3 day leisure is a 4 day working week possible depends on where you are what work you do & how valuable you are

3 day leisure is a 4 day working week possible depends on where you are what work you do & how valuable you are

Covid forced employers to greenlight working from home. One outcome, as normalcy at the workplace returns, is disaffection at having to go to office. Organisations, particularly in the technology industry, are facing employee churn. So employers are experimenting, especially in the West, with concepts like a 4-day working week. It’s early days and research shows mixed responses – higher productivity somewhere, higher stress elsewhere.

But the real question is which kind of employees will usually get almost half the week off. Economic historian Joel Mokyr posits that only about 2-3% of people drive economic growth and progress. The ones with the fundamental ideas and applications to change the way an entire society does things. Add some more skilled people to that list. And it’s still a sliver of the workforce that, for practical purposes, is indispensable. It’s a supplier’s market here and a 4-day week for this cohort can become the norm.

The rest are caught in the maelstrom of the onset of the fourth industrial revolution when digital models fundamentally change almost every activity. What the first three industrial revolutions teach us is the impact of these transformations on work is a combination of three incongruent forces: destruction of traditional jobs, productivity increases and eventually creation of new kinds of work. These forces play out over time and a 4-day week in this context can have a very different implication.

For some workers, it may mean less work and also less pay. For some employers, it may mean a Hobson’s choice between hiring more to allow 3-day weekends or losing top talent by sticking to 5-day working weeks. The idea of a 4-day week will evoke elation or apprehension depending on the nature of one’s skill and job. It may also test the implicit social agreement that underpins the interaction between markets, workers and the state. The future’s not all rosy.