A 4-day work week is doomed to fail but of course the lazy Greens are demanding it

We are feeding the laziness epidemic and I fear we may never recover

The mainstream media are reporting this groundbreaking revelation today- working a 4 day week without taking a pay cut and without increasing hours on the days worked improves health.

Well no shit Sherlock, you didn’t need a 6-figure consultant to tell you that.

We’d all love to drop 8 hours from our work week. We’d all love a long weekend every week to take a midday pilates class, do the grocery shopping in peace, hell, even go to the post office without having to wait in line for half an hour but unless you work for yourself you’re going to have to wait until after work like the rest of us plebs.

Ok, so lets look at this report. It was a six month trial of 2,896 employees across 141 organisations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom.

NOTE: There have been studies done in the past which trialled a 4-day work week of 10 hour days compared to 5 days of 8 hours. This is not that same trial. This trial is 4 days of 8 hours with no reduction in pay.

The participants answered a survey after the trial and the answers were compared to those answered by 285 workers who worked a normal five day workday. As you can guess, the ones who worked four days a week were happier. And I’m sure if you compared the four day a week answers to those who worked three days a week, the three day a week workers would be happier too. This is basic common sense, people!

None of this is groundbreaking. Unless you’re an influencer who travels for a living, people largely don’t enjoy working. That’s why it’s called work but everyone has to do it to keep a roof over their heads. Until we come up with a better system, that’s what we’re stuck with.

Ok, so we have established that employees are happier under a 4-day work week, duh, so what is the effect on business?

I’m not even going to talk about the public sector because we all know they work about a 2-day work week stretched over five days as is. For small businesses, I truly believe the impact would be devastating.

It’s essentially a 20% pay increase for 20% less productivity. How do you think that will work out for small businesses that are already struggling to stay afloat whilst still having to foot the same fixed costs and bills- payroll, electricity, rent, cost of goods, insurance, admin costs etc etc etc.

Look, I’m not a clock watcher. I’ve been a small business owner and I’ve never been the type of boss to demand my employees be in the office at 9am and leave at 5pm on the dot. I actually detest that kind of thinking and think it will only result in high staff turnover. Employees don’t need to be treated like children at primary school.

If it gets to 4pm and they have finished their work for the day, I don’t expect them to get started on a completely new project just to fill in time. I also don’t expect them to stretch out a 30 minute task over two hours to make it to 5pm.

But wiping an entire day off their week for the same pay? Absolutely not. Leaving an hour early is vastly different to not turning up for an entire day. There are certain tasks in a business or company that require doing daily such as answering phone calls or emails.

Is the expectation that the business hires another employee to carry out these tasks on the day the usual staff member is not there? And then have to deal with all the staffing costs and admin that come along with that?

A large trial for a 4-day work week was done by Unilever and Microsoft, both resulting in (obviously) preferable outcomes for their staff members. In 2022, when it was conducted, Unilever announced the trial was a success, with business targets not being affected.

But fast forward to 2025 and all is not as it seems. Unilever quietly shelved the 4-day work week. They haven’t spoken too much about why exactly they did that, but we can only assume the bottom line ended up suffering.

Insurance giant BUPA also returned to their 5-day work week after trialling a 9 day fortnight in 2023.

And there’s no word on whether Microsoft have continued their 4-day work week trial but it seems to be irrelevant in light of the mass layoffs happening in that company at the moment.

Same deal with WFH. The majority of companies who implemented it over covid have returned to mandatory in-office work. Why? Because it’s better for the bottom line when people aren’t working in their pyjamas.

There’s no point in a 4-day work week if you don’t have a job at the end of it.

I’m sure we’ll never get the truth from these companies about why the experiment was shelved, but I can only imagine the novelty wore off and after the initial excitement, employees started treating their 4-day work work exactly as they had treated their 5-day work week and productivity took a beating.

Much like uncapped annual leave and ping pong tables, gimmicks like a 4-day work week are as much about PR for the company as they are for the wellbeing of the employees. That’s why there’s a big song and dance when ideas like this are announced but never any public follow up on the results or why they were shelved.

Fun little initiatives like this can work for a while in big companies because there is so much dead weight that someone can pick up your slack if you take a day off. But the reality of small business, which the majority of people in Australia work for, is very different. If productivity goes down 20% and costs remain the same, that business will not be around for much longer. Multiply that by thousands of businesses around this country and you can imagine the carnage that will result.

Not to mention all of these businesses for which a 4-day work week isn’t even an option.

Hospitality, retail stores, childcare, medical professionals, train drivers, airport staff and about 100 other businesses don’t even get the choice but to be a 7-day or even a 24-7 operation.

Logic would tell you that if the phone rang on a Friday and the person who had to pick it up was off, the client would simply go to a competitor. It would not take long before management binned the whole idea, which is evidently what happened with these trials.

The reality of the situation is that our world is built around a 5-day work week. Unless EVERYONE agrees to adopt a 4-day work week, this will not work.

We live in such a woke world that we think we are ENTITLED to drop a day of work because of ‘burnout’ but still make the same amount of money and enjoy the same lifestyle.

These are the same people who think they can just open a business, work a few hours a day and travel the globe.

This is just delusional.