Last week, gas prices peeked at a national average of $4 a gallon. The stress that transportation has had on the working community has been immense and workers are looking for any way to reduce its impact. In my office, carpooling is more common than it ever was and reports from other industries indicate that the percentage of “home workers” has increased.
Obviously, cleaning crews can’t do their jobs from home and varying shifts make carpooling difficult, but there still might be relief in sight for their pocketbooks. The concept of a four-day workweek has been spattered across newspapers and chat rooms alike, and the concept has been well received.
Increasing shifts to 10 hours and reducing the amount of work days in a week to four would save employees at least one day of gas. Sounds great, right? Well, there are logistics that must be outlined and laws to consider before such a program can be implemented.
In most cases, it is less than ideal to go sans staff for a day. Some facilities are getting around this by fluctuating their crew so someone is present every workday. Half the staff works Monday through Thursday and the other staff is on hand Tuesday through Friday. Problem solved. Well, in some states at least.
Many employers who are considering a four-day workweek simply have their hands tied by the states in which they live — in the form of overtime. In some states, any time spent working over eight hours in a day is considered overtime, regardless of how many days a week are worked. In these states, a four-day workweek would help employees, but it would be a financial burden on the department. Essentially, with four ten-hour days employers would be paying eight hours of overtime for the same amount of work they would get in five eight-hour days.
Other states aren’t as strict, indicating that an employee can work as long as they want in a day, but anything over 40 hours in a week is mandatory overtime — making the four-day workweek feasible.
According to many of my readers, various departments are actively exploring the four-day workweek as an option to help employees ease their financial burden. In fact, some have already implemented the program with great success. It might be time to examine your department to determine whether similar programs would work.
Posted
06-16-2008 8:00 AM
by
Corinne Zudonyi