Four day weeks could cause employees to overwork

The argument

Supporters of the four day week present it as a route to a more productive and happier workforce, and opponents of implementation accept that this is how the change is usually sold. Their objection is that the arithmetic of the working week does not alter simply because the number of days does. On this view the decisive question is what happens to the workload. If the volume of work expected of an employee stays the same while the days available to complete it fall to four, then the work has not been reduced; it has been compressed. The most likely response, opponents argue, is that employees lengthen the four days they still have, absorbing the missing day into earlier starts and later finishes, so that the arrangement delivers the same output through a more intense schedule rather than a lighter one. The second consequence follows for those who cannot absorb it. Where the compressed week makes deadlines unreachable within the four days, the pressure does not end when the fourth day does; it travels with the employee into the days off. Opponents argue that an unmet deadline is itself a form of work that continues to occupy someone who is nominally resting, so the additional day is spent anticipating the backlog rather than recovering from the week. On this account the extra day off is nominally free but not actually free, and the rest it is supposed to provide is precisely what the arrangement takes away. Taken together these two effects are held to reverse the case for the policy. The benefit on offer is one additional day away from work; the cost is either longer and more intense hours across the remaining four days or a day off degraded by stress about work left undone. Opponents argue that neither price is worth paying for that single extra day, and that a reform which merely redistributes an unchanged workload into less time, without reducing what is actually asked of employees, should not be implemented.

Premises

Counter-arguments

On average, a British employee working full time works 42 hours a week, with two billion hours of unpaid overtime. Over half a million workers suffer from work related mental health conditions, with 15.4 million days lost to work related stress. Being able to redistribute hours away and engaging in more leisure time, would stop individuals from being overworked, giving an overall better quality of life. The founder of Unchartered had encouraged more rather than less working hours during the pandemic. After a few weeks, it became apparent that staff were struggling with balancing work, meetings and home-schooling, and so a four day working week was introduced. It was found that employees seemed more engaged and refreshed. In another firm it was found that working compressed hours focused people more and things were done more efficiently, with meetings being streamlined.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise assumes the workload is fixed, but the trials the counter describes redesigned the work rather than compressing it — meetings were streamlined and low-value tasks dropped — so the hours were redistributed instead of stacked into four days. [Rejecting P2] The comparison is to an idealised five-day week rather than the actual one. On the counter's figures British full-time employees already average 42 hours, with two billion hours of unpaid overtime and 15.4 million days lost to work-related stress, so deadline pressure spilling into rest time is a feature of the status quo, not a cost the shorter week introduces.