This concerns me. Currently I have something like 800 hours of sick time saved up. Where I work, you are expected to use sick time to for Dr.s appointments. I’m using it now to go to PT once a week for a shoulder injury. It’s a nice perk.
I expect some companies would make to take these appointments on your day off.
Much as I would love three days off, this couldn’t work for where I work. Many of us deal with domestic and international contractors and clients. We could not effectively work with them if we had days off during the work week. We could only adopt a 4/10 schedule if they all did.
Also, since many of us work ~10hrs a day anyway, we’d actually be getting less work done if we only worked 4 days a week.
It would be really difficult for two people working 10-hour days to arrange their schedules to have the child less hours in daycare than if they were both working 8-hour days.
Suppose the child is in day care from 8:30 to 17:00 (8 1/2 hours - a pretty long time for a two to five-year-old). I will assume the following commute times:
10 minutes from home to day care, 20 minutes from day care to work.
Parent 1 leaves at 8:20, drops kid off at 8:30, arrives at work at 8:50 or 9:00. That parent has to work until 18:00 with an 8-hour work day (1-hour lunch period) and gets home at 18:20.
Parent 2 leaves at 7:10, gets to work at 7:30, leaves work at 16:30 and gets to the day care at 16:50.
Now suppose both parents are working 10-hour days. How would they arrange their schedules for the child to be in day care less hours per day? Suppose they try to shorten the day care time from 9:30 to 16:00 (two hours less.) Their schedule becomes:
Parent 1 leaves at 9:20, drops kid off at 9:30, arrives at work at 9:50 or 10:00. That parent has to work until 23:00 with a 10-hour work day (1-hour lunch period) and gets home at 23:20.
Parent 2 leaves at 4:10, gets to work at 4:30 and leaves work at 15:30 to get to the day care at 15:50.
If both parents have different days off, then the child is only in daycare 3 days a week and the weekly number of hours in day care is 6.5 * 3 = 19.5 hours/week
One parent’s work day starts at 4:10 AM to get in the car to go to work. The other parent’s work day ends at 11:20 PM when they get home. One of the parents will not see the children in the evening, the other one will not see the children in the morning. That doesn’t seem so great to me. (Neither does leaving for work in the morning at 4:10 or getting homne in the evening at 11:20). The single parent’s situation is even worse.
And that’s even assuming that both parents have jobs allowing them to have such flexible schedules. In the Utah case, is everyone on the 10-hour plan supposed to be working the same hours? Then the working couple cannot arrange their schedules to try to minimize day-care time. Also, from reading the thread, I got the impression that in the Utah experiment, everyone had to take Friday off.
To go back to the example above, if I used 8-hour workdays and the same flexibility in work start/stop times, then the schedule would be:
Parent 1 leaves at 13:20, drops kid off at 13:30, arrives at work at 13:50 or 14:00. That parent has to work until 23:00 with an 8-hour work day (1-hour lunch period) and gets home at 23:20.
Parent 2 leaves at 4:10, gets to work at 4:30 and leaves work at 13:30 to get to the day care at 13:50.
The child is in day care for a half-hour instead of 6.5 hours! The weekly number of hours in day care is 5 * .5 = 2.5 hours/week.
Explain again how 10-hour workdays would reduce the number of hours in daycare?
How can you deal effectively with the customers when you have every Saturday off? People need to readjust their ideas of the work-week. Or your company can provide services on every day of the week with the understanding that there will be smaller staff on certain days. I still say that a truly progressive solution is to cut the number of hours per work-week, not rearrange the same number of hours to fit in less 24-hour periods.
Night shift? One parent works 8 pm to 6 am and drops the kid off at day care at 10 am before going to bed, the other parent works 8 am to 6 pm and picks the kid up at 6:30 right after work. 8.5 hours a day, 4 days a week, 34 hours a week. It’s difficult when dealing with 10-hour shifts, I agree.
As far as days off, though, Utah’s model needn’t be followed if it’s adopted by private companies. If people are allowed to pick their day off, then one parent has Friday off, one has Monday off, and there’s only 3 days where the kid has to be in daycare.
