A four-day week for councils is nothing but a public sector get-rich-quick scheme
On paper, the four-day week sounds marvellous. Who wouldn’t be tempted, after all, by the prospect of working fewer hours for the same salary?
Its proponents share an almost messianic zeal for the idea, which has become a totem for progressive, modern working practices. For those hoping to expand this practice to the public sector, an apparently successful trial by South Cambridgeshire District Council is proof that it’s a policy whose time has come.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how extraordinarily dishonest the public sector can be when it really tries. Even so, this level of dishonesty deserves some recognition. A six-day week is my suggestion.
Any organisation moving to a four-day week would have to increase their productivity by 25% to get five days’ worth of work into four. Failing to do so would mean a loss for local taxpayers, who would be paying the same for lower output. And even with the 25% increase, we would just be breaking even.
The problem is that such a rise in productivity would be utterly unprecedented in the public sector.
In the 20 years up to 2019, public sector productivity only increased by 4.1%. Are we really expected to believe that a council can achieve a 25% increase in productivity at the drop of the hat? There’s no evidence that this could happen, and taxpayers would be left either with a worse service or a huge bill for the extra staff who would need to be recruited to maintain service levels.
6 comments:
I can't even think of how any local council could justify a four day week, when they're so abysmal at their duties to their poll tax payers already!
Tunbridge Wells is a council which is loopy enough to try and splash money on all sorts of time-wasting stuff, but at least the public saw sense, and told the Tory lot to get stuffed with their ridiculous 'People's Palace' at a cool £11,000,000!
The money paid to KCC is even less useful, and we now have a third-rate road system to thank for their waste and failure!
Forgive the rant, it's ingrained...
A boss once told me that most big changes in most companies' practices were not due to money; people don't decide to do things differently because someone has an idea on how to make more or save more money. Most change is initiated because it is too much like hard work to persist with old practices.
So councils working from the correct place, sending fewer emails, having shorter meetings, etc. are all good ideas, but were probably needed because they rectify stupidity which became intolerable. Not much to do with money.
So sort yourselves out, lads, and do more for us in the time you have saved. What about weekly bin collections again? What about those cavernous pot-holes?
Be fair. A four day working week could be productive - if they previously attended five days a week, but only did a couple of hours work a day.
Well, when Heath was forced to impose a three day week in the 70s, productivity actually rose! The Country produced more than it had previously. Whether that would have been sustained is another matter.
If the same work could be done in four days it would be a positive: three days of leisure means three days of spending, so an economic boost. And families might have more time for each other and the children.
Lumping all public sector workers together and calling them idle is a lazy slander. Teaching (e.g.) has become such a crazy job that teachers are leaving in droves and there is a recruitment crisis.
Scrobs - £11,000,000 sounds a lot even for a 'People's Palace'. Aren't some of them working from home anyway?
Sam - your boss was probably at least partly right. A problem arises when following existing practices is always the easy option because they are familiar.
DJ - a four day working week could be productive, but it would be strange if that were to continue indefinitely. It seems more likely that old habits would reassert themselves.
Tammly - I think that's the issue, sustaining it. It isn't easy to see why it would be sustained.
Sackers - I spent most of my working life in the public sector and I'm happy enough to take the lazy slander on the chin. There is a fundamental public sector incentive problem which certainly wore me down.
We have teachers in the family and teaching does seem to have different problems. From the outside looking in, I'm not surprised many are leaving. Only this morning we heard that many won't return to one of our local schools after the summer holiday.
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