IDL how four-day work week discussions always ignore that we'd still work 40 hours

Everyone's getting all excited about four-day work weeks like it's finally here, work-life balance, more time off, except nobody's talking about the part where it's still 40 hours just crammed into four days instead of five, so instead of working 8 hours a day five days a week we work 10 hours a day four days a week, and that's not a shorter week, that's the same week with worse days.

I tried to explain this to my friend who's all excited about her company's new four-day policy and she's like "but I get Fridays off" and I'm like yeah and you work 10-hour days Monday through Thursday so congrats I guess, and she says it's worth it but I don't know, ten-hour days sound exhausting to me.

And here's what nobody mentions, meetings don't disappear, you still have the same number of meetings, they're just crammed into fewer days, so now instead of a few meetings sprinkled through the week you have back-to-back meetings for 10 hours straight, and when exactly do you do your actual work, before 8 AM or after 6 PM, that's when.

My friend's already sending emails at 7 PM on her four-day schedule because ten hours of meetings leaves zero time for actual work, and Friday off is great in theory but everyone else is working Friday so your clients still expect responses and your team still needs things and you're technically off but you're still checking email, so it's not really off, it's just unpaid work from home.

The other thing is not every job can cram into ten-hour days, if you work with customers or clients in different time zones you need coverage all five days, so four-day weeks only work for certain jobs, which means it becomes another perk for office workers while service industry people keep working five or six days.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a four-day week, but an actual shorter week, like 32 hours, not the same 40 hours pressed into four days, because I'm already exhausted working 40 hours and adding two more hours to each day isn't going to make me less exhausted.

Everyone treats four-day weeks like this revolutionary idea and it's not, it's the same work with different scheduling, and if you want real change, pay people the same for working less, not the same for working the same amount in fewer days.