I’m all for fewer hours per week, though. I’ve only recently (the past six months, anyway) started insisting on leaving the office when I’m supposed to leave and not giving over all my evening time out of company loyalty, and it’s made a significant difference in my overall stress levels. I’m able to be happy at work and at home.
This is fair, and pretty much what I was describing without going into great detail. Let’s working with the 8.5 hours per day. With a 5-day work week, that’s 42.5 hours in day care. If the parents switch to 4x10, by say leaving one hour earlier for work and leaving work one hour later, that’s 10.5 hours in day care. Even if they both work the same days, that’s 42.0 hours in day care, or 1/2 hour less. If they can get different days off, say one works M-R and one T-F, that’s only 3 days of that for 31.5 hours, or a full 11 hours less of day care.
FOA, I never argued it would be less hours per day, just that it would be less total. Extrapolating on the example you provided above, I showed that it is either about the same or a lot better in that regard. Yes, I realize long periods of child care can be difficult on children. I’m not a parent, so I don’t know if 10.5 hours is significantly worse than 8.5 hours, but intuitively, I’d think spending 11 hours less in day care a week, even if the days are longer, is probably preferable to a significant amount more time. Second, as a matter of fact, your math is incorrect. A 10 hour work day that starts at 1000 with a 1 hour lunch ends at 2100, not 2300.
Either way, this is not what I’m promoting. The point I was trying to make was, the impression that a 10 hour work day necessitates 11 hours or more of day care is not true. Just staggering their hours, by an hour or two can help keep it in a more reasonable range.
As an example, one couple I know does something similar to this. The father works the 9x9 deal, and the mother does some freakishly long 3x12 or something (I’m not 100% clear on her hours, only when she leaves and what days she works, which is enough), but the concept is close enough. The father gets to work at 6:30, leaves work at 4:00 (1/2 hour lunch), and picks their kids up by 4:30; he takes every other Friday off. The mother leaves for work at 7:30 and drops the kids off at 8:00; she takes every Tuesday and Thursday off. The result, they’re only in day care for 8.5 hours a day, and for only 5 days every 2 weeks.
Yes, this is, in fact, my understanding as well. However, I’m not completely sure how their government agencies work, and I was also commenting on the 4x10 schedule in general. Even if it flops in Utah, it doesn’t mean that there are ways to adjust it to make it more suitable to more situations. I’d like to think that future versions would take some greater flexibility into the concept. My apologies for not being completely clear on what I was discussing.
Yes, extreme situations can be manufactured, but in general, it will result in less childcare. If both parents work 9-6 (with an hour lunch) and a 30 minute commute, that’s 9.5 hours in daycare, or 47.5 per week. If both parents work 7-6 with the same 30 minute commute, that’s 11.5 hours in day care, or 46 hours per week; if they have different days off that’s 34.5. If one parent works 7-4 and one works 9-6, that’s 7.5, or 37.5. If one parent works 7-6 and the other 9-8, that’s 9.5 for 38 hours (about the same) or, if they take different days off, 28.5.
Sure, you could stagger 8-hour work days so they spend practically no time in daycare, and you can do the same thing with 10-hour work days. I don’t think a little bit of staggering (like an hour or two) is particularly uncommon, but I do think that significant staggering (like your almost 12 hour staggering example) is very uncommon.
The point is, in most cases, this will either have very little effect on the total amount of day care (slightly better with no staggering, possibly slightly worse with some staggering) or be significantly better. Some families will have to pay for a little more, some families will have to pay for a little less, some families will pay the same, and some will pay a lot less.
There is a help desk on site where I work that has somewhat normal business hours (6:30-4:30, I think), but they run the 9x9 schedule, but still have a full staff on most days because. As an example, if you have 10 workers, and each has 1 day off every 2 weeks, then you can run a full staff of 9 for 9 hours a day. Of course, it’s not quite that clean and simple in practice, but the fact that mroe people take mondays and Fridays off is fine, because they generally receive fewer calls on those days anyway.
As for being progressive and cutting hours, my understanding is that that’s actually less cost effective than just rearranging the days. For instance, say one company hires four guys to do 40 hours of work a week for $40k; another company hires five guys to do 32 hours of work a week for $32k. Both companies are paying $160k for 160 hours of work a week, right? But the problem is, companies provide benefits as well, so unless the second group gets significantly less in benefits, the first company is more cost effective.
