Business sounds alarm on four-day working week trial

The Canberra Business Chamber warns that a four day working week for public servants in the nation’s capital would be bad for business

Canberra Business Chamber chief executive Greg Harford.

The chief executive of the ­Canberra Business Chamber, Greg Harford, has challenged the viability of a four-day work week with no loss of a pay – a position endorsed by the ACT Labor Party – describing it is unrealistic and bad for business.

The ACT government has been under pressure to embrace a four-day work week, with Chief Minister Andrew Barr saying he was open to a “medium-term consideration” of the issue despite raising practical challenges with how it could be implemented.

In July, ACT Labor committed the party to trialling the four-day working week within the ACT public service. It also supported moves to have a “32 hours week with no loss of pay” introduced as a standard for all workers.

Mr Harford said there was “a fair degree of scepticism in the business community that the idea of a four-day working week for public servants will deliver better outcomes for business”.

“Public servants already often have relatively good terms and conditions and the idea that they should be further rewarded without any increase in productivity seems unusual,” he said.

The Legislative Assembly’s standing committee on the economy and gender and economic equality also recently conducted an inquiry into the future of the working week, handing down its findings in mid-September.

The committee recommended the government establish a working group to inform atrial of a four-day week for the public service “with no loss of pay or conditions”.

It recommended the ACT government develop a “pilot program … for private sector employers who would like to voluntarily trial a four-day work week”.

The committee found that the ACT public service was “well placed to undertake a trial of the four-day working week” and that private businesses were able, under current legal settings, to transition their workforces.

A four-day working week had the potential to bring “enormous benefits not only to individual workers but also to the population at large”, the committee found.

These benefits included providing more free time for people to prioritise their health and wellbeing, as well as their families and communities, while reducing carbon emissions and ensuring ­increased gender equality in domestic duties.

However, the committee noted that employers found greater disadvantages to the four-day working week than did employees although it conceded that it “did not receive any submissions from business owners or operators”.

“If productivity is not maintained, the cost to business of 20 per cent of their workers’ salaries engendering no return is a considerable financial disincentive,” the report found.

Some examples were provided where productivity was increased, with the committee noting that Microsoft trialled a four-day working week in Japan for a period of five weeks and that productivity increased by 40 per cent.

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Mr Barr made clear to the committee that a four-day week would not be a priority for his government, saying it was not “an issue on my agenda at the moment”. He said the “next time we would ­potentially consider anything would be next year’s budget”.

He also warned that a transition to a four-day working week could not occur in a bubble, suggesting it would not be practical for the ACT public sector to make the transition on its own.

“There is discussion about trials, and that is one thing. These sorts of changes over economic history have been society wide,” he said. “We need to think about the implications. The ACT sector cannot operate in a bubble that is completely isolated from everything else that happens in society.”

He said the government would respond to the committee “in due course”.