"Five-day working week - a luxury?"
To expound on a letter with the above heading appearing in your daily on the 15th of February 2008, the answer is yes, and no. It depends on where you live. In the west, 5 working days are more than good enough, because.....you work. That is why there exists what we call a "rush hour" that lasts an hour (or an hour and a half at the most, depending on how far you have to travel). The work force is bent on reaching their place of work on time, and do not leave a minute earlier. Lunch hour is fixed, and you cannot reach a soul during that period. On either side of the lunch hour, and as long they are at work, they put their hearts into it, and do their work intensively and extremely efficiently.
You would think, under the circumstances, that they do deserve 2 days of rest and relaxation. Do they get it? Not quite. Cleaning the house, washing clothes, gardening, small repairs that need to be done around the house and doing groceries take up most of one of those days, at the least. They do not have a domestic workforce. The few hours of relaxation that they can squeeze out of that is quite heavenly.
But what about a place where people arrive at their workplace whenever they want, be easily distracted during work, enjoy abnormally extended lunch periods, leave as they wish and have an extremely efficient domestic workforce? I think they should work 8 days a week!
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