Could The Iran War Accelerate The Shift To Four‑Day Workweeks?

This article, written by Bruce Crumley, was originally published on Inc.com.

As the nearly five-week war with Iran sends prices of gas, food, and other goods ever higher, some observers are wondering whether the otherwise grim situation may eventually produce an unexpectedly happy development for employees. Not only might the increasing cost of fuel convince more businesses to again relax recently tightened work-from-office requirements, this thinking goes, but many could go even farther by cutting the work week to just four days as a way of conserving energy.

There are several reasons why speculation about a four-day workweek in response to the Iran war has been increasing of late.

The first is that it revives arguments some economists, academics, and progressive business leaders have made in recent years in favor of cutting the workweek by a day. Enduring productivity gains made by employees during the past century, they argue, would permit employers to operate only four days without output dipping.

What would employers get in exchange? Some businesses and countries have tested the four-day model, with many reporting productivity actually increased as a result, while burnout and turnover rates plunged. Win-win, supporters say.

The second reason is that while paying workers five-day salaries to work only four may sound ruinous to many business owners, the idea of letting staff work from home was also a crazy notion until the pandemic turned it into an obligation to just keep operating.

Some Countries Have Already Cut The Workweek

And finally, several Asian nations, including Vietnam, Pakistan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, have all issued business directives to help conserve increasingly tight fuel supplies. In addition to urging more remote work, many of those countries have also already cut the workweek to four days.

In other words, just as remote work wasn’t something most employers ever would have imagined—or allowed—before the pandemic imposed it upon them, some experts say disruptions from the Iran war could force a shrinkage of the workweek.

“Previously, a four-day workweek was mostly theoretical or confined to a handful of pilot programs,” Mercer chief workforce strategist William Self said in a recent Fortune article that examined possibilities the war’s consequences could produce a three-day weekend. “Now you have some governments weighing in as a matter of public policy and major employers adopting it, and they’re doing so in the same news cycle. That’s a different situation than we’ve been in before.”

Why The US May Not Follow Their Lead

While that’s true, still other differences offer arguments for why a reduced week is likely not in the cards.

For starters, virtually all the nations that have cut the workweek are relatively small economies that produce little or no oil of their own and import virtually all their energy supplies. That’s almost the entire opposite of the situation in the US, which is the world’s largest crude producer.

Meanwhile, remote work was introduced to prevent an enormous global health threat from killing hundreds of millions of people. As painful as today’s higher gas and energy prices are to businesses and employees, those costs have not assumed life-and-death gravity likely to provoke another workplace revolution.

Why Employees Aren’t Buying The Optimism

Finally, as some online skeptics note, the current oil and gas crunch would presumably have to become urgent before the government and businesses felt obliged to embrace the four-day work week they’ve long rejected.  But to reach that point, the economy would need to be in such a state of disruption and distress that companies accepting three-day weekends would likely also have to adjust with mass layoffs.

Say hello to the seven-day, no-pay weekend, and goodbye to the four-day workweek.

“Only way that happens is if fuel rationing is enacted,” warned Free-Huckleberry3590 in a recent thread on social media platform Reddit about the potential of the Iran war ushering in progressive workplace changes. “If that happens, we have a lot bigger problems to worry about.”

“When energy costs go up enough, and they can’t raise prices because then no one will buy anything, they will close one day a week,” agreed JustmyOpinion444. “But they will either change everyone to 10-hour days or, essentially, cut our pay.”

“The direction things are headed is for economic crisis, during which there will be no talk of workers' rights or conditions, unless you want to get fired and replaced by the desperate unemployed person behind you,” Arabidkoala added.

In other words, despite the hopeful, happy talk about the Iran war generating a four-day workweek the same way the pandemic ushered in remote work, the majority of employees responding to that optimism aren’t at all convinced.

“Anyone who thinks this is actually going to happen is totally delusional,” said Mrs_Privacy_13 by way of example.