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Now, I know we don't talk about the pandemic much these days,

but you will remember in those anxious days,

working habits were thrown into disarray. People learn to work

at home, they learn to meet on Zoom, or some people, I should say, because it wasn't as simple as

that for everybody. But obviously, the working from home debate has continued post-lockdowns.

We've discussed it, in fact, on the bottom line since then too. But all that working from home chat may have distracted from a different but related reform in working,

a move to a four day rather than a five day week.

Now there are plenty of employees who work regular or irregular shifts that don't align to a nine to five norm,

and many work variable hours for whom a four-day, five-day week debate may not be relevant.

But there is an idea that many more employees should be changing the structure of their week.

We're going to hear about how it's worked from a couple of

people who've tried it. But first, let me introduce Joe Ryle, his director of the four-day

week campaign. And Joe, well, tell me what it is. This is the campaign to promote the idea of a

four-day week. Yeah, I'll tell you what we're campaigning for. So you may not know,

but a hundred years ago, I'm going to start there, We all used to work a six-day working week. So everyone used to work on a Saturday as well as the Monday to Friday. And it's been 100 years since we made that change, since we benefited from the weekend. And what we're saying is ultimately, if you look at all the productivity gains that have happened in the economy since then, particularly the last few decades of all the new technology. Not many of those benefits have been passed back to work in terms of more free time,

more leisure time. And so we believe that this is a change which is long overdue, that we should

be working a four-day, 32-hour working weeks, so reducing down from the standard 40-hour working. So it's not

cramming five days of hours into four days. It's not four, ten hour days instead of five, eight hour days.

No, and let me really clarify that because it does get confused sometimes. You know, sometimes people talk about a compressed hours working week, where you compress, say, a 40-hour working week into four days.

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