10-Hour, 4-Day Schedule Just Isn’t Working Out : Labor: Many firms say wage laws limit flexibility, and workers find pace grueling. A 9-hour system with alternate Fridays off is gaining favor.
Margie Pohl, personnel manager at Tropitone Furniture Inc., says the 10-hour, four-day workweek at her factory here was a bust.
After eight hours of welding and machining aluminum patio furniture, worker productivity fell sharply, according to Pohl. “It was just grueling for our employees.”
Tropitone thus had to operate on Fridays, to make up for the lost productivity and fill shipment orders. After a year of having to pay hefty overtime wages, the company abandoned the 10-hour work days. “It just cost us too much,” Pohl said, although she declined to provide a figure.
The four-day workweek has been well received by some companies. But as more businesses in California and nationwide adopt shorter workweeks, hoping for financial and environmental benefits, a growing body of evidence is emerging that the four-day work schedule is not living up to expectations for most companies.
Especially in California, where companies complain that they have little flexibility to run such schedules effectively because of the state’s wage laws.
Tropitone isn’t alone in trying and later abandoning the four-day workweek. Companies that have stuck with the schedule suggest that it has had mixed results. And some--seeing weaknesses in the 10-hour workdays--are instead opting for the 9/80 plan in which employees get every other Friday off by putting in nine hours of work Monday through Thursday, plus eight hours on alternate Fridays.
“The four-day workweek has not worked out very well at all,” said Willie Washington of the California Manufacturers Assn., which has 900 member companies.
Washington attributes the problems largely to the state’s restrictive wage regulations. At their core is a law that requires employers to pay daily overtime wages for work performed past eight hours a day, whereas in most other states time-and-one-half pay kicks in only after 40 hours in a workweek.
The only way a business in this state can legally run a compressed work schedule is by first getting two-thirds approval from its employees.
Employers and employees can initiate the vote for a shortened workweek, and either can rescind it. But for workers to do so, they must wait a year. Employers can remove it at any time, but to switch back they must seek another two-thirds approval. Companies say that limits their ability to operate fluid work schedules to meet seasonal needs.
Manufacturers on compressed work schedules have the additional requirement of guaranteeing 40 hours of work each week to employees. Plus they cannot schedule more than 10 hours of work a day, which means companies with continuous operations can’t install, say, two shifts of 12 hours each.
That is exactly what Inland Container Corp., a Indianapolis-based company, wants to do at its paper mill in Ontario. Personnel manager Larry Gravette said Inland Container’s mills in other states operate on such 12-hour shifts. “It’s just more of an economic disadvantage” for California, he said.
Lloyd Aubry, director of the state’s Industrial Relations Department, said that however inflexible the wage rules may be, “this was not imposed on them. Manufacturers and their representatives agreed to them.”
Aubry said the state’s wage provisions were originally enacted to protect workers and have become more flexible in recent years. But noting that employers have complained about the inflexibility, he said, “It’s something that the Industrial Wage Commission will have to take a look at.”
Gov. Pete Wilson, who temporarily lifted the daily overtime requirements after the Northridge earthquake to help workers and businesses recover, said he thinks the daily overtime rule should be permanently removed. Wilson urged the next legislative session to create a bill that would do so.
Nationwide, experts say, 25% or more of large companies offer a four-day work schedule for at least some of their employees. But in California, that figure is probably closer to 15%, said Matthew Bartosiak, a senior consultant at the Employers Group trade organization in Los Angeles.
Since mid-1989, when labor officials began tracking factories on compressed workweeks, 537 manufacturers--including 80 in Orange County--have reported converting, mostly to the four 10-hour-day workweek. But experts said many of these companies have since dropped their plans.
Mike Beaulieu, personnel manager at Tolo Inc., a Santa Ana manufacturer of metal and plastic components, which had been on a four-day workweek, said: “A few weeks ago, we got out of it.” He declined to provide further details, saying only that management decided to discard it.
Despite the recent nationwide surge in employers going to compressed work schedules, extended 10- and 12-hour work shifts have always been the norm for workers like police officers, firefighters and hospital workers.
Many city and county governments, because of declining tax revenues, routinely close on alternate Fridays to cut costs. Most Orange County and some Los Angeles County offices operate under the 9/80 plan, though how much the closures have saved the governments is now being analyzed.
