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The case for a four-day standard working week

The five-day working week and the two-day weekend have been standard for so long that it is hard for many to imagine anything different. However, it dates back only to the middle of the 20th century as a normal way of working. Before that, Saturday was a normal working day in Western countries, and only Sunday was normally taken as a day of rest.

The advent of the weekend, and the associated standard workweek of 35 to 40 hours, was the culmination of a long series of reductions in working hours from the peak of 70 hours or more reached in the early 19th century (Schor 1993).

For most of the 20th century, it was expected that these reductions would continue, as technological progress reduced the labour input needed to produce any given volume of output. Writing in the 1930s, Keynes argued that a 15-hour week would be achievable in two generations, a claim assessed by Quiggin (2012). By the 1970s, substantial literature had been devoted to worrying about how people might manage to occupy all their free time (Jones 1982; Scitovsky 1976).

In reality, the trend towards reduced working hours came to a halt in the 1980s, ending with the shift to a 38-hour standard working week, as opposed to the 35-hour week unions had advocated since the early 1970s. Since then, there have been some improvements in parental and carers’ leave but no general reductions in standard hours of work.

Meanwhile, the intensity of work has generally increased, and the dominance of the standard five-day week has been eroded by reductions in penalty rates. The result of these developments has been an increase in stress and burnout, with adverse consequences for both mental health and long-term productivity.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened concerns about stress and burnout. The problems have been particularly severe for front-line workers in health and aged care.

The pandemic has also overturned longstanding assumptions about the nature of work and our relationship to work. Most obviously, remote work has proved more successful than even its most optimistic advocates predicted. More generally, it has become clear that ‘This is the way we’ve always done things’ is not a sufficient basis for sticking to existing work arrangements.

One manifestation of this has been renewed interest in the idea of a four-day working week. A number of enterprises are undertaking trials as part of the 4 Day Week Global (4DW Global) initiative. These trials will provide useful evidence on how various versions of the four-day week might be implemented, and on the effects on mental health, work–life balance, productivity and job turnover.

While such individual initiatives are valuable, government action is essential. As major employers, governments can lead the way in implementing improved working conditions. And, at some point, the general shift to a four-day week will require legislative action.

A four-day working week is well within the realm of economic feasibility. But how much, if anything, would it cost in terms of lost production and lower wages?

History of working hours

In 1856, Melbourne stonemasons became some of the first workers in the world to achieve an eight-hour working day (New Zealand also claims this achievement). This event is still commemorated in Tasmania, where the Labour Day holiday is called Eight Hours Day.

For the 100 years and more following this milestone, standard working hours were slowly but steadily reduced. The working week was cut from six days to five by 1948, bringing us that great boon, the weekend. Thanks to steady increases in productivity, all this was achieved while living standards even improved steadily.

Although the standard work week remained fixed at five days, increases in leisure continued until the late 20th century. Annual leave was introduced, increasing to four weeks a year in the 1970s. Sick leave, long service leave and an increased number of public holidays all reduced the number of hours worked per year.

Finally, weekly working hours were cut from 40 to 38 in 1981. Some unionised workers in industries such as construction were able to negotiate slightly shorter hours, allowing them to work a nine-day fortnight. This typically involves working days of about eight hours for a total of 72 hours a fortnight, or 36 hours in an average workweek. That is the same hours per day as in the 19th century but with around two-thirds as many days of work in a year.

All this progress came to a halt with the era of micro-economic reform (often called neoliberalism) that began in the 1980s. There has been no significant reduction in standard hours since then. The actual number of hours worked has ebbed and flowed according to the state of the labour market, but without any clear trend.

A large increase in women’s participation in the workforce was accompanied by an increase in part-time and casual employment. To some extent, the rise of part-time work allowed for an element of work–life balance consistent with traditional gender roles that assigned women more responsibility for home production and child care. However, the insecurity of casual employment worked in the opposite direction.

The industrial relations system

For most of the period of neoliberalism, employers favoured longer hours of work for their core full-time workforce, while workers and unions pushed for better work–life balance. The forces have ebbed and flowed, with no clear direction. No sustained progress towards improved work–life balance has been achieved since the 1990s.

In the 1990s, following the recession of 1989–91, bargaining power was strongly in the hands of employers. Work intensification resulted in a temporary increase in productivity, described at the time as a ‘miracle’, portending the emergence of a New Economy. This euphoria was short-lived (Quiggin 2001).

The intensity of work increased to the extent that conservative prime minister John Howard described the issue as a ‘barbecue stopper’ (Hewett 2001; quoted in Treguer 2023). Howard meant that mention of the issue was sufficient to stop discussion of any other topic. However, the increasing prevalence of unpaid overtime, including on weekends, meant that work intensification literally stopped barbecues from happening.

