Summary
The campaign for a four-day working week is gaining traction, particularly in the UK. Manuela Saragosa hears from Lorraine Gray, operations director at Pursuit Marketing, a company that has already made the switch from five to four days. But Ed Whiting, policy director at the charity Wellcome Trust, explains why they decided against the change after a major consultation. Asheem Singh, director of economy at the Royal Society of Arts, warns that a shift to a four-day week could result in a two-tier economy.
(Photo: A pin placed in a calendar, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You don't know in advance what has happened. |
| 0:03.9 | We've heard nothing yet. |
| 0:04.8 | You don't know if they tried to go into lunar orbit and they underburned. |
| 0:08.9 | We're standing by. |
| 0:09.9 | I don't know if the back end of the spacecraft blew up. |
| 0:12.3 | You don't know what's going to happen. |
| 0:14.4 | 13 minutes to the moon from the BBC World Service coming soon. |
| 0:23.4 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:25.8 | Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:28.8 | Coming up, how about working less and playing more without sacrificing your salary? |
| 0:34.2 | The option to have a long weekend was very appealing across the workforce. |
| 0:38.4 | They were all enthusiastic about this particular change. Absolutely. As you can imagine. |
| 0:44.0 | There's a growing campaign in the UK and elsewhere to cut the working week to four days. |
| 0:50.2 | So why did one of the UK's largest organisations just turn its back on the idea? |
| 0:54.7 | I think it's more the time cost, actually, of how you put this all together and make it all work for us as an organisation. |
| 1:00.2 | Not all jobs are readily sort of movable into a four-day pattern. |
| 1:05.5 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:12.1 | All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so the old proverb goes. |
| 1:17.4 | But does all that work also make Jack less productive, less efficient, stressed and unhappy? |
| 1:23.2 | There's an argument gaining traction among unions and some politicians here in the UK that if the |
| 1:28.5 | working week is cut to four days instead of the usual five, then everyone would be more productive |
| 1:33.9 | and content. In other words, everyone should work fewer hours per week, but keep the same pay. |
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