Debate: a four-day working week should be written into law

Intermediate

8 min

A labour policy debate. You are arguing for a statutory four-day week; your opponent represents small businesses.

An intermediate-level session of about 8 minutes. 3 rebuttal rounds against an opponent. Each round runs up to 60 seconds.

Your opponent will agree that people work too many hours, and may well agree that the trial evidence is worth reading out. What they will not concede is the statute: who enforces it, what a firm with almost no margin left does about it, why a law rather than a practice that spreads on its own. Most of the debate lives there. You end up defending a mechanism instead of an idea, which is a narrower kind of speaking and much harder to fill with enthusiasm. It is also the half that decides who wins.

Angles worth taking

Name the firms with the thinnest margins before your opponent does, then say what the law itself should do for them.
Define the law you are defending: a phased floor, with stated exemptions and stated enforcement, is yours to specify.
When trial evidence is questioned, say what those trials actually tested rather than repeating the headline result again.
Ask what protects a worker whose employer never adopts a shorter week voluntarily; that gap is your case for legislating.
Stay on hours, pay and who absorbs the transition cost, and off the claim that everyone will simply be happier.

Who is in the room

You play

A student defending the motion

You speak with

A small-business association head who agrees shorter weeks can work and argues that legislating one would destroy the firms with the thinnest margins

Ready to speak?

Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.

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The format

The motion you defend

A four-day working week should be the legal standard.

Rebuttal rounds

Time per round

60 seconds

Modes

Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)

How a roleplay session works

Read your brief

Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.

Open the conversation

You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.

Handle the turn

Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.

Read the report

Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.

What you're scored on

Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.

Your objective

Argue for the law itself, not merely for shorter hours — and answer what happens to firms that cannot absorb it.

Task outcome

Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.

Appropriacy

Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.

Recovery

What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.

Delivery

Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.

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