo of life and the pace of work were not merely relaxed or leisurely, today’s Right would savagely smear the generations that built modern Europe as bludgers and loafers.
Before capitalism, one day’s work was considered half a day; a serf working an entire solar day, would be credited with two “days-works.” Inconveniently for the hater Right, detailed accounts of artisans’ workdays are available. Academic assessments for the fourteenth century work out to a yearly average of 9 hours per day (excluding meals and break). But with a pliant media and the focus on today’s news, the intensity created by this system itself selects against such remembering.
For more than 95% of Homo sapiens’ history, foragers worked so little because they had few wants, which they could almost always easily satisfy. Instead, they spent time on other purposeful activities such as making music, exploring, decorating their bodies and socialising. Now, we are worked to death by a system that is at the same time poisoning our planet.
Most human activity is, holistically speaking, a bad idea these days. The slacker ethos is trivial to defend; it is utterly impregnable to criticism.
William Cobbett’s Rural Rides written as a journalist between 1822-26 was a last glimpse of the preLapsarian times before the blight of industrialised capital destroyed it.
He was no Blakean dreamer and quite scathing of the yeoman & home weaver who had allowed themselves to be so deracinated and debauched to the low condition he found.
Also not too keen on their diet of spuds & Indian corn (maize), esp tea and sugar which he saw as the “a weaker laudanam that weakened all who indulged and debased their souls.” rather than the rough bread & small ale upon which they previously throve.
PS He was first & foremost a journalist – when that term meant something such a recording daily events.
Not many of his like around these days.
Industrialisation and land enclosure. In combination this made it near enough impossible for anyone to support an independent life without significant private wealth, which had previously been an option for anyone free of an existing obligation of servitude. They had to find employment working for someone else, or starve. This employment is now so ordinary the significance is often lost, but the history of employment law makes it clear. A contract of employment is based on the principles used in a contract of household service defining the role of a servant, and that in turn is based on the feudal laws defining the role of serfs under their masters.
Tea and sugar are of course products of empire and slavery; commodities of great historical significance. Cobbett was not alone in his condemnation. I once came across an article from a Glasgow newspaper published around the start of the 20th C commenting on the new and fashionable tea rooms in the city. The author lamented these places tempting customers away from decent public houses. He said they would enter the tea rooms, thinking no harm, only to emerge an hour or two later as “tea-sodden wretches, no better than drunks”.
Sugar already getting a bad rap way back when! 🙂
There are currently trials on 4 day weeks and 6 hour days, in, where else, Scandanavian countries.Basically the result is that people are more conscientious when they know they have the same amount of work to complete in less time. Less water cooler conversations, less social media, less mindless emailing.
In some situations it works. For hourly rate wage earners, it’s a killer without increases in hourly rate.
Still with a 4/3 split and a 7 day fortnight, 4 on 3 off, 3 on 4 off, I would so go for that.
The way to make it work is of course, a UBI so employers aren’t worse off financially for the increase it costs of administering a larger payroll.
SS Rat thinks public holidays are a joke. The 7 day fortnight will make them irrelevant.
“And given men’s sport commands multiple days off in Victoria and NSW (not to mention a horse race)”
You can speak for Victoria, but in NSW we have the Labour Day holiday on the day following the rugby league grand final. So not exactly a ‘day off’ for ‘men’s sport’. And not a whisper of a day off for any old hore race.
of those in retail you can be asked to work if rostered on , New Years Day, Boxing day is no longer a public holiday in retail in NSW, Australia Day , Easter Saturday, Easter Monday, Anzac Day and I don’t mean ,from the time they open it is a normal day, Queens Birthday so that leaves us with Christmas Day and Easter Sunday 2 public holidays they are closed, compared to most workers who have a min 12 days a year and in retail we still only get 4 weeks annual leave a year like every one else and as far as penalty rates are concerned they are being fazed out in retail so working nights and weekends will pay the normal day rate. How do I know I worked in retail.