The power of Civic Wednesday with a four-day workweek
Original Medium Post HERE
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Together, they can increase joy, productivity, and health — and strengthen our communities
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If a four-day work becomes the norm, what should be the additional non-work day?
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The four-day workweek
A small, but increasing number of employers have moved to a four-day workweek. One survey found more than half of employers were considering it.
We have experienced mass changes in our typical workweeks before: some states shortened “the legal workweek limit for women from 54 to 48 hours” in the 1910s. The Fair Labor Standards Act established “the maximum workweek without overtime at 44 hours” in 1938, and Congress amended that to 40 hours just two years later.[1] A big change could happen again.
A variety of research links shorter workweeks to positive individual outcomes including increased happiness and life satisfaction. Many employers who have implemented four-day workweeks have found productivity increased too.[2]
How can we use a four-day workweek to maximize community joy? Partly by answering . . .
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Which day?
Some four-day workweek employers have varied which four days each employee works. This allows for five (or more) days of coverage in childcare, retail, customer-facing, health care, and other settings.
While some people must work every day, we should move toward a norm of an agreed additional non-work day — to join Saturday and Sunday.
The four days of work should be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
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But how will we take long weekends if we don’t have Monday or Friday off?
That is a great question — and exactly the point.
The weekend is when we most like to leave town to explore, to have adventures, to see friends out of town. We need a day to connect with our communities.
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Civic Wednesday — for a lifetime of service
With one day off right in the middle of the workweek, people could take daytrips — but they’d be less likely to go away and more likely to stay in the community. We could create a cultural norm of having a Civic Wednesday.
In a time of fraying connection and trust, a shared Civic Wednesday would help us reconnect, strengthening our relationships as we pursue shared purpose, and in turn strengthening our society and democracy.
National service, and volunteering in general, is associated with a range of individual health and wellbeing benefits[3]; national service also is associated with increased ongoing civic engagement. “Neighborhoods with higher levels of civic participation have a greater sense of community, better leadership, and lower rates of crime.”[4]
What if we built on the concept of a year of service — and structured service for a lifetime? What if we finally brought service opportunities to all Americans — so every American and every community could benefit?
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What would we do on Civic Wednesday?
Civic Wednesday would feature many weekly service, wellness, and learning activities. Imagine a variety of volunteer-led community-based fitness classes, volunteer-led tutoring and enrichment for children (and people of all ages), community cleanups.
We would finally have a National non-work day for voting. Neighborhood Associations and other community groups could meet on Wednesdays to ensure more diverse community members could attend and make their voices heard. We could have robust civic conversations; more of us could participate in the kind of engagement found in New England Open Town meetings (making those meetings more representative and democratic).
Civic Wednesdays would catalyze increased wellbeing too. A four-day workweek already is shown to improve employee health; a shared Civic Wednesday could feature more community fitness activities like Eastie Rising.
Participation would be voluntary. We would strive to remove barriers to participation and to make this a cultural norm. People would design their own schedules based on their own needs — with no set hours or amount of time for participation.
I would envision positive spillover, with civic engagement increasing every day of the week — as those who did have to work Wednesdays could choose another civic day.
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Universal Basic Income and Civic Wednesday could help each other
“A growing body of research . . . shows that guaranteed income works — that it pulls people out of poverty, improves health outcomes, and makes it easier for people to find jobs and take care of their children.”[5]
With growing concern about job displacement from rapid technological advances, and about the potential of those advances to further concentrate wealth and grow inequality,[6] support for some form of basic income is growing. Further, with current inequality and poverty, many people simply couldn’t afford to participate in a Civic Wednesday. While there are several barriers to scaling Universal Basic Income (including cost), one significant barrier is the American aversion to giving people something for nothing.
What if we addressed that barrier by linking Universal Basic Income to participation in Civic Wednesdays?
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Universal benefits would result
Those Universal Basic Income payments would be well earned. Clive Belfield’s research found at least a $2:1 return on national service.
As noted, a shorter workweek is associated with increased workplace productivity. Civic Wednesday would maximize that productivity increase because employees who volunteer “tend to perform better at their jobs.”[7]
The positive return would extend far beyond our workplaces through the positive impact of volunteering we highlighted, including reduced community crime, improved individual health, and increased individual and community joy.
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How to support this vision
Employers considering the four-day workweek could make Civic Wednesday the non-work day. They could help connect employees with service opportunities — and offer bonuses to those who participate (providing early experiments for the Universal Basic Income idea).
There are current barriers for many employers. For example, East Boston Social Centers needs to meet the needs of working parents — many of who don’t yet have a four-day workweek. Also, we are reimbursed based on hours of early education and care provided; we couldn’t currently offer a four-day workweek without unacceptable reductions in wages (we continue to seek funding to innovate in our support of our staff. Please let me know if you’d like to help). We can still contribute to the vision, however. And for now, we could partner to offer Civic Wednesday engagement opportunities.
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In this time of rapid change, we need policy and cultural innovations to help individuals, communities, and democracies thrive. Civic Wednesday could be one of those innovations.
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This is the 44th post about boosting joy the only way we can: in community. Please share, subscribe, and join our movement by emailing me or supporting East Boston Social Centers. Stay joyful, East Boston.
East Boston Family Engagement Network Parent Partners prepare for a community Baby Shower: a great example of an event that could happen on a Civic Wednesday.
[4] Pancer, S. Mark. From The Psychology of Citizenship and Civic Engagement. https://academic.oup.com/book/26331/chapter-abstract/194624763?redirectedFrom=fulltext
[5] Greenwell, Megan. Washington Post Magazine. October 24, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/24/universal-basic-income/
[6] A variety of research, including some sited in this New York Times article by Steve Lohr, has found associations between technological progress and growing inequality.
[7] Binns, Corey. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Spring 2014. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/do_volunteers_make_better_employees