Our clients and contractors have weekends off as well; it just comes earlier for them. The bastards. 
I understand what you are saying about readjusting your idea of the work-week. But when you are dealing with people in a dozen different countries, time zones, and work habits, it’s inefficient and makes poor business sense to decide to change the availability of your resources and expect everyone else to deal with it. There will be no understanding; all they will see is our diminished ability to deliver, and then they’ll give our competitors a call.
Progress at what cost? We would lose clients and contractors if we limited our work week like this, I guarantee it. Contractors want to keep busy because they have bills to pay; clients want the product we deliver in order to release their product while the demand is high. If we cannot assign and deliver work at the 5-day a week, ~10-hour a day pace that we currently do, we’ll lose them all.
Some businesses are simply not well-suited for a change from 5/8 to 4/10. We, unfortunately, are one of them.
I work in Montana. We had a brief informal discussion about this and no one was particularly interested except for the programmers.
The rest of us work varied hours and often work 40+ during the school year. We earn an average of 120-160 hours of comp time each year. Throw in 5,000 to 10,000 miles of travel (all in-state, all driving) for each of us and there’s no desire to try and do that in four days a week.
We also think that state agencies shouldn’t say, “Sorry, I’ll call you back in three days.” Even when all of us are on the road we’re checking voice mail 11 hours a day and email for 12-14 hours. Unless you have a specific question that only one of us can answer**, you get a call back in 24 hours or less.
whistlepig
** It’s hard for me to return calls when I’m teaching an all-day workshop and doing working lunches.
The 11 hours difference is overstated, in your example, the 10-hours/day couple has a big difference in schedule. I could come up with the same number by adding some variance between the schedules for the 8/hour per day couple:
Parent 1 works 7-16 (instead of 7:30 - 16:30)
Parent 2 works 10:00 - 19:00 (instead of 9:00 - 18:00)
(BTW, these are both in the range of acceptable work schedules at my company)
child is at day care from 9:30 - 16:30 - 7 hours per day = 35 hours per week - almost the same as your 10-hour/day couple. However, this is not the main drawback for me. See next comment.
I think you were overstating the difference there. About the same - maybe. But 10.5 hours in day care vs. 8.5 makes a huge difference in my opinion. Specifically, it makes the difference between the child having breakfast and dinner at home with his parents vs. having breakfast and dinner at the daycare. My kids eat breakfast at 7:30 and dinner at 18:00. There is no way to fit meal preparation time and eating time around a 10.5 day outside the home. Mealtimes are very important to me - for one thing, I can make sure that they eat a nutritious meal, and that they eat even the vegetables they don’t like. And secondly, there is the community and discussion and teaching of manners that occurs during the meal. I wouldn’t want to give that up 3 or 4 days a week.
Whoops! Sometimes my brain goes wonky when doing that mental arithmetic. I was thinking 11 hours and ended up with 11 PM instead of 10AM + 11 = 9 PM. :o
Well, staggering by 1 hour (parent1: 7 - 18, parent2: 8 - 19:00) makes for a 11 hour day in day care (7:30 - 18:30 = 11 hours). You would have to stagger by at least two hours to bring it down to 10 hours per day in day care (and with the 10 hour in day care schedule my kids wouldn’t be eating breakfast and dinnet at home - so in my case I would want to stagger by 3 hours at least). A single parent, of course, is forced to the 12-hours/day in day care situation (e.g. single parent works from 7 - 18, child is in day care from 6:30 - 18:30).
Well, once we start using “freakish” schedules, I can come up with an 8-hour per day couple with almost zero day care time! Though granted I had a mistake with my workday ending at 23:00.
I disagree with you, and think that having a 10-hour work day as a standard schedule would wreak havoc (that’s right! havoc!!! :)) with a family’s schedule.
In any case, this is not my main beef. My main beef is that, with increases in worker productivity, the right thing for a company to do is reduce working hours, not try and cram in the same amount of hours in less days.
I’ll just have to repeat what I said before:
I am not a labour expert so can’t solve all these problems, but I’m sure that there were similar issues when the standard work week changed from 6 to 5 days and the working day dropped from 10 or 12 to 8. If the issues weren’t solvable, factory workers would still be at work 10 to 16 hours a day, 6 hours a week.
