Four-day work week or lose your job?

The spectre of unemployment is casting the longest and darkest shadow over the economy and consumer sentiment. To survive this downturn in confidence and investment, private companies, which do not have the luxury of being supported by the taxpayer, are having to cut costs.

So how to ease the pain and share the burden?

NVDL: Any other ideas? How about changing the sort of industries we're used to...more railroads, more...farming...more grocers, more people who fix things (and not just by replacing broken parts with new ones). How about less fry pits and fast food joints, (aka cancer huts), how about less cars and more public transport. How about more walkable communities, and fewer sterile single person box apartments?

clipped from www.smh.com.au So how to ease the pain and share the burden? In order to minimise the trauma of involuntary redundancies, we believe inadequate consideration is being given to the non-voluntary four-day week as an alternative to redundancy. This may be administratively difficult. We are under no illusions about the workplace legislation imposed on employers by federal and state governments, which is ridiculously complex and burdensome. This idea may also be opposed by unions paranoid about a Trojan horse of lower pay and more onerous conditions. But surely a four-day week, either voluntary or imposed, is preferable to involuntary redundancies. Some smaller enterprises in Australia have already begun using the four-day week to avoid lay-offs. In the United States, Nissan, the Japanese carmaker, announced this month it was putting its American assembly plants on a four-day week, which also means a 20 per cent cut in salary, to preserve jobs in the face of a severe slump in sales.