Four-day working week appears to be a panacea for everything that’s wrong in the workplace - David Behrens

The results of the world’s biggest trial of four-days-a-week working were published this week, with the vast majority of companies who took part opting to make the arrangement permanent. It could be a game-changer for the country’s economy, said the organisers – to whom the only question must be, why has it taken so long to realise this? Didn’t everyone say so in the Eighties?

As the findings went before MPs in a push to give every worker a 32-hour week for no less money, a tech company in Sheffield whose staff took part in the trial explained why it was a no-brainer. It’s a competitive jobs market, they said; the incentive of coming to work less often gave them a recruitment advantage over their rivals.

The state of the jobs market is best illustrated by the government’s desperate attempt to coax back to work those who retired early during the pandemic. Some half a million people under 65 have left the workforce since then and there are currently more than a million situations vacant – so you can see the logic. But as the Resolution Foundation think tank pointed out, retirement is nearly always for life; the campaign is doomed to failure.

As someone who did indeed retire during the pandemic, I concur. I’d waited my whole life for my gold clock; I’m not about to hand it back just to massage the employment figures. Besides, who am I kidding? I’m not under 65 – I’d be lucky to get work greeting people outside Asda.

But I’ll tell you where there are plenty of workers going spare and that’s within the government itself. There are well over a million people doing public administration jobs and half of them are at the heart of the civil service. Of those, 85 per cent are white and three-quarters are in the top grades. And nearly all are under-employed. A four-day week? Most of them have cleared their desks by Monday lunchtime.

I’m speaking from experience. For three misbegotten years I was at what was then the Highways Agency, helping them build traffic websites, and I saw at first hand the way senior people delegated their caseloads to freelance ‘consultants’, who then brought in contractors to do the actual spadework. The result was that taxpayers were charged for each job three times.

This remains the practice today, yet those senior officials are the first to whinge when someone tells them to buck up their ideas. Just ask Dominic Raab or Suella Braverman, both of whom have been accused of bullying for daring to administer a strictly metaphorical kick up the backside to their recalcitrant staff.

The emotional impact of the experience on those chastened officials was impossible to underestimate, moaned the head of their union, the contradictorily-named Association of First Division Civil Servants. No, it wasn’t – we’ve all been carpeted at one time or another; what makes Whitehall mandarins think they’re immune?

There is one way they could help ease the recruitment crisis and that is to do the vacant jobs themselves. Instead of sending retirees back to the grindstone, the government could release thousands of civil servants into the jobs market like fish into a river, and see how many manage to swim upstream. Will they be able to withstand the pressure of working four full days for a boss who thinks that with perks come responsibilities, not privilege?

Actually, it’s not a bad idea for a reality show – like The Apprentice but backwards. I’m claiming the format rights, if anyone from Channel 5 is reading.

To up the ante, they could throw in a few bigger fish like Jonathan Brearley, the wretched head of the government’s energy watchdog who has presided over the collapse of 29 suppliers and the obscenity of British Gas breaking into people’s homes to fit prepayment meters. Let’s see if he’d survive in a competitive workplace for even the first four days.

But if there is to be a wholesale retooling of the jobs market isn’t it surprising how little the unions have had to say about it? Perhaps it’s because the changes are being wrought by supply and demand, not by coercion; that’s not their language. It’s an early sign of spring that after a winter of orchestrated discontent, they are starting to become as ineffectual as they were in the Eighties.