A Four-Day Work Week For Town Employees?

With dwindling budgets, city officials are pulling out all the stops as they try to maintain services and prevent hefty tax increases. A controversial and novel idea has come from Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who announced this week a four-day work week for 1,450 non-uniformed city workers. His list of drastic cuts even include shuttering the city's pools and prohibiting the purchase of toilet paper.

Faced with a mounting budget deficit, Booker said he will put these practices into place next month.

At a City Hall press conference, Booker said that "I'm going to shut down as much of city government as I can. We're going to stop buying everything from toilet paper to printer paper. Call me Mr. Scrooge, if you want, but they'll be no Christmas decorations around the city."

Montclair, too, is grappling with a $69.9 million budget - likely to be approved in September - that will result in a large property tax increase as well as drastic cuts to all sorts of organizations, including the Montclair Arts Council.

So could Montclair ever implement a four-day work week?

"It would be wrong to say that we wouldn't consider it," said Councilor Nick Lewis. "I wonder if it really is worth the effort, given the fact that police and fire, who are over half our employees, would not be impacted by this.

"And I'm not sure that such a plan would work for the public works guys, especially since we have shrunk that department so much in the coming year," he said. "And we can't close the animal shelter and I doubt that we can operate the health department on a four-day-a-week basis. Do we want to have code enforcement only four days a week?"

In the end, Lewis said he supposes it is an issue the Township could look into it, although he's not sure it makes a lot of sense.

When asked about a four-day work week, Mayor Jerry Fried emphasized that the Township already has implemented six furlough days in Montclair this year, "some version of what they're doing in Newark."

Indeed, the Township offices will be closed Friday, August 20; Friday, September 17; Friday, October 15; Friday, November 12; and Thursday, December 23. Already offices were closed on Friday, July 16. Refuse collection is suspended on these furlough days.