The four-day workweek was in the news again last week. As reported in the New Zealand Herald:
An advocate of the reduced working week says it's time for New Zealanders to re-examine how they're doing business, and that cutting back hours can improve both productivity and mental health.
Charlotte Lockhart is the chief executive of the not-for-profit 4 Day Week Global project, which she established along with fellow New Zealander Andrew Barnes for like-minded people who are interested in the idea of a 32-hour working week.
She spoke with Sunday Morning about the need for change, and said that technology is making more flexibility possible in many workplaces.
"The reality is we know that the way we're going to work in the future isn't how we've worked in the past.
"There's no reason why we need to be working five days a week. It's not a mandatory number."
Lockhart is right that the five-day workweek is not a mandatory number, and neither is the 40-hour week. However, as I noted last month when I blogged about the four-day workweek in Iceland, there is a key point that advocates of the four-day workweek simply don't understand, and that is tournament effects. As I said in that earlier post:
...when there are tournament effects, people are paid a 'prize' for their relative performance (that is, for winning the 'tournament'). The prize may take the form of a bonus, a raise, or a promotion. The point is that each worker only needs to be a little bit better than the second best worker in order to 'win' the tournament. Those incentives would work to undo the decrease in work hours, since if everyone else reduces their work hours from 40 to 32, a worker that keeps working 40 hours will increase their chances of winning the tournament. If you doubt that tournament effects are real, I recommend asking any serious academic how many hours they work each week (since tournament effects are rampant in academia). This is not consistent with the overall goal of the four-day workweek, which is to reduce work. All it would do in these occupations is shift more of the work to outside of the paid workweek.
In occupations that have strong tournament effects (like academia, as well as professional jobs like lawyers, accountants, finance, professional sportspeople, etc.), shifting to a four-day workweek wouldn't change the incentives for the workers. If you work a little bit more than your peers, then you are more likely to 'win' the tournament and get the promotion, the prestige, the bonus, or whatever other reward the tournament is leading to. If your peers choose to drop down to working four days a week, all the better for you. They'll soon realise the cost of their choice, when the rewards accrue more to those who ignored the four-day-a-week call (just as they currently accrue now to those who work excess hours).
However, not all occupations have strong tournament effects. In some jobs, the tournament effects don't depend on productivity as measured on a weekly basis, but depend on hourly productivity. In those jobs, the workers are reasonably interchangeable as well, so it doesn't matter so much who does the work. Reducing from five days to four days a week for the same pay isn't going to reduce these workers' chance of winning the tournament (and if it increases their hourly productivity, as four-day-workweek proponents claim, then it might increase the workers' chances of winning). Consider service workers, or hospitality workers, or manufacturing workers, or construction workers, or administrators. They aren't competing for productivity-based rewards, or if they are, those rewards depend on hourly productivity, not weekly productivity. A four-day workweek for the same pay is a clear win for these workers (although a five-day workweek with a limited number of hours per day might be even better).
In some jobs, the potential tournament effects are reduced to some degree because promotion or salary advancement or prestige is determined by something other than productivity, like tenure. For example, salary advancement for teachers or nurses is based on tenure. Teachers or nurses don't work extra hours to get ahead of their peers in the salary advancement tournament (however, promotion or prestige might still reward those who work more hours). Moving them to a four-day workweek may be beneficial for workers in these jobs, to the extent that the structure of rewards counters the tournament effects.
There are clearly many jobs where the four-day workweek may have positive effects, but only where the tournament effects are weak, or where they are neutered by the way that the tournament is structured. Unfortunately, those are the jobs that the four-day-week advocates are focused on, to the exclusion of jobs where tournament effects are strong and unavoidable. A one-size-fits-all approach to adopting the four-day workweek is likely to be problematic.
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