Jo Harper and Nik Martin
Chile recently announced plans to bring down the number of working hours. Staggered over five years, Chileans will eventually work just 40 hours a week instead of the current 45.
Along with Ecuador, Chile will have the shortest work week in Latin America — a region that has the world’s longest official work hours. By comparison, Argentina, Mexico, Peru and Panama have 48-hour work weeks, while in Brazil it’s 44.
The law vs. reality
Most countries have statutory working hours that protect workers from being forced to put in too much overtime. But in reality, they are often pressured to put in many more hours than the law requires.
Japan, for example, has a term for workaholic employees — Karoshi — or literally death by overwork. The country does have a 40-hour work week. But abuse is so high, the government had to pass another law in 2018 that specifically limits overtime to around 30 hours per month.
Despite this, a survey last year found that 37% of 18,000 firms still required their workers to do a lot of overtime — an average of 80 unpaid hours per month.
The United States is also famous for its hustle culture, where workers are expected to put in several hours of overtime a week. Certain sectors of the economy like law, finance and technology are notorious for piling work on their staff.
Reports of tech workers sleeping under their desks are commonplace, while surveys show many lawyers work up to 60 hours a week to meet their firms’ billable hours targets.
US workers put in an average of 1,791 hours per year, 442 more than German workers and 301 more than French workers, according to stats from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Not all countries are following Chile’s example to cut working hours. South Korea had planned this year to raise the maximum working time to 69 hours as companies complained that the current 52 hours wasn’t enough to help them meet deadlines. But younger workers staged mass protests against the plan, forcing the government to reconsider. In 2021, South Koreans officially worked 1,915 hours.
France, of course, became famous for introducing a 35-hour week in 2000. Although it was widely interpreted as improving work-life balance, the measure was an attempt to cut unemployment, which had reached a record high of 12.5%. The 35-hour week was also meant to be the point where paid overtime should kick in.
Political systems, working hours and quality of work
Higher quality of working environment — hours worked, benefits, paid holidays, pension and health systems — often correlates with more advanced democracies, where companies, trade unions and the state have developed a system of collective bargaining. However, that doesn’t show up in the latest ILO data (above) where mostly non-European nations work the least hours in a week.
Overall, developed countries generally have shorter official workweeks and more vacation days, due to cultural demands for adequate leisure time. They also trend toward more generous overtime compensation and more favorable parental leave laws.
Improved working practices began in the 19th century and expanded massively after World War II. Today, in comparison, only 15% of workers in EU countries officially work more than 48 hours per week, while in China and South Korea, over 40% of workers do so and in Chile it is over 50%.
Chile’s military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet from 1970 to 1990 severely curtailed trade union bargaining for higher wages and a welfare safety net under an experiment with Monetarism (using the supply of money to stabilize the economy).
Other countries in Latin America followed suit together with the UK under Margaret Thatcher and the US under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The concept of increasing productivity and a welfare state system was deemed largely incompatible.
Working hours tied to contentment
One OECD country among those with the shortest workweeks is Denmark, which ranks as one of the happiest countries in the world. Denmark is known for the concept of “hygge,” which is described as “creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people.”
In France and Germany, too, a large state combines to produce a work-life balance. People in Italy still in fact enjoy the best work-life balance, according to the OECD. Employed Italians have the most time for leisure and personal activities, while only 3% of employees in the country work very long hours (50 or more hours a week).
Another major factor leading to contented workers is their incomes. The middle and working classes of the US and UK have seen stagnant or declining real wages since around 1980 when Monetarist — or so-called neo-liberal — policies first took hold in the Anglo-Saxon economies.
Today, faced with a political backlash from those largely excluded from reaping the benefits of rising growth, many free-market conservatives argue that a smaller state and low-taxed businesses will help grow wages. The bigger the pie, the more to go around, no matter the relative sizes of the slices.
But with artificial intelligence (AI) arriving, an aging population and the world’s productive base and power shifting to Asia, the question of quality of work is again on the political table. France under President Emmanuel Macron is a key test case. Why, many French people ask, should they pay for lower growth and productivity with shorter retirement? Who is right is a political choice.
Worklife in a post-pandemic world
COVID allowed tens of millions of office-based staff to work from home, spurring calls, as economies recovered, to retain a better work-life balance by avoiding long commutes and child care costs. Many companies still allow staff to work entirely remotely or through a hybrid system of office and home.
Consultancy McKinsey calculated that about 20% of workforces in advanced economies could continue to work from home between three and five days a week long-term without impacting productivity.
The introduction of nomad worker visas in many countries was spurred by employees’ demands to work from anywhere in the world, including Thailand, Spain, and Croatia.
Other countries are experimenting with four-day work weeks, including Belgium, which now allows employees to choose whether to do the same number of hours over a four- or five-day week.
In the UK, dozens of companies signed up for a trial by Cambridge and Oxford University along with Boston College, to test the impact on productivity from a 4-day week. Almost all of the firms subsequently continued with the new arrangement. Sweden and Iceland have conducted similar trials, while Spain is also offering to subsidize the wages of companies that take part in its upcoming experiment.
Despite scary headlines that hundreds of millions of jobs will be replaced by AI in the near future, many proponents of the technology see generative AI platforms like ChatGPT as primarily human aids, although the platforms are improving by the day. Many argue that it will take decades to replace humans entirely and until then, AI can free up the many who complain of overwork to concentrate on other productive tasks.
(Courtesy: Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, and Newsclick.)
