A four-day week is bad news for workers

When I was a young reporter on the Daily Express in the 1980s I was sent to Belfast to cover the IRA’s hunger strikes campaign. It was a fast moving story, focused not just on the men who were dying from refusing food but all the riots, bombings and killings that accompanied their deaths. When you heard dustbin lids being banged on the pavements outside the Divis Flats on Belfast’s lower Falls Road at 2am it was the signal that another protestor had died.

It was an incredible story in which to be involved. But after four days of reporting on it for 18 hours a day I took a phone call in my hotel room from a colleague in the newsroom in Manchester. ‘OK – you’ve done your bit,’ he told me, ‘you can come home now’.