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When the 700 students of the MACCRAY school district in Minnesota return to school next year, they will be attending school 23 fewer days than this year. That's because MACCRAY is one of the first schools in the country to go to a four-day school week.
They say they are doing it to save money --23 fewer days means 23 fewer days to heat the classrooms and buy fuel for school businesses.
As schools, cities and corporations try to grapple with the impact of rising gas prices, many are considering the four -day work week as a possible solution. But is it?
Or, if the country as a whole doesn't adopt this new formula for getting work done, will it create more havoc then the benefits of the cost savings?
While the students may like this new schedule and while it may save the school district money, how much more is it going to cost families who will need extra day care to take care of kids that previously spent Fridays in school?
What impact will the school's decision have on businesses in the small community that will need to readjust their work week to accomodate parents who may now need to spend different hours at home.
The MACCRAY school district is not alone. School districts, municipalities and corporations throughout the country are going to a four day work week in an effort to help employees who are feeling the pain of commuting five days a week.
While the four day work week is still in its infancy, it could, like casual Fridays in the 80s, become a trend whose day has come. In a guest post for The Oil Drum, Aaron Newton writes: The Four Day Work Week: Sixteen Reasons Why This Might Be An Idea Whose Time Has Come.
Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.
The five -day work week may be arbitrary but "unpacking" this 70 year tradition will have a profound effect on our work lives.There are some industries that have experimented with the four hour work week in a tradition called summer hours.
As Women of Mystery explains:
Summer hours in trade book publishing are three-day weekends. Different publishers set them up in different ways, and some publishers allow their employees to choose from two or more options. The different options I’ve encountered over the years are: * Working 8:00 am to 5:30 pm Monday through Thursday and getting every Friday completely off. * Working 8:30 am to 5:30 pm Monday through Thursday and getting every other Friday off, working the normal 9:00 am to 5:00 pm on the Fridays in between. * Working 8:00 am to 5:30 pm Monday through Thursday and getting a half day off every Friday. * Any of the above, but with Monday off rather than Friday. * None of the above, working just regular hours and days. For the company as a whole, business is usually normal Tuesday through Thursday, but comes to a screeching halt on Friday whether or not half the staff is still there (it is just half the staff, after all). As a result, Monday finds the people who were off on Friday trying to dig out of the piles that accumulated on their desks while they were gone, their phones ringing unanswered, e-mail building