In some ways, the push for compressed schedules is part of a larger workplace trend that has seen most large employers offer staggering hours and flex time--which do not require a worker vote. Flex time gives workers a span of time in which to report to work. And by staggering start times companies can better comply with state car-pooling requirements.
“Increasingly, workers are finding a desperate need for more personal time,” said Barney Olmsted, co-director of New Ways to Work, a nonprofit resource group in San Francisco. Olmsted said more companies are considering the 9/80 plan, which seems to have had much better results than the four-day workweek.
Fluor Inc., the giant engineering services firm based in Irvine, looked at the four-day, 10-hour workweek. But Mark Krouse, Fluor’s human resources manager, said the 9/80 plan seemed less of a strain to workers. So after a trial run of the 9/80 plan in the summer of 1990, Fluor workers overwhelmingly approved it, and the new schedule took effect in March, 1991.
About 90% of Fluor’s 3,000 employees in Irvine now work this abbreviated schedule, with senior management and others--including Krouse--working traditional five-day workweeks to handle customer concerns on the off Fridays.
Krouse said the 9/80 plan has helped lift Fluor’s average vehicle ridership requirements from the South Coast Air Quality Management District from 1.23 in 1991 to 1.34 this year. (AQMD’s goal is 1.5 employees per car.)
The 9/80 plan has also helped Fluor recruit workers, people like David Neeve. “It was a great incentive to work here,” said Neeve, 26, who uses the free Fridays to work on his MBA.
Nationwide surveys have shown that most workers prefer compressed schedules, whether it’s the 4/40, the 9/80 or some variation that gives them extra days off.
Take Kirk Wulff, a machine operator at Wesval Inc., an Anaheim company that makes controls for aircraft rudders.
Nearly every Friday morning, Wulff, 30, tees off at a Birch Hills Golf Course in Brea with his neighbor. Home by 10 a.m., he takes care of work around his Anaheim house, then picks up his 6-year-old daughter from school. “When my wife gets home, we start our weekends,” he said with gusto.
Wesval’s owner, Kevin Huffer, raves about the four-day workweek too, saying it has saved his company as much as $1.80 an hour per worker in overtime expenses. “It’s worked out fantastically for us,” he said.
But for some manufacturers, the 9/80 plan isn’t really an option because the extra hour each work day doesn’t boost production or save costs.
And the four-day, 10-hour workweek has had a punishing toll on some workers, especially middle managers caught between production workers and senior management.
Rick Boyer, a warehouse manager at the Pacific Fitness factory in Cypress, complained: “I’m here at 6 in the morning and I never get out of here. I work a hell of a lot of Fridays” to make sure the work is done.
Partly because of the excessive work, Boyer said he has given his notice. “Personally, the four-day workweek really sucks for me.”
Howard Cooper, president of Pacific Fitness, which makes exercise equipment, said most of his employees seem to like fewer work days. But even Cooper could not offer a ringing endorsement. His main complaint: At the end of a quarter or a fiscal year, when the company needs to ship “everything that doesn’t walk,” he says the company has to operate on Fridays, which is costly.
“I can’t say it’s doing more good than bad,” Cooper said.
At Tropitone in Irvine, “we just couldn’t do without Fridays,” said Pohl, the personnel manager. “Our customers needed things. They wanted it shipped on Friday.”
Making matters worse, Pohl said, workers began to miss one of their regular workdays--some apparently on purpose--while coming in on Fridays for which they were paid at overtime rates. “It didn’t take long for employees to figure that out,” Pohl said.
Pohl said Tropitone’s struggle with the four-day workweek was such that it wouldn’t matter if the state labor laws loosened up. “I don’t think we would ever go back to it.”
Compressed Work Schedules
* Four forty (4/40): 10 hours of work on four days, usually Monday through Thursday.
* Nine eighty (9/80): 36 hours of work one week (nine hours, Monday through Thursday with Friday off) and 44 hours the next week (nine hours Monday through Thursday and eight hours on Friday).
* Flex time: Gives employees the option of changing their starting and ending times daily within a preset range, (e.g. workers begin between 7 and 9 a.m. and leave between 3 and 5 p.m.)
* Staggered working hours: Employers stagger their workers’ starting and ending times, generally by 15 minutes to 2 hours, so that all workers don’t arrive or leave at once.
