UK UK to try new 4-day workweek program

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Article: https://longisland.news12.com/uk-to-try-new-4-day-work-week-program
Archive: https://archive.ph/dbilp
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Thousands of UK workers are starting a four-day workweek from Monday with no cut to their pay in the largest trial of its kind.

The pilot program, which will last for six months, involves 3,300 workers spanning 70 companies, ranging from providers of financial services to a fish-and-chip restaurant.

During the program, workers receive 100% of their pay for working only 80% of their usual week, in exchange for promising to maintain 100% of their productivity.

The program is being run by the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, Autonomy, a think tank, and the 4 Day Week UK Campaign in partnership with researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.

Sienna O'Rourke, brand manager at Pressure Drop Brewing, an independent brewery in London, told CNN Business that the company's biggest goal was to improve the mental health and well-being of its employees.

"The pandemic [has] made us think a great deal about work and how people organize their lives," she said. "We're doing this to improve the lives of our staff and be part of a progressive change in the world."
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Neigh said:
Didn't labour do this decades ago and it was a disaster?
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It was the Conservatives under Heath, but it's not remotely comparable. The country was undergoing rolling blackouts due to a shortage of production capacity (we were running low on coal due to strikes), so the government introduced a three-day-per-week electricity consumption cap for commercial users, in an attempt to reduce energy demand. It didn't really work.

The idea of this four-day week has been around for a long time and has been trialled in several countries to some degree. It's meant to give workers a better work/life balance.
 
Dark Edea said:
I don't mind taking less pay for a four day week.
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This is something I think is a good approach, a more flexible work schedule as opposed to a consistent rigid one. That way you could hire on employees for X days a week and both parties would benefit as it would offer more intricate staffing solutions.
 
Retink said:
This is something I think is a good approach, a more flexible work schedule as opposed to a consistent rigid one. That way you could hire on employees for X days a week and both parties would benefit as it would offer more intricate staffing solutions.
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I don't know about Europe but in the US this ends in a disaster unless it's a high paying, professional position. Retail in the US is a shitshow of untrained/unqualified managers and lazy employees with good people thrown to the wolves. You'd think flexible scheduling would benefit everyone but what ends up happening is the good workers are worked to death while the bad workers are given the fewest hours.
 
Asking the least motivated generation in human history to work harder will not be effective. I don't care how many properly functioning people say it's great, the vast majority of humanity needs a whip held over their head to be of any use at all. They won't see "four day work week at 10 hours a day" as anything more than "two extra hours for me to waste then I get an extra day off".
 
XYZpdq said:
What the fuck sort of do-nothing job do you have if you only need to do it four days a week?
It's a bunch of shit to setup in advance if I want to only come in five days of a week instead of my usual six.
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The employer will be expected to hire more people to cover the now open days.
 
Neigh said:
I don't know about Europe but in the US this ends in a disaster unless it's a high paying, professional position. Retail in the US is a shitshow of untrained/unqualified managers and lazy employees with good people thrown to the wolves. You'd think flexible scheduling would benefit everyone but what ends up happening is the good workers are worked to death while the bad workers are given the fewest hours.
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Well yes, this would apply to professions more than anything. Though retail and the like is already flexible as people decide to just vanish randomly regardless.

Also, when I say flexible I don't mean it necessarily changes week to week, but rather when you sign up you agree to X days a week and you consistently work those X days after that as normal.
 
Between the time I spend reading stuff on StackExchange, waiting for things to break so I can fix them, helping with other things, etc, I could probably lose 4 or 5 hours a week and still be basically as productive.

If I had some issue that I just couldn’t solve, and so I could take the afternoon off and come back to it fresh the next day, rather than spend 4 hours just butting my head against it to fill my required hours, I would love that. But that also requires a) trust from your employer and b) enough self-discipline to use it responsibly.
 
urr13 account said:
This kind of thing depends heavily on the type of work involved, some jobs just need someone there, some require specific skill sets.
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And some are bounded by external forces. Part of my job depends on machine thruput, which is effectively fixed. Working 80% of the time means getting 80% of the productivity, the end.

urr13 account said:
The standard work-week in the early 19th-century was 6-days a week and 14 hours a day, right? So society has made dramatic changes to the standard work week before, this isn't without precedent but in a system where people can barely get by with families that have two full-time incomes, I just don't see how you go about making a change like this if the intention is to roll it out nation-wide in the UK, with other nations potentially following the lead in the following years.
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Societies can change like that, but not because they want to. You need a driver that increases productivity to the point that labor becomes productive enough to generate sufficient surplus value over [n] hours a day [x] days a week. The industrial revolution gave us that boost with early automation to elimate what would otherwise have been mindless labor, and it did it on the back of the proliferation of cheap, plentiful energy sources that are a necessary replacement.

