A 5-day working week is now an international standard, and has been for many decades. Many people saw this as a major achievement for employees compared to the 6-day working week that was common until then. In recent years, however, the 5-day working week has been increasingly questioned as calls for more flexible working hours and therefore a shorter working week have become more frequent.
So much so that several countries have already conducted trials of the 4-day week, including Ireland, Canada, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The United Kingdom is the latest country to join in.
4-day working week tested by university researchers
The 4-day week campaign, as the project is simply called, is an initiative of the think tank Autonomy, researchers from Cambridge University, Boston College and Oxford University, as well as the UK government itself, with the aim of creating “a world where we work to live, not live to work”. UK companies can voluntarily join this trial run and reduce their employees’ working week to 32 hours without loss of pay.
Running for six months – June 2022 to December 2022 – the project will include workshops, mentoring, networking and wellbeing and productivity assessments. According to the campaign, the introduction of a 4-day working week would bring benefits for employers, employees, society, the economy and the environment. By shortening the working week, employees would have a better work-life balance, more rest and leisure time and more opportunities to complete ‘essential’ tasks such as cleaning, raising children, etc.
In addition, the campaign has found research showing that this reduces unemployment, increases productivity, improves mental and physical health, advances gender equality and reduces the carbon footprint by working one day less.
A 2019 study by Henley Business School confirmed that 250 participating companies could save almost £92 billion a year by adopting a 4-day working week because employees are happier, less stressed and healthier – which only seems to reinforce the point. “Put simply, a rested worker is a better worker.
And although the 4-day working week is not unknown in Germany, the change has never caught on across the board. Only a few companies have introduced it as standard – but the number is growing. On top of that, the Left Party called for a 30-hour week as a full-time norm back in 2020, arguing that digitalization will make much of human labor redundant. However, critics noted that many labour market experts assume that digitalization will not lead to less work in the long term, but merely to different work.
In any case, we will probably have to wait a while before the 30-hour week becomes the norm in Germany – if that ever happens. We just hope that we can at least try it out.