The ACCI does not support legislating four-day work weeks, instead urging businesses to make their own decisions. “What are the standard working hours, what delivers the best outcomes for those individual enterprises, that should be with the enterprise, and we do not seek to tell individual businesses what they should do to run their own business,” Mr McKellar said. The chamber of commerce supported businesses negotiating with employees if business objectives and productivity were met, he said. Mr McKellar flagged the chamber’s concern with four-day work weeks being legislated in the National Employment Standards. “The issue here that we are seeing is with various unions bringing forward proposals, whether it be for an additional week of annual leave or whether it be a four-day working week or something else, are these going to be part of the National Employment Standards?” he said. “Are they going to be, as Michele says, one size fits all, and we should say certainly they should not. “That is the fundamental approach that we support, but that is not something that should be imposed right across the board universally.” Australian businesses partaking in various individual and collective trials of shortened work weeks are reporting higher staff satisfaction levels. In 2019, Microsoft Japan introduced a four-day working week and reported a 40 per cent boost in productivity. In 2022, a large-scale UK trial involved 73 companies and 3300 employees; about half of respondents said productivity improved either slightly or significantly. The renewed debate around four-day work weeks also comes as multinationals and some of Australia’s largest companies wind back pandemic-era workfrom-home allowances. 8 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA VOLUME 07, ISSUE 03
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