In a virtual gathering at the start of September, members of Scotland’s ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) voted overwhelmingly to break with tradition by ditching the five-day working week and replacing it with a four-day system instead. A total of 509 delegates at the party’s annual conference backed plans for a trial of a four-day week. Just 16 dissented.
Given the benefits reported by various Scottish companies that have already adopted the model, it is perhaps no wonder that the SNP wants everyone to share in the spoils. Edinburgh construction company Orocco, for example, says productivity increased and staff mental health improved when it dropped Fridays from its working week back in April. Similarly, Melissa Cairney, an employee at Glasgow packaging firm UPAC, says her employer had no qualms about moving to four-day weeks following a successful two-month trial earlier this year. “Trials […] showed no evidence of any drop in productivity but a marked decrease in stress levels as the staff embraced management’s desire to make their lives better,” she says.
Though both companies are small – each employs fewer than 50 people – their findings chime with the results of much larger-scale trials conducted in countries including Iceland. Between 2015 and 2019 Reykjavík City Council and the national government let office and shift workers cut their hours without any reduction in pay and found the benefits to their wellbeing were repaid to employers by way of productivity gains.
But if these findings have already been made – and similar pilots are currently being run in Spain and by consumer goods giant Unilever in New Zealand – what has the Scottish Government got to gain by duplicating the task itself? Quite a lot, according to Tom Calvard, a senior lecturer in human resource management at the University of Edinburgh Business School. He says that if the Scottish Government wants to make its pilot really worthwhile it will include all sectors of the economy and all types of work contract – something previous pilots have not fully addressed.
“The Scottish Government needs to look across different employment statuses and groups,” he says. “Employees on zero-hours contracts are interesting and a potential positive of this pilot is that it could insist not just on the maximum time people will work, but on the minimum too. Many people are under-employed – they’re not working enough, not using their skills enough and not earning enough. They’ve got a need to benefit from these schemes too.”
David Morgan, an employment specialist at law firm Burness Paull, agrees. “If you’re going to legislate a reduction from five days to four days, gig workers will say ‘I don’t give a toss, I’ve never worked five days’,” he says. “I’d be interested in [how the pilot could address] job security for gig workers and people on zero-hours contracts. Every country around the world is still grappling with that problem; employment status is a very tough area.”
Whether the Scottish pilot will incorporate these issues remains to be seen. Despite the conference vote and statements about building a “welfare economy”, the SNP has so far released scant details about what its pilot is expected to entail. A spokesman for the government says plans for the pilot are “in the early stages of design”. He did not confirm whether £10 million that has been allocated for the scheme is an internal governmental budget or whether the money would be used to help participants pay for additional members of staff. He also did not comment on the companies that are likely to take part in the trial.
In many respects that is neither here nor there, though, because regardless of how good the Scottish pilot turns out to be – even if it finds a solution that would benefit gig workers and those employed in settings other than offices – the results are likely to be moot. This is because employment law is reserved to Westminster, meaning that while companies such as Orocco and UPAC can alter working patterns by asking the permission of staff, the Scottish Government has no powers to make four-day working weeks a nationwide policy from on high.
“There’s nothing stopping an employer [moving to a four-day week] because working hours and shift patterns are almost always a feature of an employment contract,” Morgan says. “But if employers were to no longer be allowed to let workers work five days or more that would be quite radical. [If that was the outcome of the pilot] it would need legislation, but the Scottish Government can’t change that.”
The SNP has acknowledged that the planned pilot would be used to “consider a more general shift to a shorter working week as and when Scotland gains full control of employment rights”. Whether it will ever do so is far from a foregone conclusion.
When Scots were asked to vote on secession from the UK back in 2014, then SNP leader Alex Salmond said he was giving the electorate a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to determine the country’s future. Since then Salmond, who last year defeated a series of sexual assault charges, has left the party and his successor – Nicola Sturgeon – has put another independence referendum well and truly back on the table. Indeed, so-called indyref2 was a central plank of the SNP’s successful Holyrood election campaign earlier this year and, although she did not push the matter at her party’s recent conference, Sturgeon has made it clear that she would like the vote to be held 2023.
It is a difficult path for the First Minister to tread. Though there is the small matter of Westminster refusing to sanction a second vote to contend with, many in her party feel Sturgeon has taken too cautious an approach to indyref2 – and the SNP has lost members to Salmond’s hardline Alba Party as a result. At the same time, polling suggests that support for independence is on a knife edge, with research published by Opinium earlier this month finding that just 51 per cent of voters are in favour of independence – the first poll since April to put the Yes campaign in the lead.
Against that backdrop, and taking into account the fact that the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found 80 per cent of Scottish workers to be supportive of four-day weeks, it’s no wonder the SNP is so keen to signal its commitment to the cause. In 2020 delegates at the party’s conference said a review of working practices that included “the possibility of a four-day week” would be desirable and the SNP first committed to running a pilot in its 2021 election manifesto. Yet it wasn’t until the IPPR published its research on September 1 that that translated into “overwhelming support” for shorter working weeks. As one party member was quoted saying in the Express, supporting a four-day week as the party of health and wellbeing “is the winning combination to win us independence”.
If showing support for a four-day week is more useful to the SNP than a four-day week itself, it is perhaps unsurprising that the government is remaining so tight-lipped on the detail of its pilot. Which is a shame because, if successful, the scheme could have the potential to be not just transformational but world-leading, too.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
