Random Thoughts on Four Day Work Weeks and the Price of Oil

Did you hear that there are businesses and state agencies moving to a four day work week?  The idea is to save on energy costs… the business’s, of course.  It has the side effect of saving normal people some costs, too.  In some cases, the extra day at home is still supposed to be dedicated to work.

I think a four day work week is a good thing.  As a teacher, Friday was almost always a waste, anyway.  Neither teachers nor students had much focus.  This doesn’t seem to be true only of teachers and students.  Two day weekends never seem to be enough to really recharge, either.  You spend all of Saturday recovering, maybe getting to a project, and then Sunday getting ready for Monday.  With three days off, you actually get your day of rest, which I’m convinced we need.  I need it, anyway.

It makes me think about our ideas about productivity in this country.  I bet we get done twice as much in a day today than we got done in 1950.  In some cases, I bet it’s three times as much.  Having increased our ability to do more in a day, did we culturally decide to diminish how many days we worked?  Nah, we just patted our backs on our increased productivity and had higher expectations placed on us.  Not only that, but by thinking in terms of the hourly investment of the employee’s time rather than what the employee is able to accomplish in that hour, businesses were able to justify paying the employee the same (or less) even though they were producing more.  CEO’s, of course, received fat bonuses for the increase in profit.

I like the idea of the four day work week but I like even more the idea of re-evaluating where we as a society our going to put our resources and time.