The four-day week: more than a fashion?

The idea that people should work fewer days for the same pay once sounded like a slogan on a union banner. It is now being tested in town halls and offices around the world. Between 2015 and 2019, trials of a shorter working week, run by Reykjavik City Council and Iceland's national government, eventually included more than 2,500 workers, about one per cent of the country's working population. The researchers who followed them reported that productivity stayed the same or improved in most workplaces. In Belgium, a full-time employee may ask to work a full week's hours over four days instead of five. The employer may say no, but must explain the refusal in writing.

Enthusiasts see in all this the next chapter of a long story. The working week has shrunk before. France, to take a familiar example, set the legal week at thirty-five hours in a law of 1998, which applied from January 2000 to firms with more than twenty employees. Every reduction, the argument runs, was met with warnings of disaster, and every time the economy adapted. A shorter week, they add, would help employers to hire and keep staff, reduce burnout (1) and give parents and carers (2) a day to breathe.

Sceptics find the comparison less convincing. The Icelandic trials ranged from offices to hospitals, but not every job lends itself to a shorter week. A hospital cannot close on Fridays, and a restaurant or a factory needs people to be present when customers arrive or machines are running. Where hours are cut but the work remains, colleagues must do the same tasks in less time, and the day off may be bought at the price of tighter, more stressful days.

There is also the question of who pays. If pay is kept unchanged for fewer hours, someone has to make up the difference: the employer, through higher productivity or lower profit; the customer, through higher prices; or the taxpayer, when the state is the employer. The Belgian approach avoids the problem by cutting no hours at all. Employees compress (3) the same number of hours into four longer days. That gives a free day, but not a shorter week, and a working day that may last nine and a half hours is not everyone's idea of rest.

What the debate really concerns is not the calendar but the control over time. Many people already work irregular hours, answer messages in the evening or hold two jobs; for them, a free Friday is a distant luxury. The most useful lesson of the experiments may be that workplaces can change when managers measure results rather than presence. Whether the four-day week spreads will depend on whether employers see it as a way to attract workers or as a favour that costs money.

Short week or long, the question will not go away. The labour market has changed faster than the calendar, and sooner or later the calendar will have to follow, or explain why it should not.