Four Day Work Week? You will not get any arguments from me on that, all the points here look valid. Let's do it! Cheers.

Great idea. However, the big question mark is: do people really drive less on their day off?

I second that JD , as a hard working chef.
But on more important matters...
HOW ABOUT THE BLUES WIN OVER THE COASTERS ... GO YOU BLUE BAGGERS.

I think the old comments are still accurate, especially this one.

If this is actually advocating fewer hours worked...I think that will just accelerate outsourcing to countries where people will work 12 hour days, six days a week, for much less pay.

And the math critiques posted in the previous thread's comment do not appear to have been addressed.

As long as the overhead for hiring new employees is high, companies will prefer overtime (on top of a 40 hour work week)
rather than hiring more staff.

Also, if real pay is declining, workers will likely work longer to attempt to maintain their standard of living.

Another issue:

As we increasingly move to a solar-powered economy, we are going to have to re-engineer everything around the realities of the daily solar cycle. Whether sunlight is being used for interior lighting, or space & water heating, or electricity, or industrial CSP applications, most work is going to have to be done during those six hours or so centered on solar noon. This suggests to me that maybe a six hour per day, six day per week schedule is what we're really going to have to go to at least for most industrial and commercial operations. The good thing abouot that is that it would leave plenty of time each day for home gardening (which is better done at the start and end of each day anyway), chopping wood, crafts, or other sideline employments. It would require that people live pretty close to their employers, though - preferably within walking or bicycle distance.

I thought with cell phones, blackberries, laptops, etc. that people were pretty much working 24/7 anyway, regardless of whether they were at their physical place of employment. The real problem is that Americans, generally, are overworked compared to, for example, the Europeans. In addition, there are no laws requiring vacations so we have very short vacations.

Yes, it is true that if we don't work ourselves to death, then our jobs will be outsourced, which is happening anyway.

The fundamental problem is that we are in a global, largely free trade economy that will only continue to lower the living standards of most working Americans. We don't even truly have a five day/40 hour work week, so I see it as extremely unlikely that we will move to a 4 day work week.

As long as we are wedded to free trade nirvana, the life of the typical American worker will be nasty, brutish, and short. We seem to be perfectly happy with the current situation where the rich are getting much richer and the middle and lower classes are getting poorer. There is no politician with any chance of being President who will change that fundamental reality.

Further, as long as most of us "need" all the toys available in our consumer society, they will not make any changes which will lower their incomes. This is built into our DNA because of decades of consumerist propoganda starting in the early 1900s.

Further, as someone else stated above, more days off may actually increase miles traveled. I live in an area where "pleasure" driving rules.

I'm back.

Reason #14 The 4 Day Work Week would mean a reduction in the cost of childcare
Questionable –it's a question of relative costs: a high-flying manager won't stay at home on Friday just to save $50 on the babysitter. A 0-Day Work Week would reduce childcare costs to zero, of course.

Reason #16 The 4 Day Work Week feels great!
Purely subjective – speak for yourself. I actually enjoy my five-day workweek – meet colleagues at the proverbial water-cooler, listen to Katie Melua CDs as I drive to the office and back, eat great meals at a high-quality canteen where you can choose what you want and don't have to deliberate at length with your vegetarian wife and carnivore sons ...

Phew! As they say, there's no place like work. In fact, I'd go for six days any time.

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Good luck. One trouble is that despite its length, this is a static analysis.

I suspect that if people saw a four-day week as a lasting change, then their habits would change over time, and not in the direction of reducing fuel consumption. For example, the everlasting 24/7/365 school-sports hypercompetition would inexorably rise to a new level, with yet more routine driving halfway across the state to get young Johnny and Susie closer to the world-class level of play they so obviously deserve.

Seriously, people tend to respond to a block of free time by taking a trip; they can't think of anything else to do. Consider the Garden State Parking Lot, or Interstates 90 and 94 out of Chicago, or all the other jammed Interstates outbound from big cities the Friday night and Saturday morning of a nice weekend, or returning the last evening of said weekend. (Oh, and should you read this and feel inclined to put up yet another Blame America First post, consider the Autoroute du Soleil on any nice weekend, ground nearly to a halt all the way from Paris to Marseille.)

