Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I will finish with a questions for the witnesses representing the four-day week campaign. I appreciate they are trying to get some level of buy-in from employers and convince them it can work, and so on.

As part of this they have emphasised that strictly speaking they are not saying it will be a four-day week with a three-day weekend and that they are open to flexibility. There was a study in France on a 35-hour week that found the quality of time away from the job and who controls when it is taken and its regularity and usability is often as important as its quantity. It found employees of lower social rank often received time of lesser quality since they had less control over its scheduling. How do we ensure that flexibility is not used in such a way? It is why the TUC in Britain has explicitly called for a four-day week and a three-day weekend.