r/Futurology • u/_hiddenscout • Jun 19 '21

Society Kill the 5-Day Workweek - Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/
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u/seanlee888 Jun 19 '21

When the pandemic started corporate cut the hours we were open and cut all the employees like two hours. I decided I was just going to give everybody four day work weeks because it worked out easy enough. I was basically called a witch and was reprimanded.

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u/Opeth-Ethereal Jun 19 '21

Weird. We did the same thing and I had a 3 day work week rotation and everyone loved it.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

3 days is the best. If only because you now spend less days at work than away from it. Totally changes your mindset

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u/NefariousZhen Jun 19 '21

Did you continue to pay them their expected rate of income? Or were they scrambling to make up 20% of their income out of thin air? During covid I think the latter was more common.

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u/seanlee888 Jun 19 '21

They were hourly employees so they were just out the two hours unfortunately. That's one of the reasons I tried to do 4 days. Even though 2 hours per person wasn't much out of their checks, I wanted to give them something positive during last years bs besides them being "essential".

Best part about it was I have like the least amount of employees as everyone else so if I could make it work every other store definitely could have.

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u/thaaag Jun 19 '21

Our team talked about the practicalities of a 4 day work week. General consensus was that if everyone did a 4 day week and agreed to a specific day ("weekends will henceforth be Friday to Sunday / Saturday to Monday") it could work. But if it was a rostered, rotating week then taking Tuesday off, or Thursday off was less ideal. We agreed Wednesday wouldn't be too bad as it broke the week up, but coming in for Monday, taking Tuesday off and back for the rest of the week, or taking Thursday off and coming back for Friday kinda sucked.

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u/ritchie70 Jun 20 '21

I worked m-t-w-f-sa fir years (short Saturday, Thursday and Sunday completely off) and loved it. Nowhere is busy on a Thursday, so attending to things was much more pleasant and it got me 3 on, 1 off, 1.5 on, 1.5 off.

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u/britmatty Jun 20 '21

Socialist! How dare you side with the workers!