Four-Day Work Week

Abstract

The basic concept behind the four-day work week is to establish a nontraditional working schedule that allows employees to accomplish the same amount of work in fewer working days. The push for the four-day work week lost momentum after the 1970s, but it was revived in the early twenty-first century in response to increased demands for more flexible schedules, longer weekends, and lighter commuter traffic. The four-day work week is seen as one way for companies to contribute to combatting climate change.

Overview

The four-day work week is a nontraditional working schedule in which full-time employees work fewer than the usual five days every week. The idea is not new, but it has enjoyed renewed interest in the twenty-first century as changes in various industries have been met with new models of work and worker. Efficiencies have boosted productivity and caused companies to review the necessity of eight-hour days and employees’ presence in a designated workspace during business hours. Benefits to a four-day work week include potential reductions in overhead (fewer employees on premises equating to lower utility usage and reductions in work space), fewer commuters on the road (especially at rush hour), and a happier, healthier workforce (with employees enjoying longer leisure times). A four-day work week, however, can be implemented either by reducing total hours worked or by increasing the length of the workday, and success among companies that have tried a compressed 4-day/10-hour schedule has not been universal. While the four-day work week offers flexibility, it is not to be confused with “flex time,” which allows individual employees to work on different schedules while the rest of the workforce continues to work a regular five-day schedule.

As workers moved away from agrarian lifestyles and into the industrial world and as capitalists constantly demanded greater profits, workers were expected to work long hours seven days a week for low pay and no benefits in order to survive. In the absence of child labor laws, even small children were sent into mills, factories, and mines, and many rarely saw the light of day. In 1830, Americans worked an average of 69.1 hours per week. According to various studies, weekly workhours generally fell over the following decades, declining to an average of 60 hours by 1890. A similar pattern characterized the workplace in the first three decades of the twentieth century as average weekly workhours dropped from 59.6 in 1900 to 50.6 in 1929 when the Great Depression hit.

It was not until the end of World War I in 1918 that Americans saw a major change, with average weekly work hours declining to 48 hours. That change was precipitated by new technologies including a plethora of labor-saving devices, higher incomes, and the constant demand from employees for more leisure time to enjoy their families and to take advantage of the vast number of opportunities available for travel, cultural and sports events, and entertainment. In 1899 in The Theory of the Leisure Class, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen started a national debate on what he labeled “conspicuous consumption,” and the early years of the twentieth century were characterized by a constant desire to own more and better products. Between 1947 and 1958, average weekly workhours declined from 39.2 to 37.8.

With the institution of political and economic reforms and the increasing strength of labor unions that lobbied for workers’ rights and improved working conditions, support for labor reforms and a shorter work week continued to grow. Great Britain passed its first child labor law in 1788, and Germany (1839) and France (1841) followed suit. It was not until 1916 that the first child labor law was passed in the United States, and it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1918. In 1926, American automaker Henry Ford established the eight-hour, five-day work week for his workers, and that standard was adopted throughout the United States. Historically, the move for a shorter work week has focused on the four-day work week, and companies have devised a number of strategies for cutting down on hours on the job without sacrificing profit, productivity, and quality.

In 1933, British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that new technologies being introduced would lead to the 15-hour work week in developed countries within a hundred years. The assumption has been that Keynes believed workers would work three-hour days for five days each week. While Keynes’ prediction has not so far come true, the trend in Europe from the 1940s to the 1980s was for shorter work weeks. In Germany, workers worked 77 percent of the hours worked by Americans. In OECD countries, between 1971 and 2013, annual hours worked declined from 2,000 to 1,780. France also proved a major advocate for giving employees more free time, instituting measures such as shorter workdays and more holidays. French companies also gave employees an extra half-day off every week, and an extra whole day off every other week. Overall, weekly workhours worked dropped from 7.75 hours to 7.0 hours. (King & van den Bergh, 2017). French employees said they spent the extra time with their families, attending cultural or sports events, and resting.

The four-hour work week received a good deal of attention in the 1950s as countries around the world set about recovering from the devastation of World War II. Walter Reuther, who served as president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), advocated for a 32-hour workweek. However, workers, who had suffered through years of the Great Depression and a war that claimed 73 million lives overall and 485,000 American lives, were more interested in enjoying the economic boom. Most labor leaders felt that improving working conditions was more important than fighting for shorter work weeks. The companies that did experiment with the four-day work week generally had no more than five hundred employees and were located in industrial towns. As news of the high level of employee/employer satisfaction with those experiments spread, the four-day work week movement expanded westward. Originally, most four-day work week plans called for employees to work more than eight hours in a single day, and union leaders argued that any time over eight hours a day should be considered eligible for overtime pay. Employers refused to pay overtime to workers who did not work more than forty hours a week, and an impasse resulted.

