Sri Lanka ordered a four-day workweek — not for wellbeing, for survival

Wednesdays are now public holidays for government employees, schools, universities, courts. Six weeks of fuel reserves remain. Pakistan has mandated 50% work from home. The Philippines is adopting the same. Nepal, Bangladesh — the same. Twenty percent of global oil transits the Strait of Hormuz; Asia's net-energy-importing economies are rationing time itself because they cannot ration fuel.

Fortune's headline made the distinction explicit: "Sri Lanka's Four-Day Workweek Isn't About Work-Life Balance. It's About Survival." The irony lands hard: the four-day workweek that labour movements spent decades advocating arrives as austerity, not liberation. The organism adapts. The adaptation reveals how thin the margin always was.