Campaigners are seizing on the way Covid shook up working lives to push back the boundaries of the weekend for the first time since the postwar years when the whole of Saturday became a day off for most. One advocate predicts a four-day week could be available to the majority in Britain within five years, and Stephen Fry this week gave his voice to an increasingly confident four-day week campaign, which argues shorter hours boosts productivity, cuts carbon emissions and improves family life – all without cutting pay.

In the campaign, Fry suggests the seven-day week should no longer be considered “a brute fact” because it is “not real the way a day is real, a single spin of our planet, or the way a year is real, one lap of the Earth round the sun … the week was invented by us.”

But if the idea that Friday is the new Saturday sounds too good to be true, it may be. It has some heavyweight critics, especially as Britain was this week forecast to plunge into negative economic growth next year.

Robert Skidelsky, an economist who examined the idea of a national four-day week for the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, said: “It can’t be done on a legislative national basis.” He said that with real incomes about to fall in the face of rising food and energy prices, people would want to work more, not less, to maintain their standard of living.

Skidelsky advocates reducing working hours where the benefits of automation can be accrued, but cautioned that a shorter working week on the same pay – the principle of the four-day week campaign – is out of reach for “people in the gig economy who have to scrape and do several jobs to keep up a standard of living”.

A drive for more, not less, work is also being seen abroad. In China, companies are squeezing in more hours through the brutal-sounding 996 system – 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Elon Musk is the poster boy for entrepreneurs to “work as hard as hell” with 100-hour weeks.

Nevertheless, in the UK, North America and across Europe a more relaxing four-day week is becoming reality for some. The Spanish city of Valencia this month announced subsidies for employers to trial the shift, the electronics giant Panasonic in January announced an optional shorter week in Japan, and up to 50 firms are expected to join a four-day-week pilot in Australia.

“I think this is unstoppable,” said Andrew Barnes, who founded the four-day week global campaign after seeing a trial in New Zealand increase worker productivity to 125% of previous levels and sick days halved. “We are using a method of working designed for the repetitive manufacturing industry in the 1920s and we are applying that to the 21st century. It makes no sense.”

Lorraine Gray, the chief executive of Pursuit Marketing, a call centre business in Glasgow with clients including the NHS and Google, has 350 members of staff who work only Monday to Thursday. She said since the company first trialled the switch in 2016, productivity had increased by 29% and now only 12% of staff left each year, compared with 17% previously.

She said call centres often suffered from “Monday-itis” – workers calling in sick to get a long weekend. After switching to the four-day week, sickness dropped to almost zero. They found that many sick days were taken by staff only needing a couple of hours off for an appointment, but with the Friday now available for “personal admin” that had largely stopped.

“We get mums who say they now have time when the kids are at school so they can get their hair done or do housework and then the weekend is just quality time,” she said. “Some people do Open University courses, others look after elderly relations.”

Proponents of the shorter working week say it is possible because so much time is wasted at work because of distractions. When Barnes ran Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand, where he trialled the four-day pattern, he found workers’ use of non-business related websites fell 35%.

But squeezing the same amount of work into fewer hours may only be possible for people who manage their own workload; it is harder to boost productivity in occupations such as hospitality and public services such as nursing and policing.

The Vault City brewery in Edinburgh has been running a four-day week from Monday to Thursday since January on the same pay. Richard Wardrop, 32, the head of marketing, said he was attracted to join by the short week and he would “struggle now with a five-day week”. He has been using the time to travel, with long weekends in places such as Aviemore, and enjoys shopping and going out on a Friday when it’s quiet “before the chaos of the weekend”.

Source: The Guardian

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