Are there any plans in the works, by either companies or governments, to move from the standard 5 day work week in the US to a 4 day work week? We managed to go from a 6 day work week to a 5 day work week quite a while ago. I’m not talking about working 4 ten hour days… but moving to a standard 32 hour work week.
The GQ answer is yes. Here’s one: Time For A 4-Day Workweek? Cutting Hours At One Startup Shows Increase Productivity
Here’s another article, but it doesn’t say anything about hours worked.
How These Companies Have Made Four-Day Workweeks Feasible
All the other examples I found use 4 10-hour days.
I wish. I’m scheduled 4 10’s and I still end up working 5 >12’s and sometimes a sixth day.
That kind of “we own your whole life, you’re just livestock” management style is the cause and reaction to rampant absenteeism and turnover.
I’ve never had a 5 day work week, and I’ve had several jobs that were 7. I thought it made the most sense for those particular industries.
Personally, I’m a fan of the 4 HOUR workweek, but it can’t work for everyone.
The full-time positions where I work are all basically 4 10s which, with the required breaks and such that don’t count (you have to clock out) really means 4 11s.
Here in Norway the suggestion is usually to move to 6 hour days (not including lunch) and leave the number of days as is.
Well that sounds crummy but it doesn’t mean it is for everyone.
Best schedule I ever had was a 10 hour day 4 on 4 off. It was a slide schedule which meant sometimes you worked weekends, sometimes you didn’t. It actually cut down on overtime and absenteeism compared to when we were on 5 days off 2.
Having 4 days off after only working 4 days was great. I guess it’s all in who is running things.
I discovered recently that that’s how both our air-sea rescue and air ambulance services work, and I’d assume they’re pretty hot on both efficiency and effectiveness
I try to work on Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri, taking off Wed and treating it like a “weekend day”. That way, no matter how hard it gets I know it is only 2 days at most until I have a day off. This really helps me.
Did you swap from AM to Pm or was the time slot the same on all shifts? My Brother in Law is a deputy Sheriff, 12 hour shifts. Work 5 off 2 work 2 off 5, I think that is the way it goes.
Whats worse he says is every 3 months they swap from AM to PM. None of the deputies like that and it is a strain on all of them…
Mrs. FtG worked for a while on a 4x10 schedule. The place wanted longer “open hours” for her office. Did not like it at all and went back to 5x8.
My wife and I work in the entertainment business. A 5-day 8-hour schedule would be an unimaginable improvement.
That’s the exact schedule I’ve been working since 2001 and I love it. I like how the days off bump ahead every week so we get plenty of weekdays off for things like doctor appointments, which most people have to take a day off for. We have three shifts working this schedule, and it’s weird to think that there’s this doppelgänger crew working our same jobs when we’re off. There are people on the other crew who have been there for years whom I’ve never met.
I think this schedule helps reduce turnover as well. I can’t imagine having only two days off (I need two days just to wake up at this point), and most of my co-workers like it enough to think twice before leaving.
4 on 4 off is becoming increasingly common in the UK for truck drivers. Transport is frequently a 24/7 business and generally the shifts are quite long, twelve hours would be normal.
It’s a Marmite thing - some drivers love it, especially when it comes to holidays - take a week’s holiday and actually have 12 days off. Some drivers hate it because they don’t want to work weekends. If they follow or participate in a sport, it creates problems, also those with children at school value weekends with them.
My industry has probably the ultimate in flex-schedule full-time jobs. I work a random number of days in a row followed by a random number off. And at random times of the day and for random length shifts. There are limits to how extreme each parameter gets, but most office folks would find my life real disorienting. I love it.
I hated with a passion having a conventional office job. The notional 9-5 M-F that’s really 8-7 M-F & part of Sat working from home.
Some of my co-workers try real hard to stuff the randomness into a box at least enough to reliably have weekends off to mesh with the rest of their family. My wife has been flex-schedule for most of our time together so I’ve never really felt the need for that.
I prefer working weekends when possible and having weekdays off. I live in a world with half as many people in the restaurants, shops, & recreational activities compared to a “normal” schedule. Works for us.
My SIL is an retired engineer who had an interesting schedule. The whole facility worked 5 days x 9 hours one week and 4 days x 9 hours the next week. Thereby shutting down completely every other Friday. She really liked that. the days were long, but not too long. Actually no longer than most salaried folks already work.
For many Americans at least, the time spent commuting to/from work is non-trivial. Removing one or more commutes from the work week removes a b ig deadweight loss from a worker’s life. And gets them off the roads & trains too, thereby helping everybody else with more conventional schedules.
I am all for abolishing weekends altogether. Obsolete, in a service industry world.
I work 6x12-16 hour days. And sometimes a 7. My own experience has been that people have a productive span of about 4 hours in 24. With technology it really is becoming more and more possible to give people a few days of heavy work followed by a few days off/light duties. Because lets face it, some times you work non spot, other times, you do a couple of tasks and rest of the day is spent doing jackshit,
From what I’ve read, 5 days of 7 hours each is more common in Europe, and there has been talk about making a change in the US. In implementing the Affordable Care Act, they had to draw a line somewhere between which employees would be covered by the law and which ones wouldn’t. One proposal was to say that anyone who works more than 20 hours per week is covered and less than 20 isn’t covered but another proposal was to make the cutoff 35 hours. I’m not saying this would force companies to switch to a 35 hour work week, but I am saying that it would leave the door open for a company which wanted to make such a change.
FWIW, I find it frustrating that our store is open a total of 47 hours each week but all the employees work 40 hours or less, because that means there will always be times when some question comes up about a particular job which we need to ask a particular person but it has to wait because that person is off that day. Switching to a 5x7 or a 4x10 or whatever, still wouldn’t change that annoying fact. I wish I could say “From now on, the store is open 35 hours each week and every employee works 35 hours, so everyone’s always here.” but our customers expect us to be open at times that are convenient for shopping, not what’s convenient for our employees.
Decades ago I worked shift work at a factory one summer. They had what they called a “6 on, 2 off”, which really wasn’t a good description of it. What they actually did was rotate the 2 days you got off each week, so that, for instance, if you got Monday/Tuesday one week, you got Tuesday/Wednesday the next. When you hit Sunday/Saturday, they simply weren’t contiguous that week. When your days off hit the weekend, you got two three day weekends in a row (Friday/Saturday, Sunday/Saturday, Sunday/Monday). When you worked Saturday or Sunday, you got time-and-a-half. The long term factory workers in the place seemed to like it.
I like the way they worked it when I was with the airline. Since they knew we all wanted to travel, they let us switch shifts with anyone in the same department. Doing this you could easily build up a string of 10-14 days off. Of course that meant that you’d also be working 10-14 days in a row some time in the future. It was great though.
Yep.
Just about any job where there are a large number of effectively interchangeable workers it makes sense to let them trade shifts amongst themselves almost without limit. It doesn’t matter *why *two workers want to swap two particular work shifts. As long as everything is covered and the company knows who to expect on duty and who to pay, life’s good.
The challenge for most businesses is they really don’t have that many jobs where individual workers are truly *en masse *interchangeable with one another.