Do We Still Need a 5-Day Work Week?
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, July 30th. I'm Charlie Turner for The Wall Street Journal. Should we ditch the five-day, 40-hour work week? The traditional work week is under pressure because of changes wrought by COVID-19.
The experience of the pandemic and working from home is beginning to question all the face-time requirements of the workplace. And that's been kind of the biggest driver here.
Our Patrick Thomas talks about renewed calls for a more abbreviated week and how some companies have already made the move. That's after the break.
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Could the five-day, 40-hour workweek become a thing of the past? Some companies are trying out a four-day workweek on the belief that a shorter schedule could be a better fit for workers who've had to make so many adjustments to their personal and professional lives because of the pandemic and working from home. A shorter week is already being used or experimented with in some European countries, but there are questions about whether it could be widely adopted in the U.S., and companies will have to make some changes in order to implement a four-day week. For more, let's bring in our reporter Patrick Thomas. Patrick, thanks for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me.
Patrick, a shorter work week has been tried before in the U.S. during previous decades. There were some failed attempts to make it the law, but now there seems to be a renewed push for a four-day week. Tell us why the traditional five-day work week is under new pressure.
Well, it all starts with a pandemic. I mean, the tradition of the five-day The 40-hour workweek is under pressure after really COVID-19 kind of calls into question a lot of our long-held beliefs about the structure and nature of work. Companies have been experimenting with remote work and hybrid technologies and really trying to find new ways to give employees more flexibility.
Why is the five-day, 40-hour work week being questioned after COVID-19?
The stresses of the pandemic have had us talking more about burnout and mental health. So it's the experience of the pandemic and working from home as beginning to question all the face time requirements of the workplace. And that's been kind of the biggest driver here. And and this is a topic that's it's come up before in the past century. It's not entirely new. But it's really struggled to gain traction during the Great Depression. There were a lot of talk about if the 30-hour workweek was going to be the standard, but those calls always got dropped. It just never quite entered the mainstream. So right now we're seeing them resurface again for the first time in decades.
Well, how are workers driving the shift to a shorter week? What demands are they making on their employers?
We're seeing a huge push by employees right now for flexibility. The need for either working from home arrangements, hybrid arrangements, just having extra time off. Just the ability to have that work-life balance that many feel they could not get during the pandemic because...
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