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July 5, 2008

Labor productivity of government workers in Utah

I read today on CNN that Utah goes to 4-day workweek to save energy next month in a year long experiment for state employees. Four 10 hour days will replace 5 eight hour ones which has big expected savings in fuel, energy, and commuting time. More than 2/3 of state employees are effected.

I am curious how they are handling vacation. Under the old system a typical state employee worked something like 230 days a year (260 work days less 10 days of holidays and 20 of vacation). Under the new system the base number of days is just 208 days, so if they still get the same holidays and vacation then they work 178 days. The old system would be 11.5% vacation and the new system would be 15.5% vacation. That's a lot more. It is hard to imagine them cutting down on the number of holidays, but I could see them cutting the number of vacation days by 25%. That would be equivalent to saying you have a certain number of vacation hours, (8 * old number of vacation days) and you can use them to buy new vacation at the rate of 10 hours per day or 5 per half day. I find it hard to imagine any way that this works out where state employees don't end up working significantly less in total.

In customer / taxpayer facing work I see this as some benefits. For example, earlier and later DMV and permit granting hours for example could help working folks avoid missing work to do government work. But for government employees who don't punch a clock and never see anyone other than other state employees, monitoring costs of work shirking are already high and this would further raise them. To the extent that the 8 hour day made sense before, surely it had to do with some estimate of when a typical employee's productivity began to decline from fatigue. Yes, an extra day's rest on Friday would help with that, but not fully. For that reason in a private business I would expect this to lower productivity, but more complicated factors dictate government hours. They may only have eight hour days to match conventions of the private sector and thus longer days allow more project work and deep thinking, raising productivity. We'll have to see. This is an interesting natural experiment and I'll be curious to follow this and sees what happens to the number of forms, licenses, and other measurable aspects of government activity.

Of course, if this works, maybe they'll try 13 hour and 20 minute 3 day a week jobs if gas goes even higher.

Posted by OneEyedMan at July 5, 2008 7:29 AM

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