We don’t work at all like those factory workers did, so I don’t see how their ease in adjusting is relevant.
Besides, like I said, we’re here 10 hours a day anyway. 4/10 is a reduction in hours and would hurt us, not help us.
Replace “factory workers” with “office workers”. Office workers, in the 19th century, also worked more than 8-hour days, and were expected to work 6 days a week.
In any case, if you have a 50-hour work week, that’s not the norm in office jobs in the USA, at least in my experience (I am in the IT field.) How do other companies, where people only have 40-hour work weeks, manage to compete with you?
In any case, I don’t dispute an office wanting to remain open 5 days a week. I dispute the fact that workers need to work 40 hours a week.
The last I heard, we have the biggest market share for the kind of work we do (entertainment post-production). No one else matches the variety or quantity we do. That said, we do have competitors. I imagine other companies get by by having fewer clients or smaller ones who put out less work, and by being more specialized in what they do. They also put out inferior work. Half-serious winky smiley here.
We don’t need to do this. We could scale back. But we wouldn’t be the same company if we did. We couldn’t afford to do everything we do and keep everyone paid.
Some employees would work Wed. ,Thurs,Fri, Sat. 4 tens. Some would work Tues, wed,Thurs, Fri, , ETC,There is no reason to leave any important time uncovered.
I guess I need to describe the type of work we do. We translate subtitles. We have contractors, employees, and sister offices for over 50 languages.
The problem with the “Well, just change everyone’s schedules to X, X, and X” is that it assumes everyone has the skills necessary to get the work done, and it’s just an matter of rearranging the hours. That’s not always the case. In our case, we need people who are fluent in X language to be available almost constantly. Otherwise, we couldn’t deliver our work to our clients by our deadlines.
In other departments, such as the tech or media departments, skills can be trained and shifts could be divided as you describe. But those departments are dwarfed by our production department; any energy savings would be insignificant. Especially so since we have a night shift. This office is open about 24/7 and on weekdays there’s at least one person here 20 hours of the day.
Between the cost-saving measures we seem to be constantly trying to implement and our “green team” that organizes carpools and recycling efforts, if switching to a 4/10 was doable, we’d be doing it.
Hire more workers.
I had the most awesome work schedule ever–0500 to 1530, WThF off. No traffic to deal with, the honchos of course HAD to have their weekends off so we hardly ever saw management at all, and I got off early enough in the summer to go hit the river for a few hours of swimming after work before the sun went down. Who says this stupidy 8-5, M-F thing is THE BEST WAY to do things? Less traffic congestion ALSO saves gas because everybody’s moving, not just sitting there going three miles an hour for two hours a day. My overall commute time went from 1.5 hours/day to 50 min/day when I went on my 4/10 schedule, which just gave me even more time back to spend the way I want. Ten hour days gives you three ten minute breaks instead of two fifteen minute ones, which for me just works out better–I’m not a smoker, but those who did preferred the three breaks too. I never had a problem getting appointments for my days off and the only downcheck was not being able to go to weekend events–but then again, I don’t really do that sort of thing anyway so no big loss.
I say just make Monday a third day off for everyone and that way we’ll never have to deal with “someone having a bad case of the Mondays!” ever again. Win!
Seriously, though, staggering start times more widely would help a lot because traffic is a big fat fuel waster. It’d also help spread out the impact on public transit as well, because busses get caught in traffic too.
Telecommuting needs to expand severely as well because there are a LOT of jobs that don’t really require one to be physically present in an office to get the work done. Call centers, most office work, why do we have to travel to a specific place? Working from home also reduces energy needs for office buildings, shifts it to the employee–that’s a downcheck but it gets made up by being able to work in your underwear and having the fridge right there, heh heh…
The gubmint could do a lot to encourage this trend by offering incentives to companies that are more flexible about work times and shifts. It’s about time we made work a little more friendly to people who want to have a life, too!
Actually, some federal government agencies have been implementing telecommuting on a fairly wide basis. In the private sector, I think it’s growth has been limited principally by the reluctance of managers to lose direct physical supervision over their subordinates.