So what do you guys think? Personally I would absolutely love to work four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days, but I can see employers grumbling about lost productivity because I think ultimately workers will be more productive under the current 5 day setup. I am also guessing the energy savings they are supposedly getting are minimal - its just transferring energy consumption from an office to many homes. All in all I am excited, and I hope it succeeds and spreads (at least to my state!).
Let me be more clear on what the debate is:
Will this result in a significant energy savings?
What will be the net gain/loss in worker productivity?
Many cities are contemplating this shift, orhave already done it to some degree or another. I think it’s a great idea, and would love to do it where I work. I think the energy savings will be substantial due to: decreased commuting, decreased energy use in the workplace, and more efficient energy/time/effort usage to make up for the “lost” day. The extra hours government agencies will be open Mon-Thurs will make up for their being closed on Friday.
Cops have worked 4/10 shifts for years without any problems.
I currently work 4-10’s. It’s not as great as some may think. My 4 days a week are shot - I don’t have time to do much other than work. I get home, work out for an hour, eat supper, clean up, and then I have an hour at most to do anything. Sure, I get fri’s off, but I have to spend most of it catching up on household chores that didn’t get done during the week.
I have the option to work 5-8’s and the only reason I don’t is the overtime situation. When we get busy, OT is expected. If I’m working 5-8’s, I have to come in on Sat and I only get one day off. If I’m working 4-10’s, I can come in on Fri and still get a two day weekend.
Another negative is that, at least in a case where I tried 4-10, the option was looked on as a great favor to the employee, and it was frowned upon for us to take any PTO during the workweek for personal business, such as doctor appointments or going to the DMV. Those sorts of things also tended to help fill up that “extra day off” quickly and completely.
I see two potential benefits. One, obviously a 20% reduction in work commuter miles from the added day off. Question is, will that be offset by the miles they generate running around on their newfound day off?
Two, the timing of the commute the other four days will be expanded. Someone usually on the road at 8 and 5 will now need to travel at 7 and 6 or something similar. While congestion may increase in duration, it theoretically should decrease in intensity.
As for if performance over the week period suffers, my guess would be that it would. People tire after working 10 hours. I’d be surprised, albeit pleasantly, if they’re as efficient and productive during the 9th and 10th as they were during the first 8.
We’re currently on a 9/80 plan. I’d wholeheartedly embrace a 4/40 as the 3 day weekends are simply wonderful.
I don’t understand why this is seen as such a negative. Why should you be allowed personal time off of work to go to the DMV in the first place? And time you lose from work by going to the doctor in the middle of a work day, still has to be caught up sometime, so it’s not as if you’re getting one over on your boss by spending his or her time on your personal business.
I don’t get all day off on Fridays, but I work 4 1/2 days, so my Friday afternoons off is when I schedule appointments, run errands, etc., so I have less of that crap that fills up Saturdays, giving me 2 full days to relax (theoretically – there are still things that spill over into the weekends), rather than having to do all the running around on Saturdays and only getting Sunday to hang out.
Obviously mileage varies, but I love it, and would actually rather have the whole day Friday to get even more personal stuff done.
I don’t know what the current tax laws are, but many years ago when Mattel first instituted half day Fridays (where I was working at the time), it was my understanding that one of the reasons they did that was that the state of California gave them some kind of tax break, since they’d be helping reduce traffic during peak rush hour on Fridays.
This is tangentially related to my old Master’s research - when in the late 1980’s in the UK some firms were compelled by strike to reduce the work week, the firms that simply knocked a number of minutes each day saw no benefits. Those that went over to either a 4.5 day week, or a 9 day fortnight actually saw overall production rise, and work force satisfaction went through the roof. These were manufacturing businesses, though, so I don’t know what the effect would be on white collar workers.
Because that’s what PTO is supposed to be for. It isn’t just for real vacations, or for being sick. In theory it’s also meant for you to be able to use it during the workweek with sufficient notice, usually for reasons of personal business, and usually in increments of less than a whole day. The idea is so that you don’t have to burn a whole day of work to spend a couple of hours at the dentist. You log it on your time sheet as PTO and it is accordingly deducted from your accrued PTO total. My point was, the company I was working for at the time told us we were expected not to ask for PTO during the four days of work, whereas with the traditional 8-5 plan it was OK to do so.
In terms of the actual work expected, they weren’t asking us to do more, nor were they taking away PTO. It was just that they took away some of the flexibility as to when PTO could be used. For that and other reasons, I found the 4-10 system to be more pain than it was worth.
Now 9-80 (alternate Mondays off) might be something I could get behind.
