🔗 Encouraging a four-day working week could make inequality worse
If the government is serious about achieving a four-day working week to raise productivity and improve employee wellbeing, it needs to encourage trials in the public sector. A recent trial by South Cambridgeshire Council showed how a four-day working week (32 hours on the same pay) can work successfully and offers a blueprint for wider trials across the public sector.
The government also needs to target a future date, say 2040, for the realisation of a four-day working week. This could be facilitated by establishing a partnership of unions and employers to identify barriers to a four-day working week and ways to overcome them.
Pathways to a four-day working week must address issues of inequality. It is important that low wages are addressed alongside work-time reduction. Making a four-day working week viable for more workers will inevitably require higher wages including a higher minimum wage.
A four-day working week can help respond to the problem of low productivity and address issues of climate change while improving the quality of life. It can and must be a part of the future of work.
But it will take effort to achieve it – not least from the government – and will test the limits of the law. It will entail a reimagining of the economy and a move to a situation where work and life are experienced differently and better. In the end, we must all work to work less.
I want this debate in my country, too.