In the United States, a new push for the four-day work week surfaced during the 1970s as workers, particularly women who were entering the labor force in large numbers, were demanding greater job flexibility. In 1948, American women had comprised only 32 percent of the workforce. By 1971, 53 percent of working-age females were in the workforce. By that time, the four-day work week movement had expanded in Europe, and there were two hundred American companies trying out 3-day, 4-day, or 4.5-day work schedules. Those companies included hospitals, restaurants, police departments, banks, insurance companies, advertising agencies, architectural firms, professional offices, and publishing companies.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey also experimented with the four-day work week in response to union demands for shorter working hours. Before trying the experiment, the Personnel Department’s Manpower Planning Unit was charged with developing a workable Port Authority Plan. Planning included sending out a questionnaire to companies already working on nontraditional schedules. Responses were overwhelmingly positive, with managers contending that four-day work weeks had led to increased productivity, lower absenteeism, turnover reduction, decreased tardiness, reduced downtime, improved customer service, improved employee morale, and increased machinery utilization. However, none of the companies surveyed were based in large cities like New York; nor were they dependent on public transportation for getting workers to and from work. The Port Authority decided to try a 10-week program over the summer, with workers working from 8:15 a.m. to 6 p.m. four days a week. The experiment was abandoned after the trial period because managers were disappointed that productivity stayed fairly stable rather than rising as expected, and there was no clear indication of improved employee morale.

Applications

It is impossible in hindsight to determine whether or not the move away from the five-day work week would have continued, but it came to a halt in the United States in 1971 when President Richard Nixon mandated a 90-day price and wage freeze that turned into a 1,000-day four-phase freeze in response to an inflation rate that persisted above 4 percent. It has been posited that the four-day work week initiative failed because it lacked leaders committed to the movement (Grosse, 2018). Despite rejection of the four-day work week, the movement had highlighted the need for greater workplace flexibility and the advantage of staggered hours for maintaining job satisfaction. The notion that employees deserved to have more leisure time and a conviction that the four-day work week had improved health, cut costs, and increased job satisfaction continued to be widely accepted in the workplace.

In a study of workers at twenty-seven non-union firms in Britain in the early 1970s, the four-day work week was found to be highly successful. In 1977, Richard Hartman and Mark Weaver questioned top managers at 400 of the 700 British firms that were experimenting with the four-day work week, finding that managers were generally pleased with the outcome. They maintained that the four-day work week had increased productivity, reduced time spent on daily startups, heightened employee job satisfaction, and reduced worker absenteeism. Hartman and Weaver’s study generally reflected their findings from the questionnaire, but it did not uphold results of earlier studies that found that the four-day work week reduced employee turnover to any significant extent.

Mark Aquilar and Erik Hurst (2007) have carefully documented the change in work and leisure time of American workers between 1965 and 2003, finding that, on the average, Americans between the ages of 21 and 65 gained five additional hours of leisure time. When broken down by gender, they found that women gained four additional hours, but men gained six additional hours. Changes were chiefly due to the fact that males reduced the total number of hours worked, and females worked more hours outside the home. In 1965, males worked an average of 51.58 hours each week, and females worked an average of 22.45 hours. By 2003, males were working an average of 39.53 hours per week, and females were working 22.93 hours. There were also gender differences in the number of hours spent on non-market work. In 1965, males spent an average of 9.67 hours per week on such activities as compared with females, who spent 32.86 hours. In 2003, males had increased their average non-market workhours to 13.43 hours per week, and females had decreased non-market workhours to 22.55.

Aquilar and Hurst (2007) also identified an increasing inequality in the workplace that surfaced in the early 1990s. The workers most likely to work more than a 40-hour workweek were highly educated individuals working their way up professional and corporate ladders. By 2001, more than 25 million Americans were regularly working more than 49 hours a week, 12 percent worked from 49 to 50 hours a week, and 8.5 percent worked more than 60 hours a week (Fraser, 2001). Most of these high-performing individuals were between the ages of 25 and 55, and they worked in white-collar, high-stress jobs as professionals, corporate managers, marketing staffers, investment bankers, accountants, business consultants, and the administrative assistants and support staff who worked for them. At the same time, workhours for other employees continued to decline.

Viewpoints

In the final decades of the twentieth century, there was considerable effort directed at downsizing government, and one of the motivators for the movement was the need to address environmental issues. As a result, various agencies began experimenting with ways to reduce workhours while cutting carbon emissions. In the 1990s at a satellite office that employed ten workers, the Lake County Health Department of Illinois tried out a four-day work week with the goal of increasing staff time in the field, having employees spend less time in the office and on the road, and reducing the number of vehicles in the parking lot by 20 percent at any given time. Employees who had worked an 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift began working from 7:30 to 5:30, and schedules were staggered to maintain a presence at the office during normal working hours. Employees had an extra day off each week. The four-day work week reduced the number of trips from home to the office from 50 to 40, and employees saved on transportation and day care costs. Overall, the experiment was seen as successful because field time increased from 24 to 26 percent, 20 percent less employee vehicles were in the parking lot at a given time, and transportation costs were reduced by 20 percent. Further, the public was made more aware of the work done by the Health Department and they learned about ways to protect the environment. While the number of personal and sick leave days were not reduced, fewer employees took vacation time. The program was subsequently extended.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, academicians, including some economists, increasingly drew attention to the need to reduce work hours. They argued that reducing work hours by 20 percent would result in major benefits due to improved employee and overall health, the creation of more jobs, and benefits to the environment from reduced consumption of energy at work and on the road (King & van den Bergh, 2017). Most developed countries have accepted responsibility for the human role that has contributed to global warming and climate change, and individual companies have turned to the concept of the four-day work week as a way of reducing pollution caused by vehicles running on fossil fuels. The United Kingdom, for instance, has committed itself to reducing greenhouse gases by 20 percent. A number of British companies are working four-day work weeks and having three-day weekends; some are taking Wednesdays off to give employees a mid-week break; and others are working six-hour days. Companies are also taking more holidays and instituting “gliding” and flextime schedules that reduce the number of employees required to be on site at any given time.

