The Four-Day Week by Law: Promise and Reality
If society wants a shorter week without loss of pay, the missing day must be paid for by greater efficiency.
Written By: Bryan Theunissen
The idea of a compulsory four-day week, with no loss of pay, has been gaining political traction. It is presented as humane, progressive, even inevitable. After all, technology is advancing, work is changing, and who wouldn’t prefer three days off instead of two?
But promises written into law cannot suspend economic reality. Wages are not determined by decree; they are rooted in value creation. A business can only pay its staff what customers are willing to cover in the price of goods or services. If that balance fails, the firm does not survive.
How Wages Are Actually Set
At its core, a wage is not a moral entitlement but a transaction. Workers bring time, skill, and effort. Employers bring capital, organisation, and risk. Customers provide the revenue that pays everyone. Politicians may describe the settlement of that bargain as “fairness” or “justice,” but the settlement itself arises from productivity and demand.
When governments try to impose new terms on that bargain, they cannot change its underlying economics. They can only shift the costs and distort the outcomes.
What Happens in Practice
History gives us a pattern. When France reduced the legal workweek to 35 hours in the late 1990s, the expectation was that jobs would be shared and unemployment reduced. What followed was more complicated. Large firms adapted with flexible scheduling, but small businesses struggled. Many could not raise productivity enough to cover the lost hours, and hiring slowed. Surveys showed employees enjoyed more leisure, but firms carried heavier costs, and the broader impact on unemployment was ambiguous at best.
More recently, trials of four-day weeks in Iceland and the UK have been cited as evidence that the model “works.” Yet these were small-scale, heavily subsidised experiments in selected industries—largely office-based, with high autonomy and scope for efficiency gains. The results cannot be assumed to generalise to manufacturing, retail, healthcare, or hospitality, where output depends on physical presence and customer flow.
In sectors like these, mandating fewer hours for the same pay simply raises unit labour costs. Businesses respond in predictable ways: tightening performance targets, reducing benefits, automating tasks, or increasing prices. Some absorb the shock temporarily; others close. The law may compel the payslip to stay the same, but it cannot conjure demand at the till.
The Escalating Cycle of Controls
And when these adjustments occur, governments often respond with further prohibitions: bans on layoffs, bans on benefit cuts, bans on price increases. Each intervention addresses one symptom but creates another. Push far enough and the system drifts toward command and control: wage boards, quotas, subsidies, rationing.
This is not theoretical. In many countries that pursued extensive economic intervention in the 20th century, the process began with wage and price controls, expanded to production mandates, and culminated in shortages. What began as an attempt to guarantee prosperity ended as an exercise in managing scarcity.
The Real Driver of Shorter Weeks
There is, however, a way the workweek genuinely shrinks. Over the past century, it has fallen from seventy hours to forty, not because of statutes but because of rising productivity. Better tools, new processes, and higher capital investment lifted output per worker. That allowed wages to rise even as hours declined.
The lesson is straightforward. If society wants a shorter week without loss of pay, the missing day must be paid for by greater efficiency. That means investment in technology, education, and infrastructure, not decrees from parliament.
A Choice of Paths
The attraction of the four-day week by law is obvious. It offers something for nothing. But in economics, nothing is free. One path leads to compulsion: legislate outcomes, chase the fallout with new rules, and end up rationing scarcity. The other path leads to construction: raise productivity, share the gains, and make shorter weeks both real and sustainable.
The first path may flatter political hope. The second is harder, but it is the only one that endures.
Bryan Theunissen is a South African doctor with a stubborn streak of optimism. Even after years of watching bad policy win, he still insists on pointing to better choices.