Questão 60 - UNIFOR Medicina 2025/1

The benefits of a four-day workweek

 

To understand where we are now, let’s take a step back into pre-industrial times. My granddad was a farmer, worked seven days a week and was required on-site all the time. It was a lot of long hours, but also he had a lot of autonomy.

By the time my dad entered the workforce, he was a technician in a mechanical role. And he was expected to produce products on a large scale. As a result he wasn’t given the rewards from farming, but was given a salary. That change from my grandfather’s time to my dad’s brought about the birth of a discipline known as management. And management, led by Frederick Taylor, was looking at the relationship between fatigue and performance. A lot of scientific studies were done to try to understand that relationship, leading to the need for a five-day week as opposed to a six-day week.

By the time I entered into the workforce, we no longer had a very physical, laborious workforce. It’s highly cognitive and highly emotional. The fundamental physiological difference is that our brain as a muscle can’t withstand the same level of hours of work as our muscles in our body might be able to. So it’s that mismatch between an outdated work structure of five days a week, rooted in very physical labor, and what is now a highly cognitive workforce.

Disponível em: https://apnews.com/article/fourday-workweek-companies-stress-9ab1fa9371636cdbeaeaed32ac8c18dd. Acesso em: 01 out. 2024.

 

De acordo com o texto, a redução da jornada de trabalho para quatro dias se justificaria devido à