Name: Is it time for the four-day work week?
Uploaded: 2021-01-26T18:35:38.000Z
Duration: 3 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

eyes, the time ripe for introducing the four day working week.

The global health crisis has caused unemployment to saw and has turned the working world on its head.

But some say the solution to the crisis lies not in working war but in working.

Rapid transition to new ways of working is also opens up opportunities for reducing working time.

Aidan Harper works for the New Economic Foundation think tank on is championing the call for the four day working week in the UK in particular working time reduction basically flatlines since 1980 despite the fact that productivity has continued to increase up until 2000 and eight.

So what I would say is that our economy at this moment time is productive enough to rapidly reduced working time for the vast majority of people.

Unilever is one of the biggest brands trialing the initiative in New Zealand, where Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has encouraged the policy.

Not only could it help with mental health, but it could reap significant environmental gains to there are many ways in which working time relates to things like carbon emissions.

So if you have more time you are less likely to engage in carbon intensive activities.

So you're you're you're more like to walk or cycles that drive you more like to cook with fresh ingredients rather than buy expensive in carbon intensive frozen food products.

But getting paid for five sounds too good to be true, and there was a fair share of skeptics.

The Confederation of British Industry cautioned that it could push many businesses into loss, but proponents claim fewer hours doesn't harm productivity.

Historically, when people talk about the move from a six to a five day week, you had exactly the same arguments against the move from 6 to 5 day week, as you have with people today questioning the move towards a four day week, they question the ability of firms to survive in a competitive environment.

They talk about international competition, and they said, of course it's insane that people with work for five days on be paid for six.

These are exactly the same things we hear today are three main ways in which we can see that decreasing hours.

It's good for productivity of the economy.

We can look at our own history to see that when we moved from a six to a five day working week, it was accompanied by increase in productivity and it was good for the economy.

Overall, we can also look at other countries and take a macro analysis and we can see that countries that work fewer hours tend to have much stronger economies and tend to be much more productive in countries that work lots of hours.

And finally we can see really existing examples off firms and organizations who are experimenting with reductions in working hours.

And they're doing this and seeing the increases in terms of increased while being decreased sickly decreased turnover.

 And it's clearly good for these organizations that they have produced working time. 