Written by:

Victoria Winckler
Director
The Bevan Foundation

 

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Recent research has claimed that a pilot of the four-day working week has been a ‘resounding success’.  Of the 61 companies that participated, 56 are reported to be continuing with the arrangement although only 18 are doing so permanently. Employees reportedly benefited too, with lower levels of stress and burn-out and a better work-life balance during the pilot. Campaigners are calling for a similar pilot to take place in Wales. So is Friday about to become the new Saturday?

There is no doubt that there is a problem with working hours in Wales.  A typical worker in Wales puts in a 37-hour week, but a minority work a great deal longer. Three in ten employees in transport work 48 hours a week or more while three in ten factory workers work 44 hours a week or more.  Ironically, a four-day week pattern is quite common in some sectors: for example, a current advert for a fulfilment operative in Merthyr Tydfil offers shifts of 7:00am to 6:00pm on a ‘four days on – four days off’ rolling pattern. The issue for these workers is not the number of days in their working week but the number of hours.

At the other end of the spectrum there are employees who either would like more hours of work or don’t have guaranteed hours. According to the latest figures, one in six people who current work part-time do so because they cannot find a full-time job, and 44,000 employees in Wales are on zero hours contracts, which means they do not know from one week to the next how many – if any – hours they will be working.  These workers want more and guaranteed hours of work, not a cut or change in work pattern.

Unfortunately the four-day working week pilot was undertaken amongst predominantly white-collar jobs so did not include workplaces and workers facing the longest working hours. Just 10% of participating businesses were in manufacturing, construction or engineering and just 32% of participating employees did not have degrees. So for all the impressive findings, it’s not really clear how a changing working pattern might apply to the whole economy.

The pilot also found that shifting to a four-day working week achieved a lower reduction in working hours than might have been expected. While participating employees worked fewer days, the typical working week fell just 4 hours. A surprising 13% reported no change and 15% said their hours had actually increased.  It’s not clear whether this was because of the arrangements adopted by businesses or pressures to maintain output in reduced hours.

That said, many of the employees participating in the pilot reported improvements to their health and well-being, with reductions in stress, burn-out and improved mental health, work-life balance and life satisfaction. These are impressive results that corporate well-being programmes should note. But the pilot also showed that four-day working week does not suit everyone. On several measures, a substantial minority of participating employees reported either no change in their well-being while a small minority said their well-being had worsened.

Last but not least, the pilot found that changing working hours and patterns have consequences for other terms and conditions, such as annual leave entitlements, working arrangements of part-timers and overtime. Some of the ad hoc solutions adopted in the pilot, such as excluding part-time workers (effectively cutting their pay), are not sustainable and will need to be addressed if the four-day working week is to be more widely adopted.

What does this mean for a four-day working week in Wales?

Wales clearly has a working hours problem: some employees work a lot of hours while others do not have enough. The pilot shows that a four-day working week brings benefits to some people working in white-collar jobs, but a minority in those jobs do not gain. And it is impossible to know if the changes can be applied in other types of jobs and business. The pilot has also shown that there are some big issues in implementing the changed working pattern that would need to be ironed out.

While the four-day working week has a role to play in improving working lives, it is neither quite the ‘resounding success’ claimed nor is it the solution for Wales’ working hours problem.  Instead, a reduction of the standard week to 36 hours and an end to zero hours contracts would be of greater benefit.