KEY POINTS:
Even if we haven't been affected personally, I bet by now most of us have experienced the effects of the recession.
Whether it's staff at your workplace who have left and haven't been replaced, redundancies, or a local store going out of business, the corrosive impact of the
global economic crisis is permeating through to our corner of the world.
It's not all doom and gloom though. There are also some great recession-busting ideas being tossed around that will be examined in more detail at next week's jobs summit.
One of them is the idea of a four-day working week. The Government is looking at introducing a four-day week, with the fifth day subsidised at least in part by the Government on the proviso that the employee spend the day doing community work or undertaking government-sponsored training.
This was originally mooted by Canterbury's Chamber of Commerce chief exec and it's not a bad idea. Peter Townsend says a four-day week, with a day off for training, means that not only do you retain your workers, you upskill them as well. That way, when things come right again, you don't have to rebuild your workforce.
There are other forms of four-day weeks. One chap I spoke to has a timber floor laying business. He introduced the four-day week on a trial basis for himself and his staff more than six months ago.
It wasn't through financial necessity - it was because his men spent so much time on the road stuck in traffic that they were wasting a couple of hours each per day. By starting earlier and working longer hours - if effect, working 40 hours in four days - they became more efficient and could enjoy a three-day weekend.
The staff love it, he says, and the company has become more productive and is saving money.
There's a downside though, he warns. He says his wife is effectively a solo mother for four days of the week, but he says she enjoys having him at home for three days so she's happy with the trade-off.
When I started my radio show on Sunday morning, I dropped the Friday night talkback slot on ZB and so, in effect, I have a four-day week. I know I have to go to work on Sunday morning but it's such a completely different type of show that it's not like work at all.
I absolutely love it. You have more energy working four days. You can maintain your motivation and enthusiasm far easier over four days than you can over five - although I have to say that being in a recession is a powerful fillip to one's motivation.
I always have visions of myself spending Friday going out to the market gardens in west Auckland and picking fruit and coming home and bottling it. Or cooking meals for the week and freezing them, thus saving on time and minimising the risk of resorting to takeaways when the week gets away on me.
But despite the best of intentions, I generally find myself frittering away the day. Still, at least it's mine to fritter and I'm not expected to drum up talkback late of an evening. Most of us wish for more hours in the day and complain bitterly about being time poor - surely the four-day week is a wonderful way to reclaim our lives.
We must be mindful of the failed French experiment - the 35-hour week introduced by the Socialist government 10 years ago in a bid to get more people into employment.
French workers loved it - to the extent that President Sarkozy has been unable to scrap the scheme altogether, although he has made some changes.
Sarkozy says the 35-hour week has sapped the French of their will to work and that France has lost productivity when compared to other EU countries.
The French Finance Minister agrees saying that instead of thinking about work, people were thinking about their weekend - "organising, planning and engineering time off".
It also failed to generate the extra jobs that were promised and has cost billions of euros in subsidies.
So a four-day week would not be about working less - it would be about working more efficiently and productively. And that's got to be a good thing, in recessions and booms.
* www.kerrewoodham.com
