this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
15 points (89.5% liked)

United Kingdom

4138 readers
109 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Lee Rowley says a trial, which a council leader says cut the need for agency staff, should end now.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'm sceptical about some of the claims about the long-term productivity impact of four-day weeks. I suspect in the short-term it works because of the combination of diminishing marginal returns (for every extra day you work, the marginal benefit of the extra day decreases) plus people putting in extra time on the remaining four days; so over a longer horizon, if working patterns adjust back to normal after the novelty wears off (i.e. people stop putting in the extra hours and go home at normal time), then I think four days should lead to less work getting done than five days (albeit still more than 4/5ths of the work due to the diminishing returns).

But long-term experiments are good for testing out hypotheses like this. Also for central government to dictate to local government what they can and can't do is fucked up - the voters of South Cambridgeshire have elected a Lib Dem council (reelected barely a year ago winning 35 of the 45 seats available) and it's up to the voters of South Cambridgeshire to decide whether experiments like this represent value for money, not some angry Brexiter at Westminster.