The Four-Day Week
The idea of a four-day working week has moved from the margins of debate into serious boardroom discussion. Several large trials, most notably in Iceland and the United Kingdom, have reported a striking outcome: when employees worked one day less for the same pay, productivity did not fall, and in many cases it rose.
At first glance this seems paradoxical. How can a company produce as much in less time? Advocates argue that the traditional working week was never an accurate measure of output in the first place. Much of the office day, they claim, is consumed by needless meetings, interruptions, and the simple fatigue that accumulates over five long days. Remove one of those days, and workers arrive sharper and more focused, wasting less of the time they have.
Yet sceptics caution against treating the results as a universal cure. The trials, they point out, were often conducted by companies that were already well organised and enthusiastic about the change. A struggling firm with chaotic processes might find that simply cutting hours does little except squeeze the same dysfunction into a smaller window. Moreover, the model suits knowledge work far better than industries such as healthcare or retail, where someone must physically be present.
What the experiment really exposes, perhaps, is how rarely we question inherited assumptions about work. The five-day week is not a law of nature but a convention barely a century old. Whether or not the four-day week becomes standard, the more valuable lesson may be the willingness to ask whether the way we have always done things is genuinely the way we should.
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What surprising result did the trials report?
- 2
What can be inferred about why the sceptics are cautious?
- 3
In the last paragraph, the writer's main point is that:
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The writer states that the five-day week is a fairly recent convention rather than a law of nature.
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According to the passage, the four-day week suits every type of job equally well.
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Which arguments in favour of the four-day week are mentioned? (Choose all that apply.)
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- Less Time, More Done? — Прочитайте текст і виконайте завдання. · The idea of a **four-day working week** has moved from the margins of debate into serious boardroom discussion. Several large trials, most notably in Iceland and the United Kingdom, have reported a striking outcome: when employees worked one day less for the same pay, productivity did not fall, and in many cases it rose. At first glance this seems paradoxical. How can a company produce as much in less time? Advocates argue that the traditional working week was never an accurate measure of output in the first place. Much of the office day, they claim, is consumed by needless meetings, interruptions, and the simple fatigue that accumulates over five long days. Remove one of those days, and workers arrive sharper and more focused, wasting less of the time they have. Yet sceptics caution against treating the results as a universal cure. The trials, they point out, were often conducted by companies that were already well organised and enthusiastic about the change. A struggling firm with chaotic processes might find that simply cutting hours does little except squeeze the same dysfunction into a smaller window. Moreover, the model suits knowledge work far better than industries such as healthcare or retail, where someone must physically be present. What the experiment really exposes, perhaps, is how rarely we question inherited assumptions about work. The five-day week is not a law of nature but a convention barely a century old. Whether or not the four-day week becomes standard, the more valuable lesson may be the willingness to ask whether the way we have always done things is genuinely the way we should.