Add a four-day working week to existing work-from-home arrangements, and your colleagues might forget what you look like. Photo: South Agency.
When I first heard that a regional council was introducing a four-day working week for its employees, I wondered whether this would increase or decrease their workloads.
After all, a lot has been done to make Australian workplaces more flexible over the past few decades.
But as productivity growth declines and employers struggle to find reliable workers, is now really the time to give people 52 long weekends a year?
And while the public sector can introduce another perk without worrying too much about how to fund it, the private sector still has to compete for the same workers while paying the bills.
We already have more than six million Australians working from home – years after the pandemic that supposedly forced us to do it. There’s also job sharing, flexible start and finish times, nine-day fortnights, carer’s leave, mental health leave, gender affirmation leave and the right to disconnect.
And now, apparently, the working week itself needs disconnecting.
There comes a point when so-called “work-life balance” starts to look like a life of leisure with a little bit of work thrown in.
Someone working four days a week would have just 208 scheduled working days a year before taking a single day of leave. Take four weeks of annual leave and public holidays and that falls to around 180 days. Throw in a few sickies, and you’re getting down to around 175 actual working days.
In other words, you’d spend more days in the year not working than working.
And if you’re also working from home for some of those days, your colleagues might eventually put you on a missing person’s register.
This wouldn’t be concerning if Australia were experiencing a productivity boom. But we’re not. Our long-term productivity growth has been steadily declining, with the ABS reporting that the 20-year average annual growth rate has more than halved, from 1.8 per cent in 2003-04 to just 0.8 per cent in 2023-24.
So forgive me for wondering whether now is really the time to be taking another day off.
Nevertheless, now the cat’s out of the bag, the four-day week is likely to catch fire. But it is the public sector that will be best placed to embrace it – without having to worry about annoying customers, competition or how to fund the arrangement.
Which makes working for government even more attractive than working for the poor bastard who owns the business down the road.
Anyone who has worked in the public sector knows there is a mysterious illness that seems to strike on Fridays.
It is particularly virulent before a long weekend.
During the five years I worked in the APS, I thought “Friday flex” was one word.
And if Friday becomes part of the weekend, Thursdays will become the day people start taking off.
This matters because a farmer can’t decide that the sheep will wait until Monday.
While Murrumbidgee Council will just close their libraries on Fridays, the corner store that shuts one day a week will lose customers – who’ll opt to shop elsewhere all the time.
And how does a small business attract a 19-year-old apprentice to spend five days a week outside in the heat, learning a trade, when the alternative is a cushy government job with four days a week, flexible hours and the ability to answer emails from home while wearing pyjamas?
This is not an imaginary problem.
In June, 44 per cent of employers reported difficulty finding staff as chronic skill shortages continue to plague the economy.
And in recent years, about 80 per cent of Australia’s new jobs have been created in the public sector.
But there is a fairly obvious question nobody seems keen to ask: who is going to pay for all of them?
Governments don’t create wealth simply by creating jobs. They create a wage bill, which has to be funded by an economy outside government that is actually producing things, selling things and paying tax.
You can’t have everyone working for the government and then wonder why there aren’t enough people left to pay the government.
The public sector can effectively say: work four days, have greater flexibility, enjoy greater job security and still expect a nice fat salary.
The private sector can’t simply copy that model. It has customers, competitors and work that doesn’t disappear on Fridays.
And that is why the four-day week shouldn’t become the default expectation across the economy.
Australia needs a strong private sector to employ people, invest, take risks, create things and generate the tax revenue that ultimately funds government.
But once Friday becomes part of the public-sector weekend, the rest of us may discover we have to start working on Saturdays to pay for it.
Original Article published by Oliver Jacques on Region Canberra.
