buter's BABY blog

You ever have one of those days where it seems you didn't sleep right, and you end up all fuzzy through the day?

Yeah, I had one of those yesterday.

I've decided therefore, that 5 days weeks are bad, we should have 4 day weeks for the main part, with the bonus that public holidays mean that we get a 3 day week every now and again.

This would solve so many problems!! There's the problem of long weekend traffic on the not-so-common 3-day weekends - Friday night traffic out of the CBD is utterly crapola and so if there was a 3 day weekend every week it wouldn't be so bad, since you wouldn't have 250,000 extra people all driving up to the Central Coast on that one long weekend, instead some of those people would drive up next weekend. Because they can. Of course you could say instead that every weekend the traffic will be utterly crapola, but I think that wouldn't happen. After all, we don't all drive up the coast every weekend already, why would we do it when we have a 3-day weekend every week? I'm sure it's only the specialness of the 3-day weekend that makes the traffic crapola.

Another problem solved would be the midweek hump day, commonly known as Wednesday, when weekends seem so far away in either direction. If you only have a 4-day week, no hump day, since on Tuesday the weekend was only a day or so ago, and on Wednesday, the weekend is only a day or so away! No hump day makes for no boring Wednesday-itis where all your coworkers look depressed because the weekend is so far away in both directions.

And here's a thing - having a 4-day week would help out all those Soccer mums - instead of losing a quarter to half of the weekend ferrying kids to and from school sports on a Saturday morning, and thus having less time to do grocery shopping, household cleaning and all that boring stuff, there would be the option to carry out the sport thing more spread out (no more 7am starts in winter...) or get it over with all on the one day and then *still* have a whole 2 days to do all the family catch-up stuff.

As for economic sense - since it seems most salaried workers in Australia work at least 10 hours a day anyway, but only get paid for 8, why not keep pay rates the same (i.e. paid for 40 hours) even though we're only working 4 days - that way we actually get paid for the hours we work, rather than the hours we are nominally employed for. Doesn't that sound fair? And maybe it would make the workplace more efficient too.

Look, to be fair, I think it would even work if we didn't all take the same 3rd day - some people take Friday and some Monday - the Sat/Sun common days are enough for sport, social events and all that, and meanwhile we all get our extra day.

Hey. I heard the public service can sort-of do this already with flexi time. Why isn't that standard for the rest of us?

now watch me disappear in a puff of ill-humoured smoke ..... grummble rummble grumf ..