In addition, I doubt that one gets to reduce peak commuter traffic by divvying up the five days evenly. Many shops or groups will function less well if a different one-fifth of their people are out each day of the week. So a day will be chosen. Because people use free time to travel, Monday and Friday will be much preferred over Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Unless Mondays or Fridays are chosen, the irate bickering over this matter will cause administrators to throw up their hands and move on to The Next Big Thing. And people are social creatures who want to be off when others are off, so the day would tend gradually to standardize. (A shop could also rotate the day, but that is unlikely as it would confuse clients and customers - let's see, it's March, so my agent has today, Tuesday, off, no that was back in January, oh, fuhgeddaboudit, I need to move my business to another agency.)

If the real agenda was to reduce working hours for the aesthetic sake of a so-called simpler life or whatever, that would have to be accomplished in a more direct manner (and probably by fairly harsh command-and-control, given the experience with and ruckus over limiting working hours in France.) Meanwhile, on to the next idea.

(By the way, this subject was also just touched on by Tim Haab.)

To reduce energy usage, we could just go to a two-shift system. Manufacturers have known for a long time that running a factory on just one shift a day is a big waste. Why should office jobs be any different.

I'm at work for about 10 hours a day. That means my cube is sitting empty (so is the parking lot) for 14 hours a day. Wouldn't it make more sense to have another guy working there for that amount of time? If we started moving this direction, we wouldn't have to build another office building for decades.

It is really funny to read this post. Just this week, I negotiated with my boss to have Fridays off. I argued that a) otherwise I would quit, and b) I would be more productive on the other work days. She agreed. The result is that I gave up a potential promotion I didn't really want in exchange for more freedom in my life. I'm at home today on my first Friday off, reading this post.

Since last fall, I've been working as sort of an apprentice on a local farm outside of town. The Saturday farmer's market starts up in May, so the main reason I wanted Fridays off was so that I could work on the farm on Fridays to harvest and prepare for the market.

Not going to work one day won't save gasoline or emissions because I biked to work anyway (and I bike to the farm). However, I do feel that it's a step toward a life designed by me rather than one designed by my employer.

Obviously, this doesn't work for everyone. It's just my personal journey. But it feels great.

Four day weeks, and 35 hour weeks are already used elsewhere. B.C. government employees have had a 9-day pay period; they get one extra day off every two weeks. If there is a long weekend, they can take the extra day and have four in a row. Resource workers in the north who stay in camps almost never work a 5-day week.

IMO, the pressure for American employers to keep as few employees as possible and work them overtime is due to the private benefits structure in the U.S. An employee's health, dental, and extended care costs are huge, and born by the employer. This isn't fair. Preventitive health costs paid by an employer benefit the employee for years after he/she leaves the company (to work for the competition), and the result is a system where the employer and insurance companies over-promise (ie.. sell) benefits while not actually delivering when there is a claim.

A social healthcare system makes flexible work hours viable, because employers will not be afraid to hire more people.

Great idea, and you should phase it to 3 days in 2 years, and the to 2 days 2 years after that. This will give people less money to spend, and they would consume less fossil fuels for everything, not just gasoline. If most understood Peak Oil and the myths about alternatives, this plan would have a chance. But there is that big IF. Many people, politicians, and "experts" labor under ignorance and illusions about solar power, wind, oilgae, wind turbines, and gas power from poopies.

In my entire working life I never had the mythical 9 to 5 Monday through Friday job. In my bus driving days I worked 11 days of every two week pay period. I also worked in a hospital where services were provided 24/7/365.24. Grand Rapids, MI had 3 GM factories back in the 1970s and 3 full service hospitals. The hospitals had more employees than GM did. The area's largest employer was and probably still is a supermarket chain that never closes. Bringing back in some form the Sunday blue laws which prohibited most retail business from operating on the Sabbath would probably save more fuel than a 4-day work week.

The problem for this would be shift workers where the company works 3 shifts per day. Hard to do with 10 hour shifts, they would have to be 2x12 hours shifts, but labour laws in Ontario, for example, require sleep time and beds for all employees who work 12 or more hours in a row. The Toronto Fire department went from 10 hour day/14 hour night (which they had been doing since 1950's) shifts, to 24 hour shifts. Some like it, but most hate it. Appearently "sick" time has skyrocketed.

