Written by: Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. Originally published in WorkLife by London Inc.
Could the Iran war revive the four-day workweek?
Covid gave us hybrid work. The Iran war might give us a three-day weekend
Crises have a way of accelerating change, as workers in Asia are discovering this month, where a number of countries have instituted four-day workweeks in response to the energy crisis ushered in by the war in Iran.
The first country to do so was the Philippines, where president Ferdinand Marcos Jr. implemented a four-day workweek in early March, citing rising fuel costs. A little over a week later, Sri Lanka followed suit, declaring every Wednesday to be a public holiday; other countries in the region, including Pakistan, Vietnam and Thailand, all introduced their own variants, including mandating work-from-home or, in Thailand’s case, ordering their civil servants to take the stairs, and allowing them to wear cooler clothing to cut down on AC usage.
While the response is relatively regional, owing to Southeast Asia’s particular reliance on oil from the Gulf, the move has some taking notice in the West as well. Some have started to make comparisons to Covid, which ushered in remote work in a way that proved stickier than many people initially expected. “Remote work didn’t spread because companies planned it,” said William Self, chief workforce strategist at Mercer. “It spread because the pandemic crisis forced the experiment, the experiment worked and workers weren’t willing to give back what they’d gained. The same logic applies here.”
But we wouldn’t plan out your long weekends just yet, as this isn’t the first time we’ve been down this road. During the 1990 Gulf War, the Philippines implemented one of the world’s first four-day workweek policies, then lifted it shortly after. As long as the crisis appears temporary (however you define it), inertia will play a role.
“I do not see this as a model for [the West], at least in the long term, because the current sharp rise in fuel costs is temporary,” said Trinity Business School professor Dr. Wladislaw Rivkin. While Dr. Rivkin and other analysts are dismissing the notion that this could bolster the case for a four-day workweek in the West, Self thinks this time could be different — not only because of the context, but because the energy crisis underlying it appears to be more long-lasting than initially expected. Thus far, the four-day workweek has been treated as a perk or a productivity modifier at specific companies, not a broader policy tool. “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,” he said. “That’s a different situation than we’ve been in before.”
Can you call your boss a rich jerk?
If your bosses won’t listen on Slack, you can always try to make them do so in a courtroom
Disgruntled employees with a few choice words they’d love to get off their chest are keeping a close eye on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) stateside these days, where a court is considering: if you’re snarky about your boss, can they fire you?
The case at hand is that of Denise Unterwurzacher, an employee at software company Atlassian, and her boss, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. In June 2023, as Cannon-Brookes, part owner of the Utah Jazz basketball team, was discussing a restructuring plan, Unterwurzacher took to an internal Slack channel to vent her frustrations. “What’s up Outragers, just dialling in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummelled, wyd” she quipped.
Unterwurzacher was then handed her walking papers. Coincidence or retribution? That’s now something the courts are trying to sort out.
The case has become a flashpoint for the limits on free speech within the workplace — and in particular, for Atlassian, how seriously it takes its own policy of ‘Open Company, No Bullshit,’ a corporate policy meant to promote transparency. “We call a spade a spade,” Cannon-Brookes once said of their company culture. “We want everybody inside the business to do that.”
Atlassian’s lawyers are defending the firing, saying the comments veered from criticism into ad hominem attacks. “Just because it was a CEO doesn’t excuse the conduct. It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk,’” said lawyer Troy Valdez
And therein lies the central question the case poses: at what point does an employee’s frustration with a manager or with working conditions cross the line from criticism to personal attack?
Unterwurzacher is arguing that from an employee’s perspective, it is difficult, if not impossible, for an employee to do so in a way that doesn’t offend somebody. “I think it’s difficult to point out the power imbalance in a way that is not potentially described by somebody as an ad hominem attack,” she said during a cross-examination.
So far, lawyers with the National Labor Relations Board seem to be hewing towards protecting free speech. “Letting Atlassian fire her would upend well-established principles under U.S. law,” said NLRB attorney Colton Puckett. “Employees are allowed to collectively discuss and protest their working conditions, and they’re allowed to so in ways that their bosses may not like.”
