I was going to launch into a different topic but I do want to address the Friday situation. I have known Mr. Johns now for a while and I deeply respect where he's coming from. That's not a throwaway statement to start this whole thing. I sincerely mean it.
I'll start by telling a story about my family situation. My father worked in a mill, a paper mill, for about 43 years. When it comes to family friendly, one of the things that he complained about vociferously was that because we lived in a rural area, in order for us to spend a weekend doing something different with the family, we had to travel long distances.
In order to do that though, he worked five days and then two. They were eight-hour shifts, two days off. His union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers—and I say that with a great deal of passion because they are a fantastic union—treated my father well. He was a member with them for 40 years and I salute them. They're a great union. They went back to the company and they said, one of the things that we want is flexibility in the work schedule. They said fine, we're open. Tell you what, instead of doing eight-hour shifts, why don't you do 12 and that will give you up to four days off? You do rotation that way. It's a little more complicated than what I'm saying here but essentially my father got four days off. We went camping. We went to see more relatives. In the span of two years following that, we were able to take advantage of the things that my father wanted to do. To me, that was family friendly.
I'm not saying right away that without Friday, and longer hours in the week days, that would suit me but it may not suit you. What I'm saying is that we need to address the flexibility in this. What bothers me is the throwaway statement that we don't want to work on Fridays. It is ground zero for the worst argument you can put forward. It's just too easy to do. You're a member of Parliament who doesn't want to work on Fridays.
Let me go from there. Today we had the speaker. I say speaker but that's not his official title. He is basically the person in charge, speaker-like, of the Scottish Parliament. We asked him, we said, how does your week work? He said, we sit Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. How dare you do that now? Well, we didn't say it that way. We said, why would you do that? He said, Scotland's not that big, and it's very important for us to be within our constituencies as we are direct representatives of the people.
I thought, there's a novel idea. We asked him, what about the sitting days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday? He said they are elongated to the point where they can accomplish the committee work, so on and so forth.