If not 10 hours per day, how many people are willing to take a 1/5 wage cut? There is no way industry is going to pay you for a day you do not work.

Less driving? Not a chance. Jevons Paradox. It might actually increase driving. With more 3 days weekends there's more incentive to take 3 day trips driving longer distances.

This idea has been batted around for decades. There was even a suggestion 20 years ago or so in Ontario that workers "share" their jobs with those who cannot find work. You work 3 days and your "partner" works the other 3 days. The caveat being that there would not be a reduction in pay!! Business threw that idea in the trash, dah!

Might sound nice, but there are so many different jobs, so many combinations and permutations of jobs out there that very few people would be able to take up the idea. If anything telecommuting is better where it can be done, but that is few people too.

(without reading the comments from 2007)

Reasons this won't work:

#1 - Middle management dislikes it, as they tend to like to see people in their cubes even if productivity is lower.

#2 - 10 hours days are not for everyone.
#2a - They have family obligations that require them to meet the kids after school.
#2b - The thought of a 7-5, 8-6 workday doesn't appeal to them. Not everyone can be productive for 10 hour stretches.

There are others, but I'd rather focus on the positive.
Providing flexible working conidtions is important. Not everyone wants to come in for a 9-5 job.

Some would rather do nine 8hr days and have an extra day off every other week. Some would rather do four 10hr days and have an extra day off each week. Others would rather keep to the "standard" five 8hr day.

If the goal is to reduce congestion & energy use, flexible starting times for large employers, encouraging telework, carpooling, transit, and bike/walk trips to work are likely as, if not more, effective than just a 10 hour day.

The 4-day 32 hour workweek is a great idea. It's true that 5/40 is arbitrary. A federal law is not only politically possible, it's probable if actually pushed through.

To address some critques:

do people really drive less on their day off?

If part of a legislative package (e.g. an Energy bill) that included driving disincentives (e.g. a gas tax) yes it would. It would adjust the structure of our commuting pattern to be less dependent on oil. Dependency, not actual usage should be the important concept from a planning/policy perspective.

that will just accelerate outsourcing

That can be used for practically any regulatory argument. From carbon cap/trade, to a gas tax, to immigration policy, to even the existence of the FDA or EPA. America is not going to compete with a race to the bottom strategy, no matter what we do. We're going to have to rely and improve on our comparative advantages in technology, infrastructure and natural resources. We'll never prevail by trying to out-compete on labor costs.

I think the biggest counter-debate is the impact on GDP. The French have more productivity per hour of work. This suggests that there probably is an optimum work week. Would people spend more on leisure, retail, personal services with more time off? Probably, which would in turn increase production in those sectors. If one could prove that a 32 hour work week would actually increase GDP, then I think it would sail through a Democratic congress.

I am pushing your logic even further, and suggesting a one day office work week. A while back a friend of mine nailed the term green working. For more on the idea, link to an earlier post:

http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/the-six-principles-of-green...

This is the perfect example of initiatives that would cost very little, and would result in increased quality of life. Plus, as mentioned in the post above, the telepresence technology is getting better and better.

This seems like easy pickin's. I think there is a lot of low hanging fruit to reduce oil demand. What about having those that can...work from home. In the information age it seems more plausible that we could get a good payback on this practice.

My favorite alternate work week is the 3 + 3 system. Three longer workdays followed by three days off. The employer has a pool of extra days for scheduling like filling in for someone who is sick or on vacation and the worker has a pool of days off to get a continous vacation or for religious holidays. Its great for continous operations like factories, hospitals, retail and so on since the schedule rolls right over sundays, bank holidays, religious holidays etc. Its a good system for an efficiently run individualistic and secularized culture.

Having read the article but not the comments yet, I have a basic question: For efficiency reasons and to compete better, most businesses and factories now run at least 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. (There may be reduced hours on Sunday). All the gasoline saved by the person who is working four days a week will just be used by whoever works the other days. So there is no savings unless you have a four day business week, not a four day work week for each individual employee.
As for productivity, you have to hire more people to work those extra days, so training them is an additional expense. Additional benefits for each new employee, especially health insurance, would also increase the cost to the employer. This work week proposal might help lower unemployment and help the economy (but maybe not the individual employer). So I would favot it for that reason.

