No Canadian companies involved in a shortened workweek trial intend to revert back to a five-day week, new research from 4 Day Week Global shows.
The mill I work in is already set up with shift work…they work 1st shift (week 1), 2nd shift (week 2), 3rd shift (week 3), and then go on long weekend 4 days off. My department runs 21 turns (we are the plant bottleneck by design), meaning 3 shifts of 8 hours, 7 days a week. Most people dont work 7 days straight unwillingly, but regardless of that fact, you need to keep running. Not running is losing money, losing money gets corporate to shut you down, getting shut down means you have no job and the company doesn’t care either way
There is a trade off when dealing with continuous operations. You run into the issue of, “Not running costs more money than running and paying people overtime.” Moving to a 4 day week just means you would likely get forced more into overtime so we can keep steel flowing, not that you get more free time.
Also from the salary side of things, I just spoke to 4 other process engineers and all of us immediately agreed that we cannot get the work done required of us + do the extras of being a floor process engineer in only 4 days. We could get our “requirements” done, but then all of the extra work that we perform would cease. It would actively hurt the company and its profitability, which in turn hurts our job stability. Its really not as cut and dry as people want to make it seem in all instances
all of us immediately agreed that we cannot get the work done required of us + do the extras of being a floor process engineer in only 4 days.
- the plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data’.
- most/all 4-day-work-week experiments collected statistical data showing a strong trend suggesting the extra rest time made both the rote/repetitive work cleaner and the knowledge/expert work faster.
Unless your shop is a weeeird outlier, you stand every chance of coming out of a 4dww trial working more efficiently, more rested, more reliably, more effectively. That’s actually a very common theme in all this, that any ‘loss’ in time or money is eaten up by better work done more effectively when we’re not so tired we’re microsleeping all day and wondering where we are and where we were.