A New Zealand company received international attention when it launched a unique twenty-first-century experiment on the four-day work week. In the spring of 2018, Andrew Barnes, the founder and CEO of Perpetual Guardian, a company of 240 employees that manages trusts, wills, and estates, launched a six-week trial of the four-day workweek after being inspired by articles about employee health and productivity. Unlike other four-day work week schedules, Barnes committed to paying his employees for five days even though they worked only four days a week. Individual teams were allowed to work out the details of maintaining output and serving the needs of customers. Some teams chose to work shorter hours for five days rather than working on a four-day schedule. Customer needs were met since Perpetual Guardian remained open five days a week, and a minimal number of employees worked on Saturdays. The experiment was extended from six to eight weeks and subsequently became permanent after independent analysis by Jarrod Haar of Auckland University’s University of Technology documented its success. Employees reported enjoyed a better work-life balance, having more energy, being more creative, being tardy less often, taking shorter breaks, and learning how to make meetings more effective in less time. Added incentives for making the experiment permanent were a 20 percent reduction in the company’s electric bill and the fact that workers spent 20 percent less time on the road during rush hours.

Terms & Concepts

Carbon Emissions: Gases that contribute to the “greenhouse effect”; generated by fossil-burning fuels, such as those used to power cars and trucks. Released into the atmosphere, these emissions contribute to global warming, and their reduction is key to curbing the effects of climate change.

Conspicuous Consumption: A term coined by economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen who contended that Americans of the late nineteenth century were paying large sums for unneeded products in order to flaunt their wealth and prestige.

Flextime: More formally known as flexible work time; the practice that allows employees to decide among an array of options that go beyond the traditional eight-hour, five-day-a-week schedule. Elements of flextime may include arriving and leaving at different times while meeting a scheduled number of hours, working from home at least part-time, choosing to take time off rather than receiving overtime pay, or working longer hours each day to have more time off.

Gliding Workday: A work schedule that allows great flexibility as to when employees show up at work and when they leave for the day as long as they work a designated number of hours over a 12-hour period.

Leisure Inequality: Refers to the fact that better educated and higher income workers are more likely than less educated and lower income workers to work more than forty hours a week, leading to wide differences in the amount of leisure time available for non-market activities.

Nixon’s Price and Wage Freeze: In August 1971, in a move that was highly approved by the American public (75 percent), Nixon announced a price and wage freeze that was designed to be in effect for 90 days, until a newly established Pay Board and Price Commission would be charged with regulation duties. Economist Milton Friedman, the architect of the Reaganomics plan that was instituted a decade later, correctly predicted the economic failure of Nixon’s freeze.

Bibliography

Aquilar, M., & Hurst, E. (2007). Measuring trends in leisure: The allocation of time over five decades. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3), 969–1006. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=25953153&site=ehost-live

Graham-McLay (2018, July 19). A 4-day workweek? A test run shows a surprising result. New York Times, B3.

Gray, A. (2018). A brave and bold experiment: Four days’ work for five days’ pay. NZ Business + Management, 32(4), Sp6-Sp9. Retrieved September 16, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=129309275&site=ehost-live

Groden, C. (2015). Uniqlo introduces four-day work week—with a catch. Fortune.Com, n.p. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=109065008&site=ehost-live

Grosse, R. (2018). The four-day workweek. New York: Routledge.

King, L. C., & van den Bergh, J. C. J. M. (2017). Worktime reduction as a solution to climate change: Five scenarios compared for the UK. Ecological Economics, 132, 124–134. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=120141979&site=ehost-live

Leung, T. (2018). CFOs, CXOs: The four-day work week might work. CFO Innovation Asia, n.p. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=132578468&site=ehost-live

The power climbers 2018: These middle managers are tipped for success, and work four days or fewer a week. (2018). Management Today, 1. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=131519929&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Buchanan, J., & Borland, J. (2018). Should Australia move to a four-day work week? Money (Australia Edition), (210), 57. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=129162422&site=ehost-live

Christensen, K., & Schneider, B. L. (2010). Workplace flexibility: Realigning 20th-century jobs for a 21st-century workforce. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.

Surdam, D. G. (2015). Century of the leisured masses: Entertainment and the transformation of twentieth-century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sutherland, R. (2018). John McDonnell’s right—the four-day week could work. Spectator (00386952), (9922), 1. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=132795987&site=ehost-live

Zelinski, P. (2015). Is it time for a four-day work week? Modern Machine Shop, 87(8), 22. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=100531958&site=ehost-live