SOCIAL WELFARE

In Praise of Fridays

Is a four-day workweek inevitable?

While it has been well documented that the pandemic has reshaped our relationship with the digital and physical spaces, not much has been said about what that means long-term for those physical spaces and our need to be in them. Even before 2020, towns were starting to adopt a four-day workweek, but does this make even more sense in a post-COVID world?

According to an article in the Atlantic, from 2014, the time between the first five-day workweek – back in 1908 – and the first call for an even shorter workweek – by 1928 – was about 20 years. A Senate subcommittee predicted a 14-hour workweek, and Richard Nixon even called for a four-day workweek as Vice President “to improve American families’ lives.”

So the history of a four-day workweek is long, but the means to this end have been long in the making. If you were to eliminate one day from the workweek, it would logically be one of the days attached to the weekend, and most likely the Friday, even if only arbitrarily. In fact, this is the day that towns like Ellington will be tacking off as they move towards a four-day schedule, “backed by their observations that Fridays are the slowest of the week,” as noted in a recent article from the Courant.

The big change comes from the fact that more and more individuals are able to accomplish online what once would have necessitated a trip to a town or city hall. It was John Maynard Keynes who made the prediction in 1928 that within 100 years, technology would drastically decrease the workweek. While the technology to enable this has been around for years, we are just now reaching a point where, thanks to COVID, there is a mass-adoption of these tools.

Ellington for their part will not be decreasing the hours worked, despite decreasing the days worked. Employees will still be expected to work what is known as a compressed work schedule, by extending the hours on the four days they are open. This will allow residents the chance to work their jobs and still make a needed trip to town hall.

It is noted that some of these experiments resulted in increased productivity and efficiencies, some see the adoption as a perk in a time when it is difficult to attract new employees.

Whatever the reasoning, more towns and cities continue to adopt the four-day workweek. And it is telling that those that do, do not turn back to the five-day workweek. Thanks to advances, some in just the last three years, it’s now possible to do just about anything anywhere.