Aug
15
The great 4-day work week experiment
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9
Octogenarians remember a time when it took Scriptural scoldings to get people to take Sunday off. Most people worked six days a week and it wasn’t unusual to work very, very long days.
Somewhere along the line, people rebelled against this (I remember telling a colleague on the mainland 30 years ago that I loved my work and would never retire, and the colleague, older and wiser, replied, “Man was meant to walk on the beach, too”) and the 40-hour, 5-day work week took hold.
Having nights and weekends off made many people into more active consumers and boosted the U.S. economy in a number of interesting ways. The move to shorter hours coincided with more extracurricular activities in schools, since parents were more able to chauffeur kids to such events.
Today, new factors are in play, which make it economical to consider whether workers can squeeze their 40 hours into four days rather than five.
For the worker, and for the city planner, there is the matter of traffic congestion. If you’re wasting an hour or two a day in commuting, there is something very attractive indeed about going from 10 commutes per week to just eight. The savings is actually greater than one fifth of previous commuting time, because if you’re working a longer day, you very likely will be commuting in slacker periods when traffic is lighter.
Suppose you commute from Ewa to Honolulu and it takes an average of 60 minutes each way each day. You switch to a 10-hour day, four days a week, and because you are driving in earlier and leaving later your average travel time is reduced to 50 minutes each way each day. Just 10 minutes difference. You don’t save two hours by being off Friday — you save three hours and 20 minutes because of the shorter travel time on the other days.
And the truth is, even if you saved only one hour a week, it’s still worth it, when you consider that you’ve got a whole extra day to run errands and make doctor appointments. You can move all the work you do for yourself on weekends to Friday, and have a “real” weekend.
Even if your household finances are pressed and you need to work a weekend job, having Friday off takes off a lot of the pressure. After all, when you work seven days a week, when do you get your teeth cleaned? When do you take the car in to be fixed? How many months has it been since you saw a movie in a theater?
Erwin Hudelist of Hagadone Printing has put his production staff on a four-day work week. And the Lingle administration has begun an experiment with it in the state Department of Human Resource Development, roughly 100 people. Hudelist kept his delivery and customer service people on a five-day week, but still found savings in building operation expenses. Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona says the state experiment puts everybody on four days, since people can still interact with the office online on Fridays.
Hudelist and Aiona both say the biggest issue for employees who are struggling with the new system seems to be day care.
Aiona says the savings from the state experiment are limited by the fact that the HR employees are in a building with other people who are still working five-day weeks. To recoup real building operation savings, the four-day work week should be tried in departments that have their own buildings.
As state tax revenues ebb, this could be a good way to identify cost savings without actually laying off state employees.
The state government is proceeding prudently. It chose a non-union shop for its experiment (the HR people are non-union because they deal with confidential personnel files, the moral equivalent of being management) because there’s no point in negotiating with the union until both sides have some idea of how this works.
But one thing both sides know already is that a large number of state workers would really like to have a three-day weekend.
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