Three/four day weeks / the politics of free time

Leo said:

perhaps one reason (here in the states, anyway) is employee benefits: companies would rather pay health insurance/pension for one employee instead of two or three.

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There is a bit of that: a firm giving everyone a 20% cut in take-home pay and an extra day a week off doesn't neccessarily mean they can afford to employ proporionately more people.

I can also see a few fundamental practical issues - eg it'd be much harder to get everyone together in a meeting if people are off on random days, you'd have a load of dead space at desks - and quite a lot of things that would take a general cultural shift to make it work - eg companies actually expecting 4 days work a week rather than expecting five days of work to be done in four days, clients getting used to the idea that you might not be able to get in touch with Steve on wednesdays no matter how urgent it is.

But it is something that I think would make life better for a lot of people (albeit almost exclusively middle class people) and I can see it coming in by degrees - eg I've heard of a few people getting a four day week basically by being good enough techies that the company will make an exception for them to stop them leaving. I can see it becoming more common by degrees from that basis, particularly if / when the economy picks up and companies start having to compete for good staff more.

Slothrop said:

There is a bit of that: a firm giving everyone a 20% cut in take-home pay and an extra day a week off doesn't neccessarily mean they can afford to employ proporionately more people.

I can also see a few fundamental practical issues - eg it'd be much harder to get everyone together in a meeting if people are off on random days....

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Well yeah.

Mr. Tea said:

So many people here take a day off every week for the purposes of being a daddy that it's a bit of a pain when I need to talk to someone on a Friday and no fucker is actually here.

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Slothrop said:

But it is something that I think would make life better for a lot of people (albeit almost exclusively middle class people)

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As I think I said earlier, it depends wholly on the kind of work you do. With lots of jobs you're either doing it or you're not, you can't really do it any more or less 'efficiently' than you're doing it already. It also doesn't apply to anything that involves dealing with 'customers' - or lets say, people who receive some service (patients, pupils...) - which is probably most jobs in a service-based economy. To say nothing of the fact that people in low-wage jobs already would be screwed with a 20% pay cut.

As Coco Chanel said, "There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time."

More quotes plz.

"I have nothing to declare except that I'm a big gay smart-arse" - Oscar Wilde