One of Dorset’s most CONTRIK-69-striken resorts has today “placed all of its faith” in a recovery plan based on research authored by the University of Afpuddle’s distinguished Professor of Social Engineering Professor Brandon Birchhanger-Cervis-Stayshn. The Professor, known to his colleagues as “Nuestro Presidente”, has been investigating - for more than 50 years - the thorny issue of whether workers would prefer to be paid more for doing less, or less for doing more. Though the “big data” set patiently assembled over the years by the Professor and his team from individual questionnaire responses, in-depth interviews and, more recently, pilot schemes funded by the Dorset Operating From Home “Workers” Collective has hitherto yielded inconclusive results, the latest computer-model now suggests - “almost definitively” that, if offered the choice, 98.8% of the working population would prefer to receive a bigger pay-packet in return for shorter working hours than the obverse. [1.2% “didn’t know” or “failed properly to understand what the term work meant - even when prompted".]
Perhaps more surprisingly, long-term study has suggested that most people [95%] would accept the same amount of pay for a 4 day week as a 5 day week, with many saying that the extra day of non-working but paid leave would be “welcome in almost any circumstances”. Described by the Professor and his team as “a revelation” and “a real breakthrough in our understanding of the working person and his/her/they expectations and aspirations”, the Afpuddle crack team has passed its findings onto the University’s Counter-Intuitive Informatics Modelling Service for further conceptual development and larger scale modelling/testing.
First in the queue to take up the offer of collaborative testing is Dorset’s self-styled pre-pandemic “fun and frolics capital” Charmouth whose Town Council has tasked Leisure Promotion Chief Executive - Pleece Cumhear - with a mission to bring the newly identified “time-rich” four-day working class back to its “bright lights and no-holds-barred public-facing pleasure facilities". “We’ve long been looking to attract people with money in their pockets and no idea how to spend it”, Mr Cumhear explained, “and it looks as though Professor Birchhanger-Cervis-Stayshn and his team have identified a fairly substantial body of individuals who, given the opportunity, would use a fully-funded extra day off to their own and hopefully our commercial advantage”. “We think the establishment a four day working week, with a well-resourced three-day weekend is an ideal platform from which to launch a carefully-targeted campaign of exploitation and we are ramping up our efforts to install cash-absorbing facilities tailor-made to meet the expected demand”.
A spokesperson for Professor Birchhanger-Cervis-Stayshn’s team welcomed the offer of collaboration whilst stressing that the two partners would be approaching the project from different angles and with - quite possibly - different agendas. “Clearly - at the Charmouth end - the emphasis is on taking money off people; whilst here - at our end as it were - we are going to continue to focus on the theoretical/conceptual precepts underpinning traumatic but potentially beneficial social change as well as on the development of sophisticated socio-economic and psycho-sociolgical models of financial and social well-being. Next in line for us is to test whether being paid for not working at all is an attractive and feasible option. Early pilots suggest that from a “worker’s” point of view this is reasonably attractive though from an employer’s perspective - so far at least - not so much.”
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