After working for 10 years on 3 days a week and then another 5 doing 4 days a week the last few years of working a 5 day a week job has been the most miserable adjustment of my life. I’ve still not fully come to terms with how much of my time is ruined by working.
I’m a big four day week stan and I never expected to see it pushed during this parliament. Obviously the end result is going to be heavily dependent on what they end up implementing, but this is potentially huge for many, many people.
The optimist in me says yay 🎉, but the cynic in me worries that this is just Labour shaking a potential carrot at us just before announcing what is reportedly about to be the most savage tax hiking budget in recent history. They were originally going to do it in a couple of weeks on the 13th of Sept but recently pushed the announcement back to the 30th of October just before Halloween.
It feels like they know it’s going to piss everyone off, so they want more time to promise some sunshine 🌞 and rainbows 🌈 stuff first. Also, reading through that article it already sounds like there’s going to be plenty of wiggle room for businesses to make sure they get their pound of flesh by squeezing 5 day into 4 from workers or outright use the “not reasonably feasible” exemption if the definitions are vague in any way.
I hope I’m wrong, but ironically it’s the last few years of Labour really ramping up how aggressively they picked apart everything the Tories were doing that’s made me so cynical of all politicians. 🤨
Four day week could be so fucking huge. Please please please.
The biggest thing might be that it signals a government led by data and not by feels.
Currently, employees have the legal right to request flexible working, but there is no obligation on companies to agree. That balance of power is to be shifted, with companies instead legally obliged to offer flexible working from day one except where it is “not reasonably feasible”.
Seems this isn’t about a 4 day week specifically, but about employers being required to give their reasons when they reject flexible working requests. The telegraph is just using it as an example of something an employee could request.
When we requested flexible working the answer was no and the reason given was the managers have to come in 5 days a week so therefore so does everyone else. Which is such a stupid answer that it beggars believe.
Reported as misleading headline. It’s not actual policy.
Not much we can do as it isn’t editorialised by OP, that’s all on the Torygraph.
We may want a list of sites for this community that are either black or grey listed but we also don’t want to overly restrict the sources used too much as you’d be in danger of groupthink and enforcing a more left-leaning mindset that doesn’t properly reflect the range of opinion amongst general British voters.
So I would black-list the Sun and Star, grey-list the Mail, Express and Telegraph as sources to be used sparingly. We’d probably also want to grey-list sources like The Morning Star, etc - we have !uk_leftists@feddit.uk for that kind of thing.