Business cautious as it grapples with idea of four-day working week

After a trial last year involving 12 Irish businesses with some 200 people, employers like Barry Prost of Rent a Recruiter and Sinéad Crowther of Dundalk-based manufacturer Soothing Solutions also hailed their own experiences as very positive. Cork-based accountancy firm MC2 recently said it was adopting it as its basic work model.

“I think it’s a great initiative,” says Maeve McElwee, director of employer relations at Ibec. “There’s no doubt it works really well in some organisations. But if you’re putting up your hand for it, you probably have that sense that it is something that’s going to work in your business. “So it’s very difficult to organise it that your school event is always going to be on a Friday, if that’s your four-day work week pattern. Kids are never conveniently sick when you’re not on one of your high productivity days.

On the manufacturing front, John Teeling of Great Northern Distillery, a businessman with extensive experience of more than one sector, is similarly sceptical of the potential to change the landscape so fundamentally. He admits: “I suppose if you talked to me 60 years ago I would have told you that we could never break from a five and a half-day week, even a six-day one.

“If you can cut hours by 20 per cent and still achieve the same level of productivity, I think that’s bound to raise questions about whether you were overmanned to start with.”“The first thing is that the majority of people already work flexibly or part-time,” he says, pointing to the already declining length of the average working week across Europe, which Eurostat’s most recent figure for Ireland put at 35.4 hours in 2022. “So you’ve already got people who work in that space.

“Am I going to close SuperValu down every Friday? If I’m working on dairy production, I’m not going to close down and not produce any milk on a Friday. So I think the principle is sound as an aspiration, but the real application across macroeconomy and macrobusiness is difficult to comprehend right now. Unless the whole world went Friday to Sunday as its new weekend.”

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