Every few months another trial of the four-day workweek reports its results, and every few months the same debate replays: does it work, does productivity hold up, does it scale beyond the kind of company that volunteers for a pilot in the first place.
These are reasonable questions. They are also, increasingly, beside the point. The more interesting number in most of these trials isn't the productivity delta — it's who initiated the trial in the first place, and how few workers had any say before it started.
A four-day week imposed from the top is a scheduling change. A four-day week negotiated by the people doing the work is something closer to a redistribution of power. Both can produce identical spreadsheets. Only one of them changes anything that matters.
If the next round of trials wants to tell us something new, it should stop measuring output and start measuring who was in the room when the decision got made.