Improvements in the labour market contributed to a gradual reduction in the long hours of work from the late 1990s until the advent of the Howard government’s Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 (WorkChoices), which again shifted the balance of power to employers. However, the balance shifted once more with the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, partly due to the ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign led by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).

Most recently, the experience of the COVID pandemic has made it clear that existing ways of organising work are not set in stone. Most notably, many workers found they could achieve better work balance through remote work, without any reduction in productivity. Strenuous efforts by managers and employers to impose a return to office-based work have been at most partially successful. More enlightened employers have accepted the need to accommodate change and allow workers more control over their lives.

The COVID experience has produced a variety of responses, including increased resistance to overwork (‘quiet quitting’) and greater job mobility (‘The Great Resignation’). This in turn has increased the willingness of employers to consider ideas such as the four-day week, with the aim of improving worker satisfaction.

Work–life balance, burnout and employee retention

Work–life balance

Material standards of living have improved substantially over the past 40 years. By contrast, there has been no improvement in work–life balance.

If anything, the demands faced by Australian families outside working hours have been intensified. Social expectations about the need for parents to spend time with children have increased, and this is reflected in a global upward trend (Ortiz-Ospina 2020). The trend is particularly evident for university-educated parents, a group that is growing in size.

Technological progress has done little to offset this. Labour-saving devices, including refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens, led to a considerable reduction in the hours required for housework from the 1950s onwards. However, most of the gains had been realised by the late 1970s, just as reductions in standard working hours came to an end.

The lack of progress in work–life balance is connected to a variety of social problems. For example, a survey by Relationships Australia (2008) found that stress and work pressures were among the primary obstacles to forming relationships and the primary external reasons for relationship breakdown.

Over the last decade or so, awareness of the problems has increased. A variety of responses have been tried, with the aim of increasing flexibility for workers and reducing burnout. However, without a reduction in standard hours of work, the problem is essentially insoluble.

Burnout

Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Although burnout arises in a number of contexts, including parenting, it is most often caused, or at least contributed to, by problems at work.

Long hours are not the sole source of burnout, but they are commonly a contributing factor.

Burnout leads to mental health problems for workers, and poor work performance and high rates of resignation for employers. Although many employers are aware of the problem, it has historically proved difficult for individual employers to break from well-established, even if harmful, industry practices (Buchanan and Wanrooy 2001).

Collie (2015) notes the adverse consequences:

Musculoskeletal conditions, traditionally the major type of workplace injury, are becoming less prevalent, whereas work-related mental health conditions are becoming more common. We have more workers with insecure jobs, we work longer hours on average, and workplace stress has been growing.

But while we have been effective at reducing workplace risk for physical injuries in Australia, we have not paid the same attention to risk factors for mental health conditions.

Employee retention

It is widely recognised that burnout and overwork contribute to job turnover, and particularly to the loss of the skilled and motivated employees most likely to suffer burnout. Staff who are unable or unwilling to leave may adopt the option of ‘quiet quitting’, seeking to minimise their effort while maintaining an appearance of commitment.

Health and aged-care workers

Even before the COVID pandemic, healthcare workers such as nurses and doctors experienced high levels of stress and burnout. As Duckett and Meehan (2022) observe, citing Markwell and Wainer (2009):

Multiple Australian studies have found burnout rates of more than 50 per cent among health care workers, although rates are lower in general practice. US surveys have also consistently shown burnout is higher among doctors, and especially emergency doctors, than in the general workforce.

A US study by Kronos Inc. (2017) found that more than three out of five nurses (63 per cent) say their work has caused job burnout, and two out of five (41 per cent) state they have considered changing hospitals in the past year because they have felt burned out.

More generally, any workplace that is characterised by stress and overwork is ill-placed to handle an emergency. If the health system had more workers on shorter standard hours, the capacity to handle a surge of demand through extra shifts would be much greater.

The resurgence of interest in the four-day week

As disillusionment with the economic consequences of neoliberalism has grown, there has been a resurgence of interest in ideas like the four-day week. The GFC was an important element in this process, undermining faith in markets, particularly in financial markets, which had always led the push for market reform.

The disruption created by the COVID-19 pandemic has led many of us to reconsider our relationship to work, as well as our priorities in expenditure. Some are eager to return to pre-pandemic ‘normality’. Others have found working from home to be liberating and are keen to preserve some of their new-found autonomy. Still others, such as health workers, are simply exhausted after two years dealing with the ever-changing demands of the pandemic. One manifestation of our exhaustion has been the rise of the ‘anti-work’ movement, which rejects the whole idea of paid employment as a way to organise necessary labour.

A less radical response has been increased interest in the idea of a four-day working week.

What would a four-day working week look like?