Canada is miserable-r than usual
Canadians — especially young people — are getting gloomier about life with each passing year
The once-ubiquitous image of Canadians as a polite, happy nation appears to be taking a serious hit these days, with the country slipping to 25th on the recently released World Happiness Report (its worst-ever result), as a toxic cocktail of social media, stress, cost-of-living and a lack of opportunity have started to take a bite out of our collective well-being.
While the World Happiness Report laid a lot of the blame at the feet of social media — its report on the rankings focused almost entirely on the subject — here at home, experts think there are other factors worth looking at.
“Social media could be one part of this puzzle, but it doesn’t seem like it’s the full picture,” said University of Toronto happiness researcher Felix Cheung.
An entrepreneurial-minded reader might key instead on one of the categories where we fell the furthest. Take, for example, ‘freedom to make life choices,’ a measure of whether respondents felt able to do things like start businesses, pursue new opportunities and take big risks on things. On that measure, we’re in freefall mode, dropping from 12th to 58th over the course of the last decade.
“People need to feel they have autonomy, competence and connection to work and live at their best,” explained University of Quebec’s Jacques Forest. “There are examples all over the world showing that when you take care of humans, you harvest positive things. We need to look at what the people who are winning are doing.”
The economic climate looms large over the discussion, and some economists are keen to dig a bit deeper than the social media and housing costs the report seems to blame. Comparing it to the experience of middle management, Rosalie Wyonch of the CD Howe Institute said that she sees in the report evidence that Canadians are feeling powerless to face the changing tides. “Maybe they can’t move to improve their family situation or leave a job they hate,” said Wyonch in The Globe and Mail. “Young people are experiencing an early version of middle-management angst: you don’t have a ton of power, almost no resources, but you feel responsible for things you can’t control.”
And it is also a burnout story. The demographic overlap here is obvious — the groups reporting the steepest happiness declines (25- to 54-year-olds, millennials, parents) routinely report the highest levels of burnout. Stress at work, it seems, will continue to play a role in overall happiness.
“We see more burnout in those struggling to pay bills,” said Tim Cooper, VP of Mental Health Research Canada. “So they’re bringing the stress of their experience to their workplace. They’re coming to their workplaces with less charge, with less battery, and they’re burning out faster.”
A smashing way to relieve the stress
Why a rage room could be your next corporate outing
Stressed out about AI? Are you looking at your computer more as an enemy than a tool or a friend? Have you tried smashing the crap out of it with a sledgehammer, by any chance?
You should probably hold off on beating your work laptop to smithereens, as enjoyable as that might be. But luckily there is an alternative: rage rooms, where guests pay to smash things into a zillion pieces.
“In an era of layoffs and AI anxiety, smashing things has become corporate America’s newest coping mechanism,” reads a report from Business Insider.
According to rage room operators, corporate bookings are through the roof; one co-owner said that they had seen corporate clients double over the past year, and have started offering a pricey VIP Experience, “where the room can be set up like a full office, and customers are free to take a swing at anything in sight.” (We assume this does not include the boss.)
Rage room operators have been hip to this possibility for a few years. The concept has white-collar origins, having started in Japan in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. “There’s money to be made in helping offices literally smash away their frustrations,” said Shaun Crane, a rage room owner.
Psychologists see the obvious link between rage room popularity and underlying stress. “People are overwhelmed, burnt out and angry due to ongoing political, economic and social issues,” noted Colorado University’s Emily Hemendinger. “There’s a growing sense of helplessness, and many people are looking for ways to regain a sense of control.”
Add to this a healthy and accessible supply of smashable electronic waste, and you get a sense of how the business model works.
It probably doesn’t actually work in the sense of making you feel better long-term, though. “Short term, activities like rage rooms can be fun, novel and mood-boosting. They may help people who struggle to verbalize emotions start to release them in small, manageable ways,” said Hemendinger. “[But] without addressing the root cause, any relief gained is likely to be temporary.”
Nonetheless, if you’re an office manager trying to soothe your stressed-out charges, you might see the appeal in an opportunity to wallop your Windows into next week. There may be less money in computer programming these days, but maybe there’s some left in computer de-assembling.
“We expect to see rage rooms on almost every city block in the next few years,” said rage room industry analyst Anna Lawrence in a 2024 report that predicted rage rooms could become a $250 million per year industry in this decade. “There is endless consumer demand for finding unique ways to blow off steam.”
