4-Day Workweeks: The Truth Behind That Deluge of Studies
Should the bandwagon slow its roll?
For decades, economists, labor allies, and working class wannabes have hailed four-day workweeks as inevitable.
100% of the Output; 80% of the Time; 100% of the Pay
The Big Idea: Shortening a workweek into four days (generally meaning four eight-hour days for 100% of the pay previously earned in a five-day week) leads to happier employees, healthier families, and environmental sustainability… with no loss of business productivity.
Since mid-pandemic (yeah, that’s a thing now), the professional class has framed a slew of four-day workweek pilot studies as a boon for the working class.
Over the last three years, the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of business radicalism, published no fewer than eight articles with headlines like “After Testing Four-Day Week, Companies Say They Don’t Want to Stop”; “Is a Four-Day Week the Future of Work?”; and “Is Now the Moment for the Four-Day Workweek?”
The New York Times ran at least eight articles during the same period.
Fun Fact 1: In September 1964, the Times ran one of its most cogent articles about four-day workweeks. The writer concluded, “It seems unlikely that the four‐day week will be postponed indefinitely. Indeed, most authorities are predicting that it will come, though they do not agree on when.”
In February 2023, Vox slammed the case closed with the post-mortem, “The five-day workweek is dead.”
A Limited Body of Evidence
Knowing that Henry Ford popularized the five-day workweek in the 1920s, a four-day workweek may seem a feasible increment fueled by the perfect storm of post-pandemic malaise, unleashing of AI, and an influx of immigrants into the workforce.
But confidence in the four-day workweek shouldn’t be based on the hype saturating our bandwidth.
Most of the recent experiments embraced as conclusive evidence are, upon closer examination, somewhat squishy. They’re spearheaded by 4 Day Week Global (4DWG), an organization, founded in New Zealand by an entrepreneur and his partner, advocating four-day, 32-hour workweeks at 100% pay. (“100-80-100™ is the international registered trademark of 4 Day Week Global Limited,” cautions the 4DWG website.)
To what extent has 4DWG managed the four-day workweek floodgates? In their own words:
They have overseen pilots in North America, Ireland, Australasia and following this study… the UK also. They have plans for similar initiatives in other parts of the globe in this ever-expanding space, with new pilots in Europe, South Africa, Australasia and Brazil…
The group’s news-making research reports — detailing studies conducted in partnership with institutions like Boston College and University of Cambridge — read like lobbyists’ position papers.
This isn’t to say 4DWG’s work should be dismissed or is conducted in bad faith. It’s one set of contributions to a limited body of evidence, with identifiable flaws and biases that, as with all research, demand we distinguish science from public relations.
Exclusive, Small, Young Companies
In the study that included 33 companies from the US and Ireland (40% of the subjects who completed the study’s surveys live in the US):
The set of participating companies was exclusive. “The largest group is from the administrative, IT, and telecoms sector…,” the report reads. “The second largest subset is professional services…” Not a lot of retail, food service, goods-producing, education, or agriculture — those industries employing the majority of private US workers. A larger US/Canadian Trial slated to launch this spring includes a food service business and a small roofing company; others look to be mostly desk work operations.
More than half of the companies had 10 or fewer employees.
Twelve companies were fully remote.
80% of the employees were younger than 45.
4DWG touts a host of business outcomes like “Overall revenue rose 8.14%… by the end of the trial.” Is this correct?…
Sixteen companies, only about half those in the study, supplied revenue data across the six-month trial period. We can only speculate about what happened to the half that chose not to share their data.
Year-over-year revenue increases during the tumultuous pandemic era, when the six-month trial took place, necessitate context not found in the report. What was going on in the business environment during periods represented in the data?
Eighteen percent of the companies failed to complete the end-of-program survey that asked about their overall experience.
Most of these items point to an overarching weakness of this research: selection bias. Workplaces volunteering for a study of a four-day workweek have traits that increase the chances of the intervention’s success. Generalizing their results to other employers is playing with fire.
In February 2023, 4DWG and its partners announced results of a study in the UK billed as the largest-scale trial of its kind, with 61 companies (nine recruited companies dropped out before the trial launched) and around 2,900 employees. The report boasts inclusion of companies representing “increasingly diverse sectors and sizes” — though a large majority seem like office environments and most had 25 or fewer employees. Average weekly work time decreased modestly from 38 to 34 hours. Unfortunately, the researchers could only cobble together revenue data from 47 of the 61 employers.
Advocates Gonna Advocate
Evidence schmevidence. Most workplaces aren’t laboratories, and the rigors of the scientific process usually needn’t and/or can’t be applied. Advocacy may be a first step that precedes sharper research, like the cluster randomized controlled trials used to assess wellness programs at BJ’s Wholesale Club and predictable scheduling at The Gap stores. In these cases, multiple sites of the same company are studied; some randomized to receive the intervention and others used as a control group.
4DWG’s website declares the US/Ireland pilot “a resounding success on virtually every dimension.” That’s fine. It’s okay for an advocacy group to advocate. And employers eager to shorten their workweeks based on a hunch and/or good intentions should have at it. Do surveyed workers say they want a shortened workweek? C’mon, of course! (Ask if they want a “compressed workweek” and their response may be less enthusiastic.)
Less okay: Media, HR thought leaders, and legislators parroting 4DWG’s one-sided reports as if they’re settled science.
This naïveté leads to disregard for potential risks of four-day workweeks: intensified work, increased inequality, reduced employee benefits, more workers taking on multiple jobs (luring some into seven-day workweeks, as low-wage work gets divided into four- and three-day jobs, so workers can do one of each), and unpredictable economic consequences like increased consumerism, labor shortages, and inflation.
We ignore these pitfalls because most of us — journalists, TED talkers, worker advocates, researchers, and politicians — are office workers… who forget that not everyone else is.
A four-day workweek? Sure, mark me down as a definite maybe. It’ll take positive outcomes from a systematic research agenda — not just a brilliantly executed public relations campaign — to fully convince me.
Fun Fact 2: In 1956, then-Vice President Richard Nixon tantalized voters with a four-day workweek.
Gift Articles
From the New York Times, compliments of Heigh Ho: No paywall for 14 days after publication of this post…
What Is the Ideal Retirement Age for Your Health? Average life expectancy has risen by 16 years since the national retirement age was set at 65. We asked health experts when they think people should stop working now. (April 3, 2023)
Four Days Shalt Thou Labor? The pressure for a shorter work week increases as technology takes over more of man’s work. (September 20 1964)
WorkChronicles
(used with permission)
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Interesting points made that I had never considered! I like the audio you’ve made available. Is it ironic that I enjoy listening to these during work?
Call me old fashioned but I still think that a true living wage, more employee ownership, safe working conditions, a decent benefit package, and paid sick leave would make the 5-day work week more beneficial (to say healthier) than jamming 5 into 4. I can also see that service workers would be the most vulnerable. With less days they'd get to juggle even more of their lives - a second job, family, childcare, caregiving of their elders, etc. The jury is still out in my mind and it's a very small jury so far.