A shorter week can still fail workers who chase flexibility

Professor Sharon Parker. Picture: Colin Murty.

A leading researcher has warned of the downside of the four-day week – a concept that is being widely debated as people look for new ways of working post-Covid.

Professor Sharon Parker, from Curtin University in Western Australia, worries that while the shorter week will work well for some, it is being touted as a panacea to increasing work intensity and long hours.

“I hate how everyone just jumps on these trends and thinks it’s a magic solution to everything,” she says. “It’s perhaps more important to think about the principles; we need reasonable working hours and ideally some choice of, and influence over, those working hours.”

Parker runs the Future of Work Institute at Curtin and has published extensively on work design, skills, the mental health of fly-in, fly-out miners and other work issues. Her caution about the four-day week comes amid a series of pilot programs in Australia and overseas that has indicated productivity does not suffer if people cut back to four days for the same pay.

Parker is not arguing – as some employers may – that the four-day week affects output. Rather, she says a four-day arrangement can be as rigid for workers as a five-day week unless those employees have some say in which days and times they will work.

Everyone wants to work less for the same amount of money, she says, so it’s not surprising there have been positive reactions from workers. But her point is there are other ways to achieve good outcomes on hours, specifically by giving more power to people to choose their patterns of work – in other words, more flexibility, not necessarily fewer hours.

“I’m not anti the four-day working week but let’s not all just jump on that bandwagon,” says Parker. “We’re trying to achieve better quality work for people, so all I’m saying is there are many ways to skin a cat.”

One argument for a four-day week is that there is judged to be about 20 per cent of slack or down time in the average working day and that 80 per cent of hours delivers 100 per cent of a company’s productivity.

Parker doesn’t buy it: “I’m absolutely sure in some organisations there is not 20 per cent slack because of the leanness in organisations. There’s so much staff overload because (organisations) can’t get staff. I am not observing in organisations I’m working in, like aged care, that there is 20 per cent of slack.”

Switch to a four-day week and in some workplaces employees will wind up working 14-hour days to cope with the load.

“Right now, in theory, we all have five-day working weeks, but how many people are actually working five days?” Parker says. “We know there’s burnout, we know many people are working beyond those five days. I am all in favour of reducing work hours, but just how is the question.

“It’s really good to see all these trials, but sometimes organisations should just take a step back before they jump on the bandwagon, and say: ‘What am I trying to achieve here? I’m actually trying to achieve more sustainable, more reasonable work hours for people and healthy work. What are the big issues in our organisation? What are the con­straints, what are the options?’ ”

A bigger challenge for today’s employers and employees is to recognise a four-day system is as arbitrary as five days and that it’s time to shift from a focus on hours worked – inside or outside the office – to a focus on people delivering outcomes, performing the tasks required. Obviously hours are still important – tasks cannot be so heavy that they take 60 hours to complete – but especially in knowledge economy jobs it’s not really about the time spent on a specific task.

Output presents a complex question when it comes to remuneration: the struggle to have people paid for hours worked rather than for piecework, where pay is based on the amount of work produced, lies at the heart of modern industrial relations. Hours are fundamental to the way we calculate pay, and the definition of a full-time worker as one who works precisely 38 hours each week is central to our system.

Flicking the switch to output so we don’t focus on time is a great idea but assumes a person may work fewer hours, not more.

That gets us back to the notion of “reasonable hours”, which has recently jumped off the pages of law books to become a mainstream conversation.

The discussion is focused on a case taken by Sally Rugg (former chief of staff to teal MP Monique Ryan), who argues she was forced to work unreasonable hours in her Parliament House job. The Federal Court must rule on the issue in what is being seen as a test case on reasonable hours – a concept embedded, but not clearly defined, in the Fair Work Act. Already the Finance Sector Union has jumped into the fray, taking a case to court on behalf of four managers at the National Australia Bank who alleged they had to work unreasonable hours across many years.

It’s a tricky area because what is seen as reasonable is so subjective and particular to a job and an organisation. In the Rugg case, the court confronts a unique workplace where hours are often erratic and staff are expected to be on deck for long and unpredictable periods.

When outgoing Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins was asked on ABC radio this week about the case, she flipped the question and argued we should be talking about predictable hours, a concept easier to pin down than reasonable hours. It’s an idea that resonates with Parker’s point that people need control.

The concept of predictable hours is not spelt out in industrial law, except for part-time workers who are defined as being “employed to work less than thirty-eight (38) hours each week on a reasonably predictable basis”. For full-timers, predictability lies in those 38 hours, although employers must consult employees if they want to change their hours.

Predictable carries a certain fustiness, a suggestion of schedules and routines. For a Silicon Valley generation, work was about disruption and stimulation – not predictability. But for parents and other carers, predictable hours are vital. A job needs to be interesting, but many would trade off creative disruption to get to the childcare centre on time. Prediction: we’re likely to hear more about the idea in a world where workers continue to juggle their paid and unpaid jobs.