September 17th, 2009 · No Comments

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

If you worked a four-day work week, you’d be gearing up to knock off about now, as I write this on a Thursday.

Of course you wouldn’t know I was writing this, because you’d be so darn productive  during your four-day work week that you’d never crack a peek at anything on the Internet beyond your work-related reading.

Even if you weren’t loyally plowing away at your desk, you’d still be statistically more likely to read this at home, because you’d be home more. (And if you used your new-found at-home time away from home, well, that’s none of our business now is it?)

Let’s just say that a four-day workweek — whether it was composed of four 8-hour days or four 10-hour days –  would provide more leisure time, potentially a very good thing for stressed out Americans with their comparatively higher rates heart disease and health issues. This, in itself, would be enough justification to consider a shorter workweek.

But let’s move on to another reason: energy savings.

Big work centers tend to have big energy appetites. For every few cubicles, there are lobbies and meeting rooms and often, vacant rooms that are heated and cool. Sure LEED buildings are sprouting daily. But the majority of work centers, office buildings, warehouses and factories are burning through energy faster than they’re laying off employees.

Think what might happen if big office towers turned off the lights, computers. air conditioning and/or heating for an extra day every week?

Better yet, ask Utah officials, who’ve been doing just that, more or less, since August 2008 within their state government system.

The Utah experiment, set up to save energy costs, reduce carbon emissions, enhance the availability of state services and improve the quality of life for employees could be declared victorious on all fronts, says Mike Hansen, management director with the Governor’s Office, which instituted the plan.

“It looks like what we’re saving is 13 percent (less energy consumption) on aggregate,” Hansen said, explaining that the hard numbers won’t be figured or released until October.

While that savings isn’t what some higher level officials had hoped for, Hansen says it was achieved without any hard sacrifices or outlays to retrofit buildings.

“Just operating from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. — just that — is reducing our consumption,” he said.

The longer hours for employees (the vast majority work four 10-hour days)  also came with tighter operation guidelines. No longer are whole buildings cooled or heated for just a handful of workers who want to come in a few hours early or skew their shift later.

Employee behavior factored into higher energy costs in another way. About midway through the pilot plan, those assessing the program realized that  “human behavior” had created an energy creep in many buildings, with employees running portable refrigerators, space heaters and fans. All added up to excess energy costs.

And there were the legions of computers that were placed into “sleep” mode but not turned off completely at night.

With new rules put into place in the spring, the energy savings should rise even higher, exceeding that 13 percent when compared with pre-pilot energy use, he said.

Early estimates of the statistics collected suggest that the plan’s carbon-reduction aspect has worked well — removing carbon emissions equivalent to taking 2,300 cars off the road for a year.

As for what the 24,000 Utah state workers have to say about the new arrangements, (the majority of workers were affected, though some offices remained open on Fridays), most like the concept. Many love it and a smaller segment, mainly parents who’ve  complained that their longer hours don’t mesh well with childcare needs, are miffed, Hansen said.

He believes most employees would opt to go forward with the plan.

And it’s not so radical. Less than 100 years ago, the six-day workweek was the norm.

Today, in Europe many people already work weeks of 37 or 38 hours.  Many German workers are working a 35-hour week (at full pay) as part of a government program to help people retain their jobs during the global recession. And some companies are proposing a four-day week without longer hours as a way to keep more people on the payroll.

A recent article in the New Scientist lists the shorter work week (with or without the same total hours worked) as one of several  “Ways to Make a Better World”.

As the NS article points out, the last time there was a cataclysmic economic upheaval, after the 1929 crash Wall Street, the current 5-day work week emerged, replacing what had been a Monday through Saturday drill.

I hate to say it, but I remember the oil crisis of the mid 1970s (though I was a very tiny child), when some of our schools and workplaces temporarily shielded themselves against high fuel costs with a shorter week.

Today, we have more than just energy costs and security  issues at stake, as if those aren’t big enough. There’s a great big global reason to consider this change: It could instantly reduce emissions from vehicles and buildings, and we must do that soon and well to avoid overloading the Earth with greenhouse gases. This is the most urgent of all quality of life issues, and to think we could work a little less to help out.

TGIT!

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