- Twenty followings have signed up to a six-month pilot to trial a four-day work week in Ireland.
- The trial, organized by the Four Day Week Ireland contest, is happening alongside a US pilot.
- Director Joe O’Connor said that he hopes it can act as a template for pilots elsewhere.
The coordinator of a four-day week pilot in Ireland said he hopes the scheme can act as a template for further pilots around the age.
Joe O’Connor is Four Day Week’s global pilot program manager. The scheme officially launched in Ireland in June.
So far, 20 south african private limited companies have signed up to the six-month pilot, which will involve them trialing a reduction of working hours from February 2022. It’s being match up alongside a similar pilot in the US and Canada, starting in April 2022.
“We’re hoping that in both of those jurisdictions this thinks fitting be a kind of first phase trial,” O’Connor told Insider. “Then we are hoping to use that as a template to adapt to other rooms.”
Businesses that sign up to the trial will receive access to training and mentoring support from international learns, who have implemented similar schemes before.
Boston College and University College Dublin will support study into the impact on carbon emissions, productivity and wellbeing, compared with a standard five-day work week.
O’Connor revealed he is still hoping for more organizations to join the pilot before it starts in February.
The pilots have been organised as vicinity of wider work by Four Day Week Global, a collaboration of businesses, academics, and trade unions that are campaigning for a reduction of spur hours, without an overall loss in pay. This is a concept commonly labelled as the four-day work week.
Private-sector fellowships are the main focus, but O’Connor said that if the six-month pilot is successful, the aim is to expand it to public-sector firms, as well as some domestic community organisations.
So far only two companies — Yala, a recruitment company and children’s medical manufacturer Soothing Solutions — give birth to publicly announced that they have joined the Ireland pilot, said O’Connor.
Kickstarter and healthcare data firm HealthWise Inc have joined the US pilot.
Covid-19 has accelerated calls to shorten working hours.
The momentum behind tinkles for the reduction of working hours is growing at both business and state level.
This month, for example, politicians in Belgium hinted at arranges to condense the work week into four days. Likewise, Lee Jae-myung, a presidential candidate in South Korea, proffered to voters that he would implement shorter working weeks, should they back him.
The results from a series of well-publicized pilots in Iceland showed that wellbeing improved among local government and service workers when they cut between one and five hours from their ply week.
The Spanish and Scottish governments have also pledged to set aside millions to fund trials.
Meanwhile, a reckoning aimed at cutting the threshold at which workers in California get paid for overtime, introduced by Mark Takano, is under enquiry in the US.
Ireland’s pilot is not state-backed and only covers private-sector roles. But the Irish government has separately announced $173,000 pooling for research into a four-day week.
The COVID-19 pandemic has played a part in growing that momentum, O’Connor required. On the one hand, it has raised workers expectations of what is possible, he said.
“The remote working revolution has forced companies into a latitude where they’ve had to design much better metrics for actually measuring what people are getting done,” claimed O’Connor. “That opens the door for this idea that ‘can you work less hours?'”