Thank God It's Thursday?

What ever happened to the four-day work week? Not so long ago, management consultants were trumpeting the virtues of the institutionalized long weekend as something that would revolutionize American business, improve worker morale and give a whole new impetus to the leisure-time industry. Then came the 1974-75 recession, and the idea of the three-day weekend generally landed back in the pending file.

Now it seems that the innovation may not be that dead after all. Throughout the recession, a small but determined number of firms kept their workers on four-day schedules, and as the presumably prosperous summer of '77 approaches, some other employers are giving the concept a fresh look. In the Chicago offices of the big Foote, Cone & Belding ad agency, 550 employees this week begin a Memorial Day-to-Labor Day schedule that extends their workday to 9 1/2 hours (8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.) but allows staffers to take either Fridays or Mondays off. David Ofher, general manager of the office, sees the experiment as a reward for improved business in the Chicago branch during the past several years. Says he: "It's a large goose to morale. We can afford the risk of not everyone being here every day. People will cover for each other." In Houston, Pullman Kellogg, the big engineering company, has been on a 4 1/2-day week since April, with the employees taking off at noon every Friday and making up for the lost production by working an extra 45 minutes on other days. In Florida, the state department of transportation is now allowing some of its 10,000 employees to opt, if they wish, for a four-day week of ten-hour days.

For employees, the attraction of a regular, weekly three-day furlough from the salt mines is obvious enough, but some companies have found that the four-day week also brings certain problems. McDonald's Corp., which since 1969 has closed up shop every summertime Friday at 1 p.m. in all its administrative offices around the country, finds that while the workers love it, business callers sometimes get frustrated trying to reach someone on the phone on a Friday afternoon. Other four-day companies have found that workers tend to use their longer weekends to moonlight on second jobs, and thus show up exhausted when they return on Mondays. Many companies simply cannot afford the long weekend because federal law requires any firm with more than $10,000 in Government business to pay overtime to employees who work more than eight hours per day.

Though at present only about 960,000 Americans--less than 1% of the total labor force--are on shortened work weeks, the number seems destined to grow substantially in the years ahead. Last October the United Auto Workers signed a three-year contract with Ford that gives U.A.W. workers a total of 45 annual paid days off by 1979; this inspired the union's then president, Leonard Woodcock, to proclaim: "We are on the road to a four-day week. The principle is there now."

The betting is that when the U.A.W. and the automakers next wrangle in 1979, the union will use its Ford contract as a springboard for demanding a real four-day week--not four days and 40 hours, but an eight-hour day, four days a week.

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