Your professor is teaching a class on labour economics. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Ines Carvalho
Several firms and one or two governments have experimented with a four-day working week at unchanged pay. Supporters say output has held steady in most trials, that fewer hours reduce the errors and absence that long weeks produce, and that the gain in time is worth more to employees than a small rise in pay. Critics answer that the trials are run by firms that volunteered, that office work is easier to compress than work tied to a machine or a patient, and that a shorter week in such jobs simply means hiring more people. Should a four-day week be adopted more widely? Why?
Ivan
Adopt it, and stop treating the trials as the weak point. Every new working arrangement in history was first tried by employers who chose to try it, including the two-day weekend, and we did not wait for a random sample before ending the six-day week. The pattern in the trials is consistent enough to act on, and the cost of being wrong is one year of slightly lower output.
Noor
Ivan is comparing the wrong things. The weekend was won for work that was being measured in hours anyway. What is proposed now is an output standard, and an output standard is exactly what cannot be applied to a ward or a classroom. In those places a four-day week is a staffing cost, and pretending otherwise is how the policy ends up funded out of the same services it was meant to improve.