No Canadian companies involved in a shortened workweek trial intend to revert back to a five-day week, new research from 4 Day Week Global shows.
What’s never clear in these sorts of articles is if there was any reduction in salaries, or increase in working hours. Like are people going from working 40 hours a week to 32 with no change to their paycheck? Or are they getting paid 20% less? Or are they still working 40 hours, just over 4 days instead of 5?
The 4 day work week is based on the idea that people are more productive with less time to goof off. Work 32 hours for the same pay and you should see the same or better outcomes. So likely the case is yes
I know that’s the idea, but I can’t imagine a lot of companies being eager to effectively pay their employees the same for 20% “less work”. I know it’s a good idea, I just have no confidence in companies. Just look how many of them forced people back to offices during the pandemic despite the safety, cost, and productivity benefits of working from home.
They are doing more work in less time (and are happier) the tests show.
I agree, but that is true for working remotely as well, and look how few companies still offer that now. Most companies don’t like to make changes that make their employees lives better, even if there is no downside.
Not 20% less work, 20% less time.
My employer was not part of this trial but has been doing this since Spring 2022. There’s been no increase in hours/workday or decrease in salary (and in fact, I got a raise—I think most people got at least a COLA).
We ran our own trial and the results are honestly even more positive than I would’ve thought myself.
If some companiea can offer fulltime or hybrid WFH to have an advantage in getting employees, some others will.offer 4 day workweeks to be competitive with other companies. Canada can start the trend.
It would help if the governments did it… but I can’t see them being a leader on this one because of the optics.
help if the governments did it
You’d be interested to know that was the sticking point on the recent Fed strike.
And they got it.
I know dozens of people working on unionized government work who were WFH 100% since CoViD day, and haven’t been back. Desks were sold/scrapped, leased released, space repurposed. Onsite are a handful of people, usually rotating assignments, for things like shipping/receiving, and the WFH language is baked into the latest contract there too.
The gov people ARE making progress.
Sanity reigns north of the US. Too bad trickle down doesn’t work, in any form.
Don’t feel jealous on this one. We have had multiple successful trials of a universal basic income, and the only thing it’s led to is more trials. I am certain the 4-day work week will suffer the same fate.
and the only thing it’s led to is more trials
The opposition needs a case to cherry-pick and it doesn’t have one yet, I guess. But they’ll find one and, if they’re true to form, latch on like a tick until they’ve sucked any and all political cred out of it.
This works for many businesses, but sadly cannot work for certain industries like manufacturing, steel making, petroleum refining. etc. These are 24/7, 365 operations and running less than that actually costs them money. However, you’re usually well compensated in these industries in my experience
That’s why they have shift workers. Reduce the shift hours to be the same as a 4 day week. Its not hard
But then you need to hire more staff. I think part of the sell is that it’s no more cost for the employer, since workers get more done in less time. That might not be true for many operational jobs.
It could also lead to better productivity and less turn over with employees which would be a net positive in the end. When I did labour jobs 2 days off was not enough for me to recover, 3 days off would have been better for my body and mental health and maybe I would’ve stuck around longer.
And these were the same excuses used when we went to 40 hours a week and the world kept on turning.
The issue is that these sorts of fields are notorious for not liking to hire more than they have to. They’d rather overwork their existing staff than hire more.
I knew a guy who worked as a machinist, and basically everybody in his company worked 60+ hours every week all year, and the company compensated proper overtime the entire time. The company basically paid double wages for 50% extra labour, and that’s presuming that the employees even did 50% extra work for being tired all the time. The guy quit the job because he couldn’t take it after a few years, so in the end the company had to hire more help anyways.
It’s an issue of culture as well as many other things, and few people want to go against tradition.
The mill I work in is already set up with shift work…they work 1st shift (week 1), 2nd shift (week 2), 3rd shift (week 3), and then go on long weekend 4 days off. My department runs 21 turns (we are the plant bottleneck by design), meaning 3 shifts of 8 hours, 7 days a week. Most people dont work 7 days straight unwillingly, but regardless of that fact, you need to keep running. Not running is losing money, losing money gets corporate to shut you down, getting shut down means you have no job and the company doesn’t care either way
There is a trade off when dealing with continuous operations. You run into the issue of, “Not running costs more money than running and paying people overtime.” Moving to a 4 day week just means you would likely get forced more into overtime so we can keep steel flowing, not that you get more free time.
Also from the salary side of things, I just spoke to 4 other process engineers and all of us immediately agreed that we cannot get the work done required of us + do the extras of being a floor process engineer in only 4 days. We could get our “requirements” done, but then all of the extra work that we perform would cease. It would actively hurt the company and its profitability, which in turn hurts our job stability. Its really not as cut and dry as people want to make it seem in all instances
all of us immediately agreed that we cannot get the work done required of us + do the extras of being a floor process engineer in only 4 days.
- the plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data’.
- most/all 4-day-work-week experiments collected statistical data showing a strong trend suggesting the extra rest time made both the rote/repetitive work cleaner and the knowledge/expert work faster.
Unless your shop is a weeeird outlier, you stand every chance of coming out of a 4dww trial working more efficiently, more rested, more reliably, more effectively. That’s actually a very common theme in all this, that any ‘loss’ in time or money is eaten up by better work done more effectively when we’re not so tired we’re microsleeping all day and wondering where we are and where we were.
Office workers aren’t very productive in general. We should focus on greater automation.
And the concordant social safety nets and baseline wealth redistribution that benefit citizens over corporations.
My boss just mentioned 4 day work weeks… with the same amount of hours, I said that the idea is less hours, not the same hours crammed into less days and he absolutely refused that that is what people mean with 4 day work weeks…
I’ve been discussing this, lightly, on and off for a couple of years know, and most workers can’t wrap their head around the idea, either.
“They’ll never do that for us,” says the class the owners are completely and totally dependent on.
Your boss is dumb as a bucket of rocks.
You’re, uh, replying to the wrong person.
To be fair, that statement has fairly broad applicability
Yeah… it’s definitely gonna take some time to get employers on board.
