White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

In Praise of the Four-Day Work Week

September 13, 2010 by Llewellyn King 8 Comments

Let us make the three-day weekend permanent.

What do you remember about Labor Day? My bet is you remember not the Monday holiday but the Sunday, because the middle day of a three-day weekend is a day of luxury. It begins in the blessed minutes after waking, when you lie there in a cocoon of warmth; an indulgent few minutes that will begin to slip away with the movement of an arm or the opening of eye.

If you are with someone you love, it is luxury redefined up; guiltless indulgence, secured by the knowledge that work and stress are at bay. The chores have been executed on the previous day and — wonder of wonders — work will not cloud the horizon until Tuesday.

That mounting anxiety, which creeps into Sunday as the evening approaches, will not arrive until late Monday. You wonder, as you creep from your place of reverie to keep a flexible appointment with coffee and the bathroom, why every weekend cannot contain one day without care, one day, as the French say, sans souci.

When I worked for the BBC in London many years ago, we worked three days and took three days off. Longer work days but fewer of them.

Having worked every shift in the book, I was convinced that for journalists at least this was the perfect setup. My colleagues were more productive than any other set of workers I have labored with and happier. Many turned down jobs outside of the BBC just to keep the shifts they loved. Long, hard days followed by the triple crown of three days off.

This showed. Several wrote books, one finished a play and all kinds of gardens flourished, along with hobbies and sports. You can get on a golf course more cheaply and more easily on a Tuesday than you can on an over-stretched Saturday.

Years later, when I was president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, during contract negotiations I suggested the idea of longer work days but fewer of them. The Washington Post management was ecstatic; many of their staffing problems, particularly on weekends, would be solved along with the complexity of compensatory time for well-paid employees who did not get overtime.

Win-win, you say? Not so fast. When I asked the permission of the Newspaper Guild International to put the proposal formally in negotiations, the worthies in the union hierarchy exploded. We had a model contract, blessed in the 1930s by the great journalist Heywood Broun (actually, a reluctant unionist like so many in the Guild) and we were not going to depart from that contract. Moreover, the model contract called for shortening work days, not lengthening them.

Unions may be the most liberal part of the political spectrum, but internally they are incredibly conservative and change-averse. Journalists were not to have the quality of their lives improved and The Washington Post was not to improve its staffing situation.

Well, I am back at work. And working people are talking about resetting America.

So I say, let us look afresh at the four-day work week. First let us resolve the problems of physical work, where a longer day is a bigger burden. But for the great majority of America’s workers (the paper-pushers, if you will), the virtues of a four-day work week might fit with the resetting of so many things in our lives.

Everything else is changing; newspapers are struggling, information technology dominates our lives and our transportation infrastructure is overloaded.

Fewer, longer work days would ease the stress on so many services and improve the ratio of commuting time to work time. Employers would get a happier workforce and the quality of life in the working world would be so improved.

Please join me in my campaign to abolish Monday. We can win. It has no core constituency. It is vulnerable.

 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Labor Day, work week

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
The Cheapening of the Impeachment Process

The Cheapening of the Impeachment Process

Llewellyn King

Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British statesman, argued during the celebrated impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, that impeachment was essentially a political process, not a judicial one. Quite so. The political dimension of impeachment is again on display in Washington, where the Republicans, driven by a faction of the party, are moving toward impeaching […]

Men I Knew Who Knew Oppenheimer

Men I Knew Who Knew Oppenheimer

Llewellyn King

I have been to the movies. I haven’t done that since before the COVID shutdown. I went to see two huge movies that have each grossed $1 billion, and I enjoyed them enormously. They are, of course, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” I went to see “Barbie” because I thought I should know what people were discussing. […]

Joe Biden, the Man Who Won’t Call It a Day

Joe Biden, the Man Who Won’t Call It a Day

Llewellyn King

Is Joe Biden hiding in plain sight? Is his most extensive public effort these days fending off signs of age, hiding his infirmities, and clinging to the hope that he can still win in the election just over a year from now? Sotto voce, the savants of the Democratic Party worry and complain in private […]

How Over-Tourism Hit This Summer

How Over-Tourism Hit This Summer

Llewellyn King

Europe reeled this summer from heat, wildfires, migrants and worries about Russia’s war in Ukraine, and too much tourism. I know; I was part of the problem. Tourism is the quick economic fix for poor nations, but it is also vital to rich ones — until both get too much of it. The places everyone […]

Copyright © 2023 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in