Recent news coverage may have you excited at the prospect Australia will soon be adopting a four-day work week.
Recent news coverage may have you excited at the prospect Australia will soon be adopting a four-day work week.
If so, it’s worth taking a bit of a look behind those headlines.
The reports were prompted by the release of the final report of the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care.
As the name suggests, the terms of reference covered a wide range of issues relating to balancing working arrangements and caring obligations, such as for children, aged parents and supporting people with a disability.
The report contained 33 recommendations, including universal childhood education and care, additional supports for carers, and an enforceable ‘right to disconnect’ outside of working hours.
The recommendation that seems to have attracted most attention was for the federal government to undertake a four-day work week trial across a diversity of sectors and regions.
The committee favours a trial of the 100:80:100 model, whereby workers retain 100 per cent of their wages, cut their hours to 80 per cent and, in theory, remain 100 per cent as productive.
There is a considerable base of evidence to support the proposal.
Reports abound of trials in other countries and by individual organisations resulting in improved employee mental health, higher productivity, reduced absenteeism, and more equitable sharing of domestic duties between partners.
One important potential benefit is the effect on gender equity.
Research by Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre highlights that the normalisation of flexible working arrangements can help address the glass ceiling that prevents women from progressing to senior management roles.
However, the idea of a four-day work week is not new.
Trials in the 1970s generated similar claims of resounding benefits, fuelling expectations the four-day work week was an inevitable next step in workplace evolution.
With the benefit of time, longer-term evaluations of those trials were less positive about their success.
For one reason or another, acceptance of the four-day work week did not live up to the hype.
There are grounds to be cautious of the current optimism for a shorter week.
The accompanying figure – based on the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey – provides one.
Among employees working 26-30 hours per week – roughly equating to a four-day week – many more would prefer to work more hours than fewer (29 per cent against 12 per cent).
Even among those working 31-35 hours per week, roughly equal shares would prefer to work more hours than fewer hours, with two-thirds quite content with the number of hours they work.
The implication of a four-day working week at 100 per cent of pay is that people would be more productive than during a traditional full-time working week.
But one can’t help but be a bit sceptical that the hourly productivity of workers would rise to offset the reduction in hours worked.
Many organisations will have scheduling constraints associated with capital and customer services that limit such productivity gains.
And there is a risk that a shorter working week would drive work tasks further into people’s personal time as they try to maintain productivity.
Rather than adopt a four-day week, I would rather see us move on altogether from the arbitrary part-time and full-time distinction towards a more general acceptance of flexible working schedules, negotiated between workers and firms in ways that best meets their needs on a case-by-case basis.
- Professor Mike Dockery as Principal Research Fellow at the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre
