Let’s give some serious thought to a four-day week
There is growing support from the public and private sector that the solution to the crisis could lie not in working more, but in working less, but more productively.
This is an idea I have written about before, and is one that now sounds more and more like a possibility: after all, the five-working-day week is an artificial convention that can be modified. Experiments carried out around the world seem to show that reducing the time we spend working has its merits: Swedes were more productive and motivated , as were Microsoft employees in Japan, along with people working at Target Publishing, Unilever and UK supermarket Morrisons. A British think tank, Autonomy has launched a nationwide campaign arguing that as we approach the end of the pandemic, a shorter working week would produce a healthier society with lower levels of unemployment.
Not too many decades ago, we worked 10 hours a day, six days a week. The current convention of an eight-hour, five-day week began in 1908 for religious reasons: Jewish workers in a factory were free on Saturday and worked on Sunday…