Proposals for a four-day week differ regarding the associated change in working hours. At one extreme, some proposals leave weekly hours unchanged, compressing five days’ work into four. At the other, daily working hours are unchanged, and the number of hours in the standard working week is reduced by 20 per cent.There seems little value in considering proposals with no reduction in weekly hours. With a 38-hour working week, and allowing an hour for lunch, that would entail 10.5 hours at work every day, with a commute potentially added. On the other hand, some increase in daily hours, such as a return to the eight-hour working day, might be an acceptable trade-off for a four-day week. This is discussed in more detail below, along with measures that affect leave arrangements of various kinds.

It is also necessary to consider whether a four-day week should take the form of a three-day weekend, extended to include Monday (or perhaps Friday). One alternative is an extension of the rostered day off prevailing in some parts of the building industry, where all workers have one day off each fortnight, but the number rostered on any given day is constant. Another option, derived from the experience of the pandemic, would be a core three-day week (Tuesday to Thursday) with workers having either Friday or Monday off.

One path to a four-day week

To provide a concrete basis for discussion, consider a proposal to replace the current standard working week of 38 hours over five days with a working week of 32 hours over four eight-hour days. The proposal would require both a reduction in annual hours of work and foregoing some existing entitlements (public and annual holidays).

The first step would be a reduction in the standard working week from 38 hours to 35 with no reduction in pay. Such a change was first proposed by ACTU in 1973, well before most current employees entered the labour force. In the subsequent period of nearly 50 years, GDP per hour worked has more than doubled, yet working hours have barely changed.

A reduction from 38 hours to 35 would be equivalent to an 8 per cent increase in real hourly wages. The cost to employers would be partly offset by the increase in output per hour commonly observed when standard working hours are reduced.

With four weeks’ annual leave and 10 public holidays per year, a standard 35-hour working week would be equivalent to just over 1,600 hours of work per year, compared to over 1,800 hours at present. On the same basis, a 32-hour working week would be equivalent to just over 1,450 hours of work per year. However, with appropriate adjustments to leave and public holiday arrangements, a 32-hour working week would be consistent with 1,600 hours of work per year.

The first step would be to require four days of work on weeks that include a public holiday. In effect, public holidays would still be celebrated but would not produce a reduction in annual working hours. Under this adjustment, a 32-hour working week would be equivalent to just over 1,530 hours of work per year. Given that many public holidays exist primarily to provide workers with a long weekend, it seems unlikely that there would be strong objections to this trade-off.

The second, and probably more controversial, measure would be to reduce annual leave from four weeks to two for workers who chose to work a four-day week all year round. Workers who wanted four weeks of annual leave would be required to put in eight additional days of work during the standard working year. While this might sound complicated, it is similar to existing arrangements such as flexitime and days off in lieu of overtime.

A variation or extension of this proposal could be:

• Step 1: 35 hours
• Step 2: 32 hours with associated changes to public holidays and annual leave for those who ‘choose’ this option
• Step 3: 32 hours with a standard four weeks’ annual leave but with provisions for working on public holidays retained.

The 4 Day Week Global trial

A variety of experiments with four-day weeks have been undertaken, but none have been particularly rigorous. The first large-scale trials are now being undertaken by 4 Day Week Global (4DW Global). The efforts of 4DW Global began with the adoption of a four-day week by New Zealand company trustee company Perpetual Guardian. This shift was highly successful and led to the establishment of 4DW Global, the aim being to provide credible evidence on the implications of a four-day week.

The approach adopted has been to seek the voluntary participation of employers and employees in a scientifically monitored trial. Experiments have commenced in a number of countries, including the UK and Australia. Participants complete questionnaires at the beginning and end of the experiment. The results are to be analysed by a team led by Professor Juliet Schor. The team includes Australian researchers Professor John Buchanan and myself.

At this point, the UK study has reached the halfway point. Survey data have yet to be completed and analysed. However, interim responses from employers have been highly positive.

A series of questions were posed. Participants choose each answer on a scale of 1 to 5. Of those who have responded:

• 88 per cent state that the four-day week is working ‘well’ for their business at this stage in the trial
• 46 per cent say their business productivity has ‘maintained around the same level’, while 34 per cent report that it has ‘improved slightly’ and 15 per cent say it has ‘improved significantly’
• rating how smooth the transition to a four-day week has been, with ‘5’ being ‘extremely smooth’ and ‘1’ being ‘extremely challenging’, 29 per cent of respondents selected ‘5’, 49 per cent selected ‘4’ and 20 per cent selected ‘3’
• 86 per cent of respondents stated that at this juncture in the trial, they would be ‘extremely likely’ or ‘likely’ to consider retaining the four-day week policy after the trial period.

Summing up

Despite great technological advances and chronic concern over problems of work–life balance, Australian workers have seen no significant change in standard working hours for 40 years. The greatest barriers to change include inertia and the resistance of employers to reductions in working hours.

It is time to break through these barriers. The shift to remote work during and after COVID lockdowns has shown that radical change is socially and economically feasible.

Proposals for a four-day standard working week are now on the policy agenda. Progressive employers are already trialling various forms of the four-day week. It is time for governments to take the lead in this respect.

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