I Love The Four Day Work Week
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Work, Society, Self, Lifestyle, Productivity

I Love The Four Day Work Week

As an Amazon warehouse picker, the extra day off has been a game-changer

Photo: Marten Bjork/Unsplash

Working the first week at my summer job at Amazon has taught me many things, but more so on the technical side, like how to put in a missing item, unscannable item, or clock in from my phone.

One of the most existential beliefs I have come away with, however, is that the four-day workweek is supreme.

Yesterday, I got the day off. I only work Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Although it still amounts to 40 hours and longer days than your typical 9–5, having three days off every week feels significantly better than the usual 5-day workweek.

I can’t describe why it feels so great to only work four days. In reality, I’m working the same amount of time and dealing with longer hours when I do work. I’m still learning a lot and trying to find better ways to keep up with productivity quotas as a picker.

We are certainly not living in conventional times. I may have just enjoyed working at Amazon more than I would otherwise as a means of getting away from home, the computer, and online teaching. I recognize that I’m pretty privileged compared to people who have been working at the warehouse throughout the whole pandemic since I’ve had a stable income from teaching up until now.

But I have worked my 40 hour a week jobs before, whether it was at Walmart or at my college gym. But those hours were usually interspersed between five days in the former and up to seven days in the latter with fewer hours per day. And those experiences pale in comparison to Amazon.

Perhaps I just like to get all of my work done with earlier. Apparently, what Amazon is doing is actually a “compressed schedule” rather than a four day work week — a real four day work week, according to Karen Foster, professor of Sociology at Dalhousie University, is when there are fewer hours as well as fewer days worked.

“A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40,” Foster says.

The four day work week (and not the compressed schedule) is gaining traction in Europe, with more employers cutting hours but not wages. In the U.S. and Canada now with the pandemic pushing more childcare responsibilities onto parents — and it should. As researchers Ben Laker and Thomas Roulet in the Harvard Business Review found that workers can be just as productive working four days instead of five, all while becoming happier and more committed to their employers.

That means less sick days are taken, employees don’t use as much office facilities like toilet paper, soap, and hand sanitizer. Look, I don’t think many people would mind working less, but I also acknowledge that I might not have experienced what an actual four day work week is like. All I know is that working at the Amazon warehouse is a different kind of challenge, but an absolute breeze compared to teaching.

Although teaching is my calling and vocation, it is far more stressful and demanding than the monotony of warehouse work has been. I only get physically tired from working at the warehouse, but I was physically and mentally exhausted every day coming home from my school building. I loved having a three or four day weekend that gave me the escape of the weekend much earlier than the usual chaos of dealing with my students and having them curse me out regularly while trying to manage their behaviors.

Sure, I might have two hours extra tagged onto the end of every day to not make it actually a four day work week, but it’s still an extra day off work than usual. I don’t have as much downtime of a regular school day or 9–5 job with a 10-hour work schedule every day, but I have an extra day of freedom and the ability to go on “I can do whatever I want” mode.

My opinion is that if you still have to go into work on a given day, that day isn’t free. It doesn’t matter if you’re going in for less time — I would much rather have all those ten hours in flux between a compressed four day work week and a regular five day work week be packed into four.

Anyways, I’ll tell you more about my Amazon chronicles in the weeks to come. It’s been an alright job and I’m sure I got lucky in a lot of ways having one of the lighter jobs in the warehouse, and I like all my co-workers across all age groups and interests that I’ve been able to interact with (while social distancing). The only thing I don’t like about the job is the sheer size of our warehouse — I have gotten lost on numerous occasions just trying to find where I was supposed to work or the bathroom.

Being a picker is actually pretty isolating — it feels like having your own lab hood as a researcher and not having a partner. You’re kind of just on your own doing your work for most of the day. It gives me a lot of time to think since the task of picking itself is pretty monotonous, and less of a workout than it was on day one, but still a workout between all the lifting and squatting. I count my graces just to have a seasonal job right now when so many people don’t.

As the warehouse grows more and more automated, my job would probably be the first to go. Pickers have robot-like expectations from the computer as well as robot-like productivity quotas, and I can see a pretty close future where technology automates the picker position since all you really do is transport desired items from a bin into a tote. It’s a lot to get used to but I’m getting there with the help of my co-workers and managers.

But no how monotonous and ordinary the job might be, at least I only have to go to work four days a week.