A 4-Day Work Week Could Be Closer Than You Think
The future of the four-day work week is looking brighter after the results of a major new study were released last month.
Nearly 3,000 workers at over 60 organizations took part in the latest trial of reduced working time — and the findings surpassed most expectations. A large majority of workers reported significant improvements in their quality of life. And it wasn’t just employees who preferred the shorter working week: more than 90% of employers who participated opted to continue the arrangement.
The U.K.-based experiment introduced a four-day week or equivalent cut in hours, with no loss of pay, from June to December 2022. Research teams at Boston College, Cambridge University and the London think tank Autonomy studied the effects. Overall, workers reported lower levels of stress and burn out, higher job satisfaction and less conflict between work and family demands. They also said they felt more capable at work and better able to manage their time.
Almost all (96%) said they preferred working four days and most put a high value on their new free time. Asked how much money would persuade them to return to a five-day week, 29% said they would want a 26-50% pay increase, while 8% wanted more than 50% and another 15% said no amount of money would lure them back.
Employers benefited as well. Compared with the pre-trial period, there were fewer staff resignations and days off for illness. Revenues saw a slight increase. Asked to score their experience on a scale from 0 (negative) to 10 (positive), the average among employers was 7.5 for productivity and 8.3 overall.
One likely reason for the trial’s success is that it recognized there was no one-size-fits-all formula. Each organization could choose its own approach to work time reduction so long as it offered significant reductions without loss of pay. The trial was also meticulously prepared, with two months of workshops, coaching, mentoring and peer support, drawing on experience from earlier pilots in more than 100 companies in the United States, U.K., Australia, Canada and Ireland. This approach was geared to help participants improve well-being and economic prosperity at the same time — by designing new working practices and changing company culture.
The trial took place during a pitched moment in history, as evolving digital communications combined with a global pandemic to wreak havoc on the concept of “normal” employment. More employees than ever could work anytime and anywhere with a suitable device and internet signal. And most everyone who took part had fresh memories of when workplaces closed down, human proximity seemed lift-threatening and online meetings redefined personal interaction.
In some ways, the Covid pandemic gave the four-day week a boost by forcing companies to adapt to new ways of thinking and working. One manager of a manufacturing company in the UK trial observed, “I think we have come out of the pandemic with a new outlook on life… There’s a greater expectation around flexible working, hybrid working — people are taking that opportunity to think ‘I want to do something completely different.’”
Yet that new outlook brings new challenges. For example, companies will have to work out how to reconcile a shorter working week and the search for compensating efficiencies with the value of time to bond with coworkers, release tensions and test ideas. Isolation is a well-known cause of mental and physical illness, which in turn can take a heavy toll on productivity.
There’s a trade-off between a four-day work week that is more intensively output-focused, and to what degree workers are able to relax and make friends. As the report points out, the next wave of adopters can learn from a growing base of organizations that are already ironing out the four-day week in practice, “adapting different models and structures to the demands of their own size and sector and building up a toolkit of tips and tactics.”
Notably, most organizations in the U.K. trial were relatively small and workers were predominantly white and well-educated. Some were in manufacturing but the majority were in white-collar, non-profit and creative sectors that depend on human capital more than on machines and unskilled labor. That’s not surprising, but it signals a risk of greater inequality, with workers in other sectors falling behind in low-paid jobs with long hours and few options to free up more time, while white-collar workers take advantage of the shorter week.
The last time there was a big shift towards shorter working hours, in the first half of the 20th century, trade unions were out in front pushing for an eight-hour day, a five-day week and paid holidays. Over time, they built up pressure on governments to legislate, so that new standards for working hours applied (at least in principle) across sectors and income groups.
The current campaign, 4 Day Week Global, was initiated not by trade unions but by Andrew Barnes, managing director of a New Zealand finance company, who (rightly) thought it would help increase productivity in a firm like his. Many unions support the campaign, but they are largely following rather than leading. It’s the reverse of what happened more than a century ago, when some employers (Ford and Kellogg for example) gave crucial support to the union campaign by cutting their workers’ hours.
Today, pioneering employers like Barnes can show that it’s possible to cut hours without cutting pay or productivity — an admirable goal. The campaign is making headway, judging by the results of this study as well as the growing number of organizations joining in implementing the shorter week.
But the larger challenge will be to transform the success of self-selected early adopters into a right for all workers. And a statutory four-day week (or equivalent in hours) would have to be tied to a right to fair hourly wage rates, to protect those on lower incomes from being pushed further into poverty.
It’s hard to imagine how governments will be persuaded to legislate for these rights without pressure from organized workers. And unions are fighting other battles — for members’ living standards as inflation slashes the real value of wages, for jobs at risk from automation, and for their own right to organize and negotiate for workers in the gig economy and new tech sectors.
Two developments could help tip the balance in favor of a four day week. One is a growing awareness of how a better work-life balance can contribute to a more prosperous economy. The other is an increasing momentum to decarbonize the economy, which is bound to lead to a fall in jobs in energy intensive sectors and could strengthen the case for redistributing paid hours more evenly across the workforce. Both could help build support for reduced working time.
Until that happens, there is likely to be a widening gap between the time-rich and time-poor, where time poverty — a chronic shortage of free or disposable time — routinely adds to the burden of low-income workers.
(Anna Coote is head of social policy for the New Economics Foundation. A leading analyst, writer and advocate in the field of social policy, Anna is a co-author of The Case for a Four Day Week. Courtesy: In These Times, an independent, nonprofit magazine dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice.)
