Four Days On, Ten Days Off
A very interesting paper (not peer-reviewed) by a team of Israeli scholars proposes that a more manageable exit from pandemic lockdown might be achieved by implementing a scheme in which employees go in to work for four days and then return to isolation for ten days before repeating the cycle. A variation on the proposal would have two staggered relays of workers cycling through the 14 day routine.
The research has been popularized in a New York Times op-ed and a Fast Company feature, so I would bother to discuss it here in detail. Not being an epidemiologist, I can’t vouch for the authors’ assumptions about average infectiousness. Obviously, implementing such a scheme out of the blue would present formidable challenges even assuming competent political leadership.
I would find this proposal more interesting except for the expectation that it would be accompanied by an expectation to cut wages by 60%.
If people end up moonlighting at 2nd jobs to cover their expenses for the missing income you can’t really accomplish anything with it.
But hey the NYT is popularizing it so what can go wrong?
Well, I can vouch for the adjective “amateur” in your handle. The point is not to take a proposal as cast in stone but to IMPROVE it with demands like short-time compensation so that people get paid full-time wages for part-time work. Ever hear or German Kurzarbeit? No, I didn’t think so. “Moonlighting,” by the way, would be a lockdown violation and could be subject to penalty.
The authors were concerned with modeling the epidemiological implications of the proposal, not fine tuning its implementation. Bless your heart.
I suspect this is something that sounds good on paper, but runs into far too many problems in reality. At the very least, it needs planning for the long haul and our record in that regard is pretty spotty.
I can do one better than that: it runs into far too many problems in “reality” because it sounds good on paper! Our imaginations have been taken prisoner by the rhetoric of reaction that Albert O. Hirschman enumerated: any attempt at improvement will only make things worse, attempts at change will inevitably be ineffectual and they will jeopardize some previous, precious accomplishment. Those rhetorics of reaction put an end to discussion, which is what they are intended to do.
Sandwichman:
No sh*t! The last thing I would want to do is explain what I was doing to management, most of whom could not do what I was doing or understand the process. When I was planning production for 6 lines, it was pretty easy not to carry inventory for high runners because it was always in production. I would cut stock there and carry it on the less frequently run items. Typically the demand was inconsistent for low runners or came in spikes. Kept my inventory costs low due to less inventory on the high runners.
But to your discussion on “kurzarbeit,” this could and would work. You just need a planner who would schedule product and determine the needed labor. Routing should give you this hourly info. I would think one might consider three crews of 4 days on to put more time between production runs by groups. If things were going well, one could combine one of the crews with the other two. With the DA in the White House and a supporting cast of Repubs backing him, it would be an uphill battle.
Companies should be open to this especially if Congress kicked in the balance in pay. I forgot to add, the German government does contribute money if companies will keep labor on the payroll at 60% of normal wages. If someone gets an education, both will contribute more.
AS:
If it is a German proposal, chance are it will favor Labor and will have conditions. My German counterparts in Rietheim-Weilheim in the Tuttlingen District had some favorable conditions to work under and kept theri jobs far longer than Americans. Their time off was longer than ours. When they came to Cazenovia, NY where I worked, I was assigned to take them around, Given the nature of the area, it was easy to take them for long hikes on the Link Trails to see some of the hills surrounding Caz. They slept better at night.
Arbeit = work and Kurz = short. It means more than just short work or “moon-lighting.” Looking up the German version of it (I cheated), companies keep employee on the payroll for 60% of the pay and the Gov. kicks in the rest. In the US that would mean they could still have benefits. 4 day of working would allow them 10 days off in lockdown where is they were infected, it would appear in 10 days. Workers would be scanned for temperature upon return to work. This could be done at college also with 4 days of classes and the remainder watching it via computer.
It has possibilities
Rumor here is that if school comes back in the fall, you are talking about on/off schedules or am/pm splits where there currently aren’t any except for preschoolers.
That causes a lot of problems for working age adults with children.
Something will break.
If the program includes keeping worker incomes intact it could be a practical way forward especially if the infection rate continues to threaten everyone. And I’m not surprised the Germans are looking at this – their politics don’t take labor for granted as expendable the way we have.
But the original post acknowledges formidable challenges even assuming competent political leadership. And I was merely observing that in the US this would likely involve screwing workers. It’s what we do.