A 4-day week for the VPS?

Much of the reaction to the recent proposal that Victoria’s public servants be granted a four day week, with no diminution in pay, ignores the reality that on average they are probably doing little more than four days real work anyway.

Anyone who has spent time in a public service department will know that while some officers are generally very busy and work hard, many do not have enough to do. One could go further and argue that a fair bit of what is done is of little utility anyway (we are speaking of the ‘pen-pusher’ employees, not nurses, teachers, ambos, etc). The ‘make work’ phenomenon is alive and well in most bureaucracies. Moreover, a majority of Victorian public servants seem to be working mainly from home these days, and are likely to do so indefinitely for a good part of the week. Indeed this is becoming official government policy.

So formalising a four-day week, as long as there is flexibility in the arrangements, is unlikely to see any significant decline in aggregate output (which, it should be said, is notoriously difficult to measure). Productivity will undoubtedly rise. And the ‘wellbeing’ of employees and their families would likely increase with extra (formalised) leisure time. Moreover, some workers would probably take on another job on the day they have free, potentially alleviating current labour shortages in areas like hospitality and retail services.

Where the real problems arise is in any extension of this deal to other parts of government and the private sector, where most people actually put in a full five days’ work. There would be pressure for parity that would be hard for a government to resist. And because the Government obviously could not use the above logic to defend a targeted approach, it would be wiser to ‘not go there’ and simply stick with the public service’s relatively unproductive five day week.