Four-day-week might sound impossible but there are reasons to consider it – Scotsman comment

One of the great societal shifts of the 20th century was the change in expectations for women.

Children can miss out if both parents have full-time jobs. A shorter working week would increase the amount of family time (Picture: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Where once it was assumed that many would become housewives, the truth that women are the equals of men in the workplace is now almost universally accepted. And rightly so.

But this sharp increase in the number of people with jobs outside the home has had some downsides. With many couples having two incomes to fund mortgage payments, house prices have soared. Furthermore, many children now have less contact with their parents than previous generations and child-care costs have risen.

Some might see such changes as arguments to roll back decades of improvements in equality. They are not.

However, they are reasons to re-examine the length of the working week and to at least consider the idea of reducing it to four days, rather than five.

There is evidence to suggest that the reduction in productivity is considerably less than the 20 per cent that might be expected. Workers who are less stressed out and tired work better and it would also increase the total amount of parent-child contact.

This might sound like a pie-in-the-sky, unaffordable dream of a life of relative leisure.

But, before the Covid pandemic struck, many people will have thought much the same about the idea of vast numbers of people working from home, freeing them from the drudgery of the daily commute and enabling companies to relocate to smaller premises, raising serious concerns about the future of our city centres.

Radical ideas may sound impossible, but that doesn't mean they're not worth investigating.