War cry for a 4-day work week

“Tell me. Am I reading right?”

The little Italian pokes his finger at Saturday Citizen’s front page. I read what he is reading on the supermarket’s newsstand: Time for a four-day work week?

Yes, it’s time, I tell him. Not a lot of companies are doing that in sunny SA, but some have stuck their necks out, I tell him.

“Merda! This cannot be,” as he grabs a paper, indignantly waving it around.

“You’ll still get your pound of flesh,” I try to pacify him. “People will work shorter weeks but longer days – at least 10 hours.”

“You know nothing,” he proclaims with another arm-wave.

“The people, they are lazy. Now we let them sit in the sun longer.”

Turns out he knows what he’s talking about – apparently. “I’m a builder,” my co-shopper proclaims. I’ve met one or two before, but clearly not a master builder like him.

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I hear about a work force doing the bare minimum; a foreman who tells him minutes before the hardware store closes “no cement”; a master-builder-in-training laying 500 bricks a day (“Me? I do 1 200,” he brags sideways).

“And then I must pay them the same money but they only work four days a week?” His distress is by now rubbing off.

Only, it doesn’t really. I firmly believe in work ethic. You know your job, you do it. If it takes you longer because you have one less work day, you stretch your four days longer – 10 hours each if needs be.

But it seems I am in the minority, I hear that night over a braai tjoppie with my millionaire pal.

“I didn’t become a millionaire because of my staff, I became it despite them,” the man who went bankrupt twice tells me.

His woe list is long but he doesn’t dwell on it. I hear briefly about a trusted right-hand man “who only sparks when I am around”.

The Italian is right, my friend insists, South Africans are lazy. Trained to one day take over his company, my pal’s right-hand man “sits in the sun” when the boss goes on his travels. “And, like your Italian, it costs only me; no
one else.”

I hear the bosses, but hear my silent war cry better: power to the people – four days a week…

ALSO READ: SA far from 4-day work week, say experts