Four-day work weeks – a notion brought forward by New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern – she suggested the idea in a Facebook live video in late May.
Bianca Bharti in the National Post said Ardern highlighted this move in light of New Zealand’s tourist industry – the government said the domestic industry employing 15 per cent of the population and contributing nearly $13.8 billion to the country’s gross domestic product would benefit from more national holidays.
Outside of the employees in the country’s tourist industry, Ardern argued New Zealanders would profit from having a greater number of long weekends.
According to Ardern, public holidays stimulated the economy and encouraged domestic tourism. Since the borders are closed to foreign travellers for an undetermined time, growing New Zealand’s internal tourist trade seemed viable.
The BBC reported Ms. Ardern as saying "We will not have open borders for the rest of the world for a long time to come," when she was in Australia on May 5 to discuss the so-called trans-Tasman bubble, where New Zealanders and Australians could travel between both countries without submitting to quarantines upon landing in either direction.
Business academics in Canada were also enthusiastic – the idea of four-day work weeks seemed appealing. Sharon Lindores writing in the Calgary Herald quoted John Trougakos, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who said “This is an opportunity to redesign the way we do things to make them better in the long run.”
Trougakos was researching methods on improving work settings with the objective of creating healthier, happier and productive employees.
The professor decided four-day work weeks might be a constructive direction for Canadian employers to pursue as the nation’s economy reopened.
“More forward-thinking companies should start thinking about it now,” he said, observing the pandemic might’ve brought an ideal time to reshuffle established dynamics, such as changing the five-workday-standard for Canada’s industries and businesses. “People are open to the fact that change is happening,” Trougakos surmised.
Work weeks had been readjusted in history before. When British coal miners were striking in 1974, PM Ted Heath proclaimed a three-day-week from January 1 to March 7. The oil crisis also affected the British government’s decision. The first of economic catastrophes in the 1970s (the second came in 1979) related to influencing gas and oil prices worldwide ended in March 1974, when OPEC lifted the embargo for production and exports from member countries.
Commercial electricity users in the UK were limited to using electricity three days a week in the winter of 1974. Essential services, including hospitals, supermarkets and newspapers, were excepted from the ruling by Heath’s short-lived Conservative government.
Television stations were required to stop broadcasting at 10:30 p.m. Pubs, restaurants and other businesses in the service industry were dramatically affected by the three-day work order, meant to conserve electricity and coal stocks at a time of labour unrest in the days when coal supplied much of the country’s power and during a distressing oil crisis touching many economies in the world including ours in Canada.
Four-day weeks in the post COVID-age are meant to be positive-minded, but Great Britain got rid of their three-day weeks soon after December 13, 1973, when the scheme became official.
The truth is, many Canadians worked more than five days a week long before the pandemic arrived. A four-day work week wouldn’t mean anything for parents, small business owners, employees working two or more part time jobs and fulltime workers supplementing wages with part time jobs. Regular employees, or those in managerial positions working various shifts on the rota from week to week, wouldn’t necessarily enjoy the so-called benefits of four-day weeks either.
Four-day work weeks wouldn’t modify work schedules on Western Canadian farms, where nine-day-week calendars are preferable.
For employees with other jobs, or have expanded responsibilities as fulltime employees, along with those with jobs outside of regular jobs like parenting, four-day weeks would dissolve into their routines.
