Working 7 to 5--Four Days a Week : Workplace: Companies are increasingly turning to a compressed workweek to meet anti-pollution laws and to recruit workers.

While most of her friends will be at work this Friday, Barbara Davenport plans to do her Christmas shopping.

Davenport, a payroll coordinator at Builders Emporium’s corporate headquarters in Irvine, will be able to avoid the weekend shopping crush because she is participating in a company program allowing her to work only four days a week.

As a result, three-day weekends have become a way of life for Davenport in the past 14 months. Instead of working, she now typically shops, travels or runs errands on Fridays. “And sometimes it is great to have a day to do nothing but maybe read or sew,” she said.

The day off, she said, is well worth awakening at 4:30 a.m. four days a week to commute from her home in Lake Elsinore to Irvine by 6:30 a.m. so that she can put in a 10-hour work day.

Davenport is just one of hundreds of employees in Orange County and throughout Southern California who are working full 40-hour weeks, but in an untraditional way.

Increasingly, many companies are compressing workweeks for some or all of their employees from the traditional five eight-hour days to four 10-hour days or even three 12-hour days. And in a less radical approach, some employers are offering a three-day weekend every other week to employees who put in nine-hour days at the office.

A few companies began converting to alternative workweeks in the early 1970s, largely in response to the short-lived gasoline crunch. Over the years, interest began to wane, and many firms slid back to the old routine of five-day weeks.

But the compressed workweek is now winning more adherents in Southern California, in large part because of a new regulation of the South Coast Air Quality Management Control District that is requiring the Los Angeles Basin’s 7,000 largest employers to take steps to eliminate one of every three potential car trips to work during the morning rush hours. Putting more employees in each car is one option. Another is having employees come to work less frequently and stay longer.

Besides helping to unclog the smog-filled Los Angeles Basin, compressed workweeks are credited with improving employee morale, reducing turnover and absenteeism, and helping to recruit new employees in Orange County’s highly competitive employment market.

But employers also say a compressed workweek can pose fatigue problems. In addition, communication between employees who work different days is more difficult and also poses a problem to client firms and the public, which expect companies to be open regular hours. Moreover, before launching four-day workweeks, company managers say they must carefully consider if the move will interfere with pre-existing car-pooling plans or with child care, since some facilities may close before parents working 10-hour days can get to them.

Besides Builders Emporium, a home-improvement chain based in Irvine, other Orange County companies that recently have initiated or expanded compressed workweek programs in response to the AQMD push to reduce commuter trips are Delco Remy, an Anaheim battery manufacturer, and Avco Financial Services, an Irvine-based financial services institution.

Fluor Daniel, the primary engineering and construction arm of the Fluor Corp., has instituted a compressed workweek at its facilities in Greenville, S.C., and Houston, Tex., and is considering expanding a pilot program at its Irvine headquarters to encompass all 2,200 employees there.

Such compressed work schedules are generally viewed as an employee benefit, although under most plans the number of hours worked remains the same.

Eliminating one day a week of commuting to work, “saves wear and tear on the car and body and it feels like a holiday,” said Tim Trujillo, vice president of administration at Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics, a company of 600 employees in Santa Ana who have been on a four-day week for nine years.

Moreover, Trujillo, like several other corporate officials whose companies have adopted shortened workweeks, said that turnover has dropped and so has absenteeism because workers often use the extra day off to attend to family and other personal demands.

Also, the AQMD advises companies that cutting a commuting day out of the workweek is an option that can achieve a quick reduction in automobile trips at no additional cost to the employer.

And those commutes have become longer, employers say, as workers move outside metropolitan Los Angeles and Orange counties to get more house for their dollar.

Judy Quiroz, who moved from Whittier to Vista in northern San Diego County to buy a house on two acres of land, travels 75 miles on the freeway to her secretarial job at Delco Remy in Anaheim. So she is particularly grateful to be one of four employees at the plant who are trying out a four-day week.

“You can tolerate the commuting by having the extra day off,” she said.

John Dunlap, director of public affairs for the AQMD, which has put its own staff on a four-day week, said the compressed work programs are an effective pollution-control measure. “If you have employees off one day a week, you have a 20% reduction in commute trips,” he added.

Dunlap said that the district recently adopted regulations requiring companies to draft plans to reduce commuting by workers. Deadlines for the trip-reduction plans to be submitted to the AQMD have been staggered, starting with the largest firms. Dunlap said the district will not have all the plans in hand until late 1990.

“We are already seeing that more of the larger companies are embracing compressed workweeks,” Dunlap said. Of the 200 employer plans that so far have been entered into the AQMD computer system, about 50 show interest in trying a compressed workweek.

