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Japan’s fourth-biggest prefecture eyes four-day workweek, but will that schedule work?

Casey Baseel Sep 7, 2024
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There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the extra day off comes at a price.

One of the biggest changes in modern workplaces in Japan is a more vocal commitment to the idea of providing a good work/life balance for employees. Those advocating for flexible schedules in particular have some extra leverage these days as the pandemic showed that it’s possible to run a business without every single staff member in the office five days a week.

The latest employer eying a shift is Aichi, Japan’s fourth-most-populous prefecture and the part of the country where you’ll find Nagoya, its fourth-biggest city. On September 5, during Governor Hideaki Omura’s regular press conference, he revealed that his administration is looking to give government employees the option of working just four days a week and having three days off. The goal is to improve workers’ health and work efficiency, and also to make government work more attractive to job seekers.

On the surface, having a three-day weekend every week sounds like a great deal. However, that part about the plan being expected to boost efficiency doesn’t mean the reason people would be getting a day off is that Omura thinks they’ll finish everything they need to do with eight hours to spare. On the contrary, the current plan isn’t just for workers on the four-day-week schedule to complete the same number of tasks, but to continue working the same number of hours as they are on the current five-day schedule, working longer hours on those four days.

That raises the question of just how many extra hours per day employees on the four-day schedule would be working. An eight-hour shift cut into four pieces would mean two extra hours per day, but for many jobs in Japan it’s not a matter of if you’ll have to do overtime on any given day, but how much. For many people it’s a struggle to fit everything their job asks of them into five days, and cramming it into four might mean excoriatingly long shifts on those four days and being exhaustingly busy, especially if being off for three days increases the pressure to avoid leaving anything not wrapped up over the extended weekend. All that could turn the extra day off into one where workers don’t have the energy to do anything other than recuperate.

▼ Is this woman luxuriously sleeping in because she doesn’t have to go to the office on Friday, or is she just dead tired from having been there for 12 hours on Thursday?

Thankfully, it looks like those pushing for the plan are at least aware of such concerns, and government workers are currently being surveyed as to how feasible it would be for them to work the four-day schedule. Omura says, though, that that if a fud-day workweek can be implemented without causing problems or severe hardships, he hopes to introduce the system next spring at the start of the new fiscal year.

Source: TBS News Dig via Jin, Chukyo TV
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