Save the Economy with a Four Day Work Week

Its not hard to tell we are heading deeper into a nation wide shortage of work. While we might be able to stimulate the economy, its certainly not guaranteed. So most American are going to have (or already have) been forced to look more realistically at their futures in the job field. Many people are being forced to once again downgrade to smaller cars and houses and conserve their food and household items budget even further. But here's a concept you probably haven't heard yet.

We may be saved by shifting to a four-day week.

 The gap of jobs that are needed and the jobs the economy is producing is widening, no doubt about it. Its pretty ominous, and national unemployment is still barely under 10%. The actual "official" unemployment rate is probably double that. There have been specialists analyzing that about 6 million jobs alone were lost in the last recession wave.

So back to our four day week. Its clearly devastating to think of the growing number of Americans losing jobs, but this should actually be giving an incentive for Americans to work harder. If Americans are able to work together and push for a four-day week, the extra days they give up can greatly increase the amount of extra needed work. This would force businesses and companies to hire more people to cover the gap of workers. By needing to bridge this gape, we could create 25% more jobs. For every one hundred people that switched or were forced to switch, 25 new jobs would be created.

This would mean a sacrifice on the workers and might mean a little more paperwork and checks for the managers / owners, but would it be worth it?

Its not really as 'out there' as it might sound. There are several ways that families could solve the problems that would be associated with a shorter work week.

For wages, productivity can be increased, as it has by almost 70% in the past twenty five years. If only 2% of this was given to workers, there would be a whole lot compounded over years and years. This could make a '99%' job up to $50,000.

With a shorter week there is also less gas wasted transporting and commuting to work. So less money goes into filling up your car as well as repairing it.

Anyway around it, the recession / depression should have instilled a trending mindset towards less consumption and more recycling, conservative, and humble lifestyles.

However this change to a shorter week would take somewhere around twenty to twenty five years to in-act. By that time, many people would assume our economy would be in better shape. Don't. There is a good change it won't, so unless your prepared to move to Switzerland, I wouldn't get your hopes up. The way the political elections are going, we're more likely to elect someone into office who has the least amount of gossip against him/her than the one who is most likely to help our situation.