Responding to the Prime Minister’s supportive comments about a four-day work week, New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says:

“This is a dopey idea for economic recovery, for the same reason more public holidays is a dopey idea. Our economic woes are the result of keeping people away from work for seven weeks. We now need to get people back to work. Forcing employers to give people more time off would achieve the opposite.”

“There is no guarantee that people will use long weekends to spend money on tourism, especially not when households are cloth-cutting. And it’s a massive gamble to say businesses will be more productive under a four-day week. If this was true, they’d be implementing a four-day week already.”

“Hopefully, the Prime Minister’s apparent enthusiasm for the idea was just an attempt to show kindness to the person who suggested it. But she’s spooking business operators at a time when they desperately need certainty about the future. She needs to definitively rule out this dopey proposal.”

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