Excerpt from the New Scientist, 15 September 2009
'Fancy a three-day weekend - not just once in a while but week in week out? You may think your bosses would never agree to it, but the evidence suggests that employers, employees and the environment all benefit.
The four-day week comes in two flavours. One option is to switch from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days, meaning overall hours and salaries stay the same. In August 2008, the state of Utah moved all of its employees, apart from the emergency services, to working 4/10, as it has become known. The hope was that by shutting down buildings for an extra day each week, energy bills would be slashed by up to a fifth...
The second form of the four-day week is to work the same number of hours per day for four days only, with a commensurate 20 per cent pay cut.
Not everyone will like the idea of working longer days or taking a pay cut in exchange for a 3-day weekend, but it appears most do. Rex Facer at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, [says] it was the crash of 1929 that led to the five-day week. "Before that it was common to work six-day weeks with 12 to 14-hour days. When the Great Depression hit, the idea was to share work around to get more people into employment."...'
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