Anyone else doing the 4 day rip off? Is there a way out?

[mulranno]

Doing a full time role with all the responsibilities for 80 percent pay? Do I just need to suck it up for thr flexibility?

This is why I haven't - it's an easy trap to fall into I know.

If your responsibilities and workload remain the same then you are doing "compressed working" - achieving 100% fte workload in 4 days and should be paid 100%.

It's OK to retain 100% responsibilities but be allowed to delegate 20% of the workload to juniors, and get paid 20% less. However, you have to take some responsibility when you're negotiating the arrangement for identifying which bits of your workload can reasonably either be done by someone else, be done in a more time efficient way, or not done at all. Employment works like a market and employers will push for getting as much as possible value in return for as little as possible money, so it's up to you to draw the lines at what is possible.

But no - "sucking it up" isn't the way to go - it's basically just accepting a pay cut for no justification.

Well depends. Worked for me - tax/childcare saving, reasonable boss.

What did you negotiate when you discussed dropping to four days? Presumably you had to present a plan of how your absence on the fifth day would not affect the business? At the same time, I would expect to suggest which parts of your job could be dropped/are no longer relevant/could be done by someone else/in a more efficient manner etc. Years ago, I went from full-time to four days a week and part of my business case to my boss at the time was to hand over some admin work to a junior member of staff who was under-utilised (but I didn't tell him that) and use it as a development opportunity for the staff member - it wasn't filing, bit more interesting! We had also introduced some new IT systems which cut down on some of the repetitive data entry type stuff which had to be done to keep track of budgets so I could reference that as well.

If you just returned four days a week and hoped it would all work out somehow, I'm not surprised you are stressed.

The situation is that a new role has been created - I have been doing it as a freelancer for the last 6 months trying desperately to squeeze the full 5 days work into 4. They have now offered me the job as 5 days but I only want to do 4 of 4.5 spread over 5 days as I have 4 kids -- but I dont want to feel under pressure....I hadnt thought of getting rid of some of the tasks to elsewhere.

Yes, I have done it and it did end up grating in the end.

You need to decide what is more important. Nothing is perfect and four days for 80% pay is probably a better deal than a part-time minimum wage job that a lot of other Mumsnetters are doing.

I've asked to do 5 days in 4 as the days I work, do well more than 10 hours a day. They have agreed I officially but dept don't want it to gothru HR!

Yes. I've been doing it for just over 2.5 years and have now renegotiated to do the same hours over 5 days so I can drop DS at preschool and collect.

It has worked really well for us because it's allowed us both to keep our jobs and keep childcare costs down.