Guess what we're running out of thanks to the galaxy brains who run things these days?
 
Queen Elizabeth II said:
Really don't understand this. If you could do five days worth of work in four days in my employ, you'd be getting four days pay and a through investigation from me quietly on the side as to what exactly you were doing the rest of the time previously and helicopter observation to make sure you were working after that.

I'm seeing a lot of redundancy ahead. After all, maybe I'll sack a few and get everyone back on five days when they've shown me they can do things faster.
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It's not a hard concept, most people will use work to fill the hours they have, not fill the hours they have with work. When I was a 20 year old droog trawling low level jobs for work, if you gave me fifty emails and five hours, I'd finish fifty emails in five hours. If you gave me one hundred emails in five hours, I'd finish one hundred emails in five hours, simply because the rewards of work in most jobs, are more work. That's the reality of shit tier office work, people that do more they're asked to for work follow one of two paths: They get a better job than drudge work, or they stop doing more than they are asked.

Sacking them won't do shit, nor will getting new people in, nor will helicopter bothering them, nor will micro-managing them. Any office in the world will consist of a good 80% of your workforce doing what they are given, at a rate that means they can leave on time, and maybe 20% going the extra mile and really hauling ass. When I was promoted to managing a gaggle of managers, we had to go through and engage in downsizing, and time management. The result was that the top 30% of each campaigns workers, were retained, the chaff was cut, we got maybe two weeks of extreme productivity, before it fell down below the levels that we had before. Then we all lost our jobs, because we'd just annihilated our ability to farm out drudge work and get results back in volume, so the company closed up site.
 
XYZpdq said:
What the fuck sort of do-nothing job do you have if you only need to do it four days a week?
It's a bunch of shit to setup in advance if I want to only come in five days of a week instead of my usual six.
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Dude, if you have to do a lot of extra prep work just to make sure you are only coming in 5 days a week, either your employer needs to hire more people, or you need to delegate better.
 
Think about all the collective labour hours that have been shifted to machines and automation. The efficiency we gain collectively using things like self-checkouts, should result in benefits returned to us as consumers. The profit/hours gained shouldn't be siphoned completely to the top. The actual volume of menial work to do is going down, so why not redestribute the load.

Make a 32 hour work week normative, with a livable wage for those hours. Industrious types can always work overtime or two jobs if they want. Or maybe 36 hours, in 4 days of 9 hours or 3 days of 12 hours-- depending on industry. Health care shifts are already 12 hours. Other businesses could maintain seven day a week coverage by hiring both types: 12 hour workers for Friday-Sunday longer hours, 9 hour workers through the week. (Think food or small shops.)
 
Don't Tread on Me said:
I think you're thinking of when Finland tried UBI
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I was told about Labor changing work weeks and the trash piling up.

Behavioral Sink said:
Make a 32 hour work week normative, with a livable wage for those hours. Industrious types can always work overtime or two jobs if they want. Or maybe 36 hours, in 4 days of 9 hours or 3 days of 12 hours-- depending on industry. Health care shifts are already 12 hours. Other businesses could maintain seven day a week coverage by hiring both types: 12 hour workers for Friday-Sunday longer hours, 9 hour workers through the week. (Think food or small shops.)
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That doesn't work out economically with a declining dollar and massive welfare outflows. The Bernie Sanders-esque vision of a country where people work less and make more isn't feasible at this point in time and requires a level of government micromanaging unheard of in the United States. It would also continue to reward niggers for doing basically nothing at work. What's considered a livable wage according to activists in the US is also substantially higher than western europe in terms of quality of life. All this relies on the acceptance that megacorporations and near-unlimited federal power are a part of the Progressive Unites States. You would need some level of "national socialism" to keep megacorps in line which isn't happening as long as globalism and banking exist in their current form.
 
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There is always two discussions with this topic, the one from the employees that just don't want to work because they have meaningless jobs they'd rather not do, and those that wonder about the economic feasibility of the idea.

I wonder about what would people do with that additional day?
A 3 day week-end. An entire new free day to do stuff with, what would they do?

The simplest from the working/service class would probably do nothing, just stay home, consoom tv/netflix and eat, but I'm wondering about the middle-class people, those that actually have projects in mind but always use their work as an excuse to never do them, would they actually do stuff? I'd be curious to see that.
 
Considering that the UK temporarily went to an enforced three-day work week due to rolling blackouts caused by miner's strikes, we actually have a precedent of how this worked. Despite the fact that the work week was 40% shorter, productivity only dropped by around 5-10%.

I imagine that parents would be happy to have a day off work each week where they actually get several hours to themselves.
 
With how much more efficient things have become with changes in technology, I wish the average work week was between 32-35 hours a week instead of 40, with at least 6 weeks paid vacation time. I don’t think it’s unreasonable
 
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