A four day work week could improve productivity and benefit mental health says Aidan Harper, a “4 Day Work Week” campaign organiser, about the work time reduction model.
Recently, public holidays have given students and workers a four day work week following the Easter weekend, the Workers Day public holiday and the Election day holiday.
Harper commented about when the campaign started in the United Kingdom, saying, “It started two or three years ago with a group of people who were interested in working time reduction, more generally recognising that working time for general workers was old and outdated which no longer fit the purpose.”
“We had a movement, a series of campaigns with trade unions, progressive businesses, etc. who made the case for moving towards shorter hours and we believe this cause for working time reduction is something we need to be organising around,’ says Harper.
Harper says that their demands include a reduction in working time to a four day week, 32 hours or any equivalent without a reduction in pay.
When talking about the possible benefits Harper says, “This will bring about benefits to gender inequality, to productivity, to well-being, to mental health to the unequal allocation of paid and unpaid work in society, to our relationship to the environment.”
Justine Heald (24), a sixth year MA Social Anthropology student at Stellenbosch University, says, “a four day work week on paper sounds great. I think it would be awesome if one could work really hard during those four days and then have enough time for leisure and to balance out the work life, hobbies, family and other social and practical responsibilities.”
You can watch the 4 Day Work Week Campaign promotional video here.
Harper says, “We see it as an enlightened, humane answer to a series of deeply embedded and interconnected crises which currently afflict our economy and our society, in which our current model of working time operates as a major barrier to overcoming some of these issues and in many cases is exacerbating the issues.”
“From an organisational point of view you can decrease sick-leave turnover, particularly if you’re looking at quality of work and the ability to work well, being better rested and happier leads to a higher quality of work,” he continued.
MC van Coller (25), a recent MSc Industrial Engineering graduate from Stellenbosch University, now working in continuous production for a food manufacturing company, says “that would be rad, I would enjoy that so much but it also depends on how inclined you are to do work and how much you enjoy the work that you do, otherwise you’re just going to use that as a scapegoat to do less work.”
Heald says, “What I also find about 5 day work weeks, even though it’s basically a weekend of recuperation, you might find yourself lacking energy and not wanting to do anything. I think it’s really beneficial to have more days and more time devoted to those aspects because a 5 day work week could get really tiresome.”
Van Coller disagrees and says, “It sounds like it could be a reward system for hard work in the workplace, like if you get all your shit done that you have to do in a certain time you can take a Friday or Monday but I don’t think it should be implemented permanently because, in industries that I work in, like the manufacturing industry, it’s 24 hour production at a very corporate scale.”
Heald says that her whole life has become governed by work and it would improve her mental and physical well-being although she says, “On the other side of the coin I think it might be a struggle in terms of motivation and getting ready to go back into the office and being lightly demotivated or unwilling to work 32 hours but I would certainly prefer a four day work week.”