Nope - I mean the “Drive for 35.” A strike by the CSEU (Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, overwhelmingly the AEU by that stage) to reduce the working week from 39 hours to 35 hours.
Could have been mid-80’s. It’s been a while and I cannot remember the dates. I wrote about it in 1991.
So basically, you’re complaining that they shifted the personal time off that was available to use Monday through Friday, to Fridays only, and gave you the whole entire day off to do so, without penalty and without having to make a special request, and whether you needed it or not, you got it. The whole day. Not an hour or two from time to time, but an entire day, every single week.
Let me ask you, how many “personal days” per year did your company allow before the 4/10 shift change? 3? 5? 10?
Because after the shift change, you were given 50 days (assuming 2 weeks of paid vacation per year) a year to get your personal shit done during the standard work week without having to waste a weekend day to get it done, if you were smart enough to schedule it that way. How is that not better?
No. When you ask for time off to see the dentist, does your boss say “Why can’t you do it on Saturday?”
If your schedule is Monday to Thursday, 10 hours, then Friday is not paid personal time. They’re not getting paid at all for work on Friday, so it doesn’t count as leave. Friday is the same as Saturday and Sunday in that situation. So far as your boss is concerned, it doesn’t exist.
It sounds like you two are talking about different things - I think Spectre of Pithecanthropus is referring to using his allocated vacation time, not just telling the boss “hey, I won’t be around for a while”.
In which case it really doesn’t make any sense to consider Friday as your vacation time, any more than saying I had to use 16 hours of my vacation time to stay home next weekend.
PTO is like a little mini paid vacation you take to get things done for yourself. If you take a couple of hours on Wednesday afternoon for personal reasons, you don’t have to make up those two hours. You don’t work 40 hours that week, you work 38, but you get paid for 40–38 hours of work and 2 hours subtracted from your PTO account.
Its a question of flexibility. Of course when I left the company I got paid for any PTO that I couldn’t use, but by taking away the flexibility of it, they reduced its value.
Sometimes it isn’t enough to just shift all your worktime to four days instead of five–you need actual extra time to get your personal things done. Look at Brewha’s post, he says it pretty well.
I don’t remember, it was a long time ago. I think it was 5 or 6, but I never used more than 1 or 2.
I would bet that most of the people expressing support for this idea in this thread are not in the situation of being part of a two-parent working couple with kids in school. Working 10-hour days makes it that much harder to figure out what to do with your kids when school gets out.
At one of my previous companies, they had this system, which I found much preferable to the 4x10 workday:
M-Th 9 hours
F - 8 hours / F - day off, alternating
8 * 9 (M-Th) + 8 * 1 (1 Friday) = 80 hours
But realistically, with advances in productivity in the workplace due to more automation, the work week should be changed to:
M-Th 8 hours, Friday off
I’m sure business owners will start screaming poverty, ruin and the end of civilization if this happens, but then again I’m sure that the same outcries were heard when the five-day workweek became the norm.
This is true. I don’t have specific figures on hand, but the amount of productivity per unit of labor is much higher than it was 50 years ago. You’d think we would get more time off to compensate, but that idea would probably get shot down as being unAmerican.
Heh. In the last little bit, we haven’t even been paid for extra productivity.
I’d suspect that if a lot of companies do this, day care will adjust to match. If lots of people need childcare for 10 hour days, they’ll get it from some aggressive provider.
I think this would be a great idea. I can get a lot more done in a full day off than I can in the little nubbin of time I have after I get home. I wouldn’t bet on less traffic, though, since in the Bay Area traffic is bad from 7:30 am to 7:30 pm, if not longer.
I’d worry about “emergencies” that would push people to come in for 5 10 hour days. I knew someone who theoretically worked 3 days a week for our school district - she usually worked at least four.
I’d like to point out that PTO stands for payed time off. Personal is not mentioned anywhere in the definition.
Full time employees get X payed days off a year(it is measured in hours so it doesn’t screw with the 10 hour day thing). So they still get payed without coming in to work. To get PTO you must submit a request for it and your manager must approve it, but he has to let you take all the PTO you get a year within the year. If your manager shoots down a PTO request there is usually a good reason, like an end of fiscal year crunch or some such. But the manager can only reject your PTO requests for that long. Eventually you are gonna sit at your house and your employer is still gonna pay you. So it makes no sense to bitch about employees taking PTO, eventually the company is gonna have to give it to them.
If I get 120 hours of PTO a year, I am gonna sit on my ass for 15 work days(assuming an 8 hour day), and you’re damn right my employer is gonna pay me. If my manager started rejecting my PTO requests without good reason, I would think less of him as a manager. The length of the work day and the number of work days in a week does not really effect this.