Flex Time Reshapes Lifestyles : The 10-hour days can be tiring, but employees have the perception of more leisure time as a trade-off.

Imagine shrinking your workweek to four days--and stretching your weekend to three.

Well, to some, it’s no longer just a dream.

Ask John Capra, 44, of Santa Clarita, a Southern California Edison Co. planner who works four 10-hour days a week and takes Fridays through Sundays off:

“I’m more invigorated when I go back to work on Mondays. After three days off, I don’t say, ‘Oh, shoot, it’s Monday again.’ I end up with a mini-vacation every weekend.”

Or listen to Jenny Dodson, 35, of Mission Hills, a full-time nurse who works three 12-hour shifts a week at Valley Presbyterian Hospital, with four days off:

“It gives me maximum time at home with my kids. I do feel that too many children today are suffering. I see it in many of the kids I work with when I volunteer at my kids’ classrooms. Too many kids are robbed of their parents.”

And for Michael Ige, 37, of Van Nuys, working four days a week (with Mondays off) as an accountant at the Southland Corp. in Valencia saves money on car fuel (he spends $8 a week instead of $11 when he worked five days) in his 42-mile, round-trip commute.

But he acknowledges that 10-hour workdays can be fatiguing. “Usually when you get home, you don’t have time to relax or catch up on chores,” he says. “I finish dinner at about 7:30 and I’m ready to go to sleep.”

Today, the four-day, 40-hour workweek--or “4/40” or “4/10” (four 10-hour days) or “flex time,” as employers variously call it--seems to be reshaping America’s workplace and lifestyles in mincing steps, if not yet giant leaps.

It’s an idea that offers not more leisure time, but the perception of it. Actually, flex time simply rearranges the calendar that has ruled America’s workplace for more than half a century, giving employees bigger chunks of time to relax or play and work, or to run errands on days when lines at banks and other venues are shorter, or even to rethink their own work ethic.

And it’s a trend that meshes with these fast-changing 1990s, when millions of Americans--many in two-career or single-parent households--frantically try to balance careers with personal and family time.

Jenny Dodson and her husband, Stephen, 38, who works a four-day week as a police sergeant for the Los Angeles Unified School District, could qualify for advanced degrees in logistics. Both work all night, but when their staggered work schedules prevent either from looking after their children--Rebecca, 10, and Cathleen, 6--that task falls to Jenny’s mother, Judy Prey, also a nurse, who works three day shifts a week at Valley Presbyterian, which is in Van Nuys.

Sometimes Jenny arrives home from work not long after sunrise--just in time to greet her daughters as they dash off to school. “If my husband’s off, he gets the kids up and gets them ready,” Jenny says. “And since I’m already dressed, I drive them to school.”

Some experts say leisure has become more precious amid what they call growing dissatisfaction--particularly among women--with fast-track careers that all but cancel out family.

“Women realize they don’t have to work 60 hours a week and earn an MBA at night to be complete people,” said Frank McBride, a project director for Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, a market-research firm in Westport, Conn. “That was a lie that was sold to them in the ‘70s and ‘80s. . . . Now they’re trying to get fulfillment out of their jobs, but they don’t want it to be all-consuming.”

For now, flex time appears more evolutionary than revolutionary--driven less locally by employers than by efforts to improve Southern California’s air quality.

In 1988, the South Coast Air Quality Management District began requiring government agencies and large companies (those with at least 500 employees at first, 100 employees now) to implement programs aimed at thinning out commuter traffic and polluted air in Los Angeles and three other counties.

They include car-pooling and flex time, which encompasses not just 4/40s (or 4/10s) but a plan called “9/80,” wherein employees take one extra day off every other week.

In the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, at least 36 companies and government agencies have adopted some form of a compressed workweek, 27 opting for four-day schedules, according to the AQMD.

And some municipalities and county agencies have embraced various forms of flex time not just to help the AQMD address air quality, but to accommodate budgets and finances hammerlocked by California’s recession.

To date, car-pooling (or ride-sharing) has exceeded flex time as an option, if only because employers tend to be less enthused than employees about flex time.

However, as Cheryl Fields, an official of Los Angeles-based Commuter Transportation Services Inc., which facilitates car-pooling and flex-time programs, points out: “The compressed workweek wasn’t terribly popular with employers until recently. Many are discovering that it’s a win-win situation for everyone.”

Actually, employers say the four-day workweek has had mixed results.

“We’ve noticed a difference with 10-hour days--our employees accomplish a lot more,” says Gail Hill, assistant human resources manager of Brea-based Southland Corp., the parent firm of 7-Eleven convenience stores. “It’s not a trial program for us. It’s here to stay.”

A survey of compressed workweek employees--conducted by Commuter Transportation Services--showed that 67% of 4/40 participants and 57% of 9/80 participants interviewed reported increases in productivity.

“Substantial data on the effects of compressed workweeks on productivity, absenteeism and morale are in high demand,” the report concluded, “because they will ultimately determine whether a compressed workweek program will be approved by management.”

But the four-day workweek isn’t for everyone.

A Valencia-based company that produces aircraft flight-control technology scrapped it last year after a three-month trial. Officials of U. S. Textron Corp. had offered the plan to the company’s 740 employees, only for productivity and financial performance to nose-dive, said Rod Hanks, vice president of human resources.

“We found that those 10-hour days became simply exhausting,” he said. “Everybody loved the Fridays off, but Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday got to be pretty rugged. People tended to work those extra two hours a day like casual overtime--kibitzing and what have you--as if they were giving the company those hours.”

John Capra, the Edison planner, concedes that 10-hour workdays can drag on and on, particularly for those who work in a single location. “I’m out in the field part of the day,” he said, “and my time goes by pretty fast.”

His supervisors, he says, tend to be lukewarm about the four-day week because “it’s more difficult to organize meetings. We’re not always all here at the same time.”

So far, the four-day workweek hasn’t carried the weight of American law and labor that the five -day week did before it became widely implemented across the land more than half a century ago. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 shortened the workweek from 44 hours to 40--after a United Auto Workers strike, which had ended in 1937, had given rise to the eight-hour workday.

Still, the P. L. Porter Co., a Woodland Hills manufacturing firm, first offered the four-day workweek to its employees 18 years ago.

“It’s been quite beneficial,” said Jeff Lindsey, a company official. “If they ever went back to the five-day week, I don’t think they’d like it.”

That’s what happened to Susan Trulear Hale, 28, who lives in Woodland Hills and walks one-eighth of a mile to her job as a Prudential insurance disability claims manager (her husband, Duane, also works there, but on a five-day week). She had briefly worked four-day weeks with Mondays off, but found it “kind of difficult.”

After returning to a five-day week, Hale didn’t like that, either. So now she works a four-day week again--with Wednesdays off.

“It seems to be easier now, with two days on, a day off and two days on again,” says Hale, whose workdays last from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with 30 to 40 minutes off for lunch. “You’re fresher when you come back on Thursdays; you’re ready to give a lot more to those two days you have until the weekend.”