‘Unstoppable’: four-day week could be within reach for British workers

theguardian.com:

Five days on, two days off has been the defining pulse of British labour for more than 80 years. But as 70 UK companies embark on thelargest trial yet of a four-day week, the working calendar may finally be changing.

Campaigners are seizing on the way Covid shook up working lives to push back the boundaries of the weekend for the first time since the postwar years when the whole of Saturday became a day off for most. One advocate predicts a four-day week could be available to the majority in Britain within five years and Stephen Fry this week gave his voice to an increasingly confident four-day week campaign, which argues shorter hours boosts productivity, cuts carbon emissions and improves family life – all without cutting pay.

In the campaign Fry suggests the seven-day week should no longer be considered “a brute fact” because it is “not real the way a day is real, a single spin of our planet or the way a year is real, one lap of the Earth round the sun … the week was invented by us”.

Ancient Egyptians had a 10-day week, the Romans operated an eight-day week for a while, and in the 1920s the Soviet Union experimented with a five-day week with rest days staggered for different parts of the workforce to keep the machines ticking non-stop.

A brewery, a fish and chip shop, an inheritance tax specialist and a software firm are among firms taking part in the six-month trial that will be monitored by academics at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Boston College in the US.

But if the idea that Friday is the new Saturday sounds too good to be true, it may be. It has some heavyweight critics, especially as Britain was this week forecast to plunge into negative economic growth next year.

Robert Skidelsky, an economist who