I agree with all 16 reasons, yet I'm somewhat surprised an extremely powerful reason was overlooked: this arrangement is one of the ways of drastically reducing energy consumption, thus saving society from collapse (related to reason #1), without sentencing a considerable part of the population to starvation. It can be seen by looking at a simplified model of the economy based on the Easter Island (EI) case: one part of the population works on the production of necessary items/services (EI: fishing) and the other on discretionary items (EI: statue carving, transporting and setting up).

In the case of EI, the Island Council (?) could have realized in time the deforestation problem, foreseen its devastating potential consequences, and decreed an immediate end to all statue-related activities, so that the new rate of consumption of trees - now restricted to life-sustaining activities (canoe building, etc.) - was equal to the reforestation rate and the society was saved from collapse. This sustainable path could have been followed in any of 4 possible sub-paths:

A: Feed the people formerly working on statues while they relax on the beach.

B. Same as A. but have them develop polyphonic music, martial arts, and calculus (with the restriction of not cutting trees to make instruments, weapons, or paper!)

C. Have the people working in essential activities share those activities (and the associated capital goods: canoes in EI) with those previously working in discretionary activities. Thus, if initially 50% of the people fished 6 days a week and 50% worked on the statues, in the sustainable arrangement 50 % would fish Mon, Tue and Wed, the other 50 % would fish Thu, Fri and Sat using the same canoes as the other 50%, and everybody would have 3 additional free days per week to either relax or develop polyphonic music, martial arts, and calculus. This is equivalent to the shortened work week.

D. Let the people formerly employed in discretionary activities starve.

IMV this is one of the (if not "the") most important issues to solve as we face Peak Oil. Everyone here would agree that all forms of car racing (and jet ski rental and so many other unnecessary activities) should just end for good. But what about the people today making a living from them?

This comment applies mostly to we 8-5 types working M-F.

This suggestion will never be implemented because it makes too much sense.

While the corporate elite as well as others may disagree, IMO most of our "work" is basically competition for what is a fixed, or now shrinking, piece of the pie (ie, a zero sum game). Money we "earn" is often money that's taken out of the pockets of someone else.

50 years ago, most women stayed at home and took care of the family without having to "go to work". What has been gained--not much. All costs have risen to soak up the benefits of two incomes, while making life a lot more complicated and stressful than it used to be.

How many of us can really say that we "produce" something of value which is greater than energy content of the typical two gallons of gasoline we consume in our daily commute?

That being said, if we are talking about changes at the margin, it would be my preference that Wednesday be chosen as the "off", rather than a Monday or Friday, since it would be the least disruptive in the continuity of the week. Most people could figure out how to be productive at home for at least 2-4 hours on that day. I think most people would be willing to come in an hour earlier on the other four days to get this. In most cases, this would beat the heaviest hours of the commute.

Around 4-6 hours of the work week are consumed in meetings. A few key people could come in at the middle 3-4 hours of the day on Wednesday and conduct the more important meetings, which others could listen to or even participate in from home, again avoiding the heavy commute hours.

I think this would be far easier to implement than trying to decide if Monday or Friday should be the preferred day to stay home. It just seems more "balanced" to me to choose Wednesday, rather than getting long weekends off where it would take half a day just to "get up to speed"--my two cents worth.

The 8-hour day didn't just come out some government bureaucrat's head. It was an explicit goal of the labor movement for decades.

I would love to work a 4 day 40 hour week.

Hell, I typically work a 5 day 45-50 hour week now (chemical engineer in a production support role).

In general, I find it difficult to ever leave after 8 hours due to the nature of the job.

I have worked 3 12s and a 4 before for a few months and loved it in a different job, but it seems like the historical inertia really prevents serious consideration of these alternative flex times in manufacturing.

I have even mentioned the potential of working 4 10's to by boss recently, and she of course observed that we already work 10 hours a day...

I would not mind working 4 12's instead of my current schedule, especially if OT was allowed (currently not).