The four-day week or the four Thursdays?

Its promoters were probably still high on the chic weeds of the Woodstock festival. Flowers of love and flowers of friendship.

It must have been a kind of professional nirvana. They were going to reinvent the etymology of the verb to work, to take away its taste of sweat.

As university sociology students, we rambled a lot on the subject, because thinkers, and even economists, had predicted a leisure society for us.

I’m still waiting for it! Or maybe I missed it…

Since then, Zachary Richard has taken up the torch and tirelessly reminds us: working is too hard…

But I always liked to work. Well, you will answer me that I could have tried otherwise to have a life, in the sense of Get a life ! Possible.

Perhaps also work is fundamentally against human nature and the right question is: why work? There, we change galaxy.

I’ve often wondered what percentage of humans are truly happy at work. Not very strong, in my opinion…

Hence my questioning about an emerging phenomenon: does the four-day week correspond to the week of four Thursdays, in its utopian sense, that it won’t happen?

The debate is coming as big as a train in my opinion, TGF or TGV, to choose from.

I became interested in the subject again thanks to two articles in the Time^⁠1 and HuffPost France^⁠2.

A priori, how can an organization hope to benefit from a “more optimal” performance of its employees with less time worked? The term “most optimal” being an elastic criterion of employer or simply mathematical: the financial results.

For example, four days worked instead of five, or 32 hours instead of 40. But with full pay, that is to say paid for five days.

Add to that a part of telework, a mode of organization that has become almost essential. Although not all jobs are suitable.

In Quebec City, when we were trying to find the right formula between “face-to-face” and teleworking, I often repeated that firefighters could not put out fires remotely!

4 Day Week Global, a non-profit community as they describe themselves, promotes the four-day week.

4 Day published on February 21 the results of a study^⁠3 carried out in the United Kingdom, in association with researchers from Cambridge University and Boston College.

I’ll sum it up for you.

Of 61 companies, employing 2,900 people who tested the “significant reduction in working time”, or four-day week models for six months (from June to December 2022), “56 announced that they would maintain it after this experience”, and among them, 18 have already decided that this maintenance will be permanent.

Satisfaction of the majority of companies with performance and productivity, with total turnover which “remained stable overall, with an increase of 1.4%”.

In addition, 39% of the employees of these companies would have experienced a drop in their level of stress. “The number of sick days has also decreased by 65% ​​and the number of employees leaving their jobs has fallen by 57%. »

If 71% indicated a drop in their level of exhaustion, 22% would have experienced an increase in it, as 15% “reported an increase in insomnia or difficulty sleeping”. We can’t help it for some, we call it “cases”.

Now, are the British so different from us? I do not believe. The same survey at home would probably yield the same results. We are not aliens, and neither are they. The proof, the Commonwealth…

The most interesting figures from this study are the very significant drop in sick leave and employee departures.

We are talking here about an enormous cost for organizations. Replacing an employee temporarily or permanently is ruinous.

In these times of serious labor shortages, and especially if the turnover is maintained, it would not be surprising if this trend of four days a week is adopted more quickly than we think by private companies. .

And those who don’t want to follow won’t have a choice anyway. The competition for labor is so fierce that market forces, as Adam Smith would say, will do the work. Necessity is law.

The results of this study and others that will surely come will fuel the birth of new paradigms in the organization of work.

What if optimal performance came from the energy accumulated with a third day off? Or the possibility of doing a small load of laundry while working remotely?

This foreseeable revolution in the organization of work, accelerated by the pandemic, has only just begun. Labor scarcity will take us to another level, sooner rather than later.

And where the biggest paradigm shift will take place will be in labor relations. We do not remember, in the history of contemporary Quebec, a moment when the balance of power was so much in favor of the workers.

The bosses are losing the big end of the stick even more with each passing month.

Between us

I was in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean last weekend. It was storming hard. We learned that Quebec Issime had been kicked out of Place des Arts with his show December. All this after 20 years of success. Place des Arts is not a private company, our taxes annually pay nearly half of its budget. It seems to me that it requires seeing it broadly, in the sense of Quebec, like also having as a mission the dissemination of regional creation. Revolting!