Similarly Don Torluemke, president of Ekistic, a Los Angeles consulting firm helping employers comply with AQMD regulations, estimates that of the 700 companies he has worked with in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, more than half are considering adopting a compressed week and about 25% already have done so.

One of the obstacles to shortened workweeks is that under state law, companies must obtain a vote of approval from two-thirds of affected workers before requiring employees routinely to work more than eight hours a day without receiving overtime pay.

Another obstacle, Torluemke said, is that many employers have preferred to follow another trend toward giving employees “flexible work hours” so they can create individualized time schedules within the traditional eight-hour workday.

Besides, some companies argue that longer work days are not appropriate for blue-collar workers who perform physically strenuous jobs.

Still, some companies like Fluorocarbon, a Laguna Niguel-based manufacturer of rubber moldings and other industrial components, have had a four-day workweek for many years and swear by it.

Peter Churm, Fluorocarbon’s chairman and chief executive officer, said that about 2,000 of the company’s 3,400 employees in the United States and Europe have Fridays off, although the sales and service staff are available to deal with customers.

“It is a wonderful way to recruit people,” Churm said. “If we are trying to hire machinists and someone else is, we always wind up getting the guy because he likes the four-day workweek.”

Mark R. Krause, human resources director at Fluor Daniel Inc., said the engineering and construction company is considering adopting a plan that would give its entire Irvine work force an opportunity to work nine hours a day and take every other Friday off.

Krause said his firm is studying the feasibility of adopting a shortened workweek at its Irvine facility in the hopes that it will make the company better able to recruit both engineering and clerical help, two categories that are scarce in Orange County.

“We are looking at alternative ways to attract and retain office and professional people,” Krause added.

Recruitment problems are particularly severe in Orange County, he said, because of the county’s low unemployment rate--3.2% in September--and because the county’s high housing costs make it difficult for professionals to transfer from other parts of the country without lowering their living standards.

Krause said in 1987, Fluor Daniel introduced a compressed work schedule on a voluntary basis for its computer information data personnel in Irvine. To date, he said, 35 of the 48 persons eligible in the department are participating. Moreover, he said, the plan has greatly improved morale in the department and curbed its formerly high turnover rate.

Krause acknowledged that yet another factor motivating Fluor Daniel is that one of its arch-competitors, Bechtel Corp., in July adopted a compressed workweek for its 600-person staff in Norwalk.

Rita Brohman, a traffic-management consultant who works for clients of Ekistic, said a four-day week sometimes exhausts employees in physically demanding jobs and reduces their productivity. But she said there has been a clear increase in the productivity of 30 white-collar employees in accounting, payroll and management information systems at Builders Emporium’s Irvine headquarters since the switch to a compressed week over the last 14 months.

Brohman said that white-collar workers find that when they work more consecutive hours, “It is much easier to keep going and finish a project--especially when you know a three-day weekend is coming up.”

Avco Financial has been tentatively testing the waters of alternate workweeks, one department at a time. John Lenz, Avco Financial’s transportation coordinator, said a poll of the company’s department managers last April showed that they thought about 20% of the employees could be converted to a four-day week.

But so far, only a dozen people in Avco’s audit department have switched to a four-day week as part of the company’s effort to fight air pollution. In addition, 100 computer-programming specialists at Avco for several years have been working 12-hour shifts, three days a week.

Walt Halagarda, a computer operations manager at Avco who is on a three-day week, said the schedule has given him valuable time with his family.

But there is also a downside, Halagarda cautioned. “Management tends to overlook you for promotion,” he said. “They think of you as a part-timer.”

Also, he said that when he returns to work after four days off, it takes him half a day to catch up with what has been happening. And then there is the temptation of using free time on expensive hobbies or shopping.

“You tend to spend money on your days off,” he observed.

O.C. COMPANIES WITH COMPRESSED WORKWEEKS

No. of Company City Employees Alpha Beta La Habra 150 Fairview Development Center Costa Mesa 45 Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics Santa Ana 600 Moulton Niguel Water District Laguna Niguel 100 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Irvine 250 Delco Remy Anaheim 4 Avco Financial Services Irvine 110 Telonic Berkeley Laguna Beach 50 Fluor Daniel Irvine 35 Fluorocarbon Laguna Niguel 160 Orange County Government -- 2,879 Builders Emporium Irvine 30

Company Schedule Alpha Beta 4-day week Fairview Development Center 4-day week Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics 4-day week Moulton Niguel Water District 4-day week Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. 9-hour day extra day off biweekly Delco Remy 4-day week Avco Financial Services 4-or 3-day week Telonic Berkeley 4-day week Fluor Daniel 9-hour day Fluorocarbon 4-day week Orange County Government 4-day week or 9-hour day Builders Emporium 4-day week

Source: Companies listed