The company wants to give workers three-day weekends forever, but they'll have to work longer hours the other four days.
In a move meant to make its workers happier, Uniqlo will start offering full-timers at its Japanese stores the option of working four-day weeks, a spokeswoman confirmed to The Huffington Post Thursday.
The company is joining a growing group of retailers, most notably Walmart, that are starting to pay attention to worker well-being.
The shorter week is meant to give Uniqlo workers more time to deal with their personal lives, particularly those employees who need to care for elderly relatives, Bloomberg reports. Uniqlo's parent company, which also owns Theory and J Brand, also hopes the move will help it hold on to full-timers, many of whom scale back hours to accommodate the demands of their personal lives.
“Uniqlo is constantly pushing the envelope on exploring new ways to best serve its employees and their needs, this is just one of the new programs we are trying,” the spokeswoman said.
For now, it’s just a test program -- and it comes with some downsides. Still, if the four-day workweek succeeds, it could be offered up to white-collar corporate employees at headquarters and to other countries, Quartz reports.
Uniqlo has no plans yet to export the four-day week to the U.S., where the idea is often held up as kind of a holy grail among beleaguered office workers, as Bloomberg noted.
The news raises a perennial question: How should mega-retailers, known for treating their customers well, regard their employees? With a few notable exceptions, hourly retailer workers are usually treated as cheap, replaceable cogs.
But lately, there are signs of change. More companies are grabbing headlines for treating workers well -- or at least trying to. And they’re not doing it for altruistic reasons: As the economy heats up and unemployment falls, employers are finding they need to do more to hang on to their workers.
It’s important to note that Uniqlo’s friendly new policy comes with caveats. First, the “four-day” week is misleading, since workers will simply compress their time into four 10-hour days instead of five eight-hour days. It may not be a good fit for those who need to attend to daily tasks outside of work.
Second, Uniqlo employees who opt for the compressed week will have to work weekends and holidays -- the retailer’s busiest times.
“They are not offering employees fewer work hours (as a four-day work week would suggest), just giving them compressed work weeks or ‘summer hours’ all year long at the price of guaranteed weekends and holidays,” Ken Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work Institute, told HuffPost in an email. “Still, I salute them for offering a variety of work options that can be useful for different people.”
Uniqlo is known for doing a lot to retain workers, including offering extensive training and relatively good hourly pay that averages about $10 an hour in the U.S., according to salary site Glassdoor.
“If people are happy, the retention rate is high,” Uniqlo's USA chief executive told Bloomberg this spring. The company has also been criticized in the past for terrible working conditions in its Chinese factories.
There’s a large and growing body of research that demonstrates that treating retail workers humanely is actually good for business. Costco and Trader Joe’s have made names for themselves by paying hourly workers decently and offering benefits and clear paths to promotions.
The idea gained traction this year as the economy improved and the movement to raise the minimum wage gained steam. Probably the biggest sign that things were changing on a wide scale was Walmart’s announcement in February that it would raise worker pay and reduce the uncertainty workers face when it comes to scheduling. Target soon followed suit.
Earlier this week, Walmart revealed that the plan is costing slightly more than expected -- about $60 million over the past three months. It seems like a lot, but it was just 1 percent of $6 billion in operating expenses.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon seems to consider the expense an investment that will pay off in the long run with better sales. "We're pleased that the investments we've made are helping to improve our business,” he said in a press release this week. “Even if it's not as fast as we would like.”