Icelandic Study Shows 4-Day Workweek Trial Is an 'Overwhelming Success' and Possible 'Blueprint' for Future

and that's not the end of our demands, that's the beginning!

I had Friday and Monday off. It was great those 4 day work weeks. But all my customers would have to do it or I have to work Friday. If not they'll order it from someone else especially if it's urgent, which it usually is.
 
and that's not the end of our demands, that's the beginning!

Not as good as the democrat 7 day off week every 52 weeks in a year in the US, but you are getting there.
 
I prefer 2 weeks on followed by 2 weeks off so I could really travel & relax. Currently the masters only allow 2 days of freedom we have to use to catch up on personal errands or side gigs.
 
It's time we consider this, as the workforce in America is more overworked than any other westernized democracy.

But as we start to fumble our way back to some sort of normal, it’s not enough for employees to demand that our hours return to what they were. Prepandemic, nearly a third of Americans clocked 45 hours or more every week, with around 8 million putting in 60 or more. While Europeans have decreased their work hours by about 30 percent over the past half century, ours have steadily increased. We have long needed better work-life balance, but despite constantly trying to hack our lives by waking up before dawn or exercising during lunch, that can be achieved only by actually working less.

To Americans, who log 7 to 19 percent more time on the job than our European peers, that may sound heretical. But we should heed the other countries that have come to this realization. This year, the Spanish government announced a pilot program to entice companies to try out a four-day workweek without reducing anyone’s pay. Last month, Japan released economic policy guidelines encouraging employers to do the same. Iceland just published results from an experiment with a four-day week in Reykjavik that ran from 2015 to 2019 and found that productivity didn’t decline and in some cases even improved. The reduced schedule showed “that we are not just machines that just work,” one Icelandic participant said. “We are persons with desires and private lives, families and hobbies.” Employees reported being less burned out and healthier.

Working too long is bad for our health, associated with not just weight gain and more alcohol and tobacco use but also higher rates of injury, illness and death. A study that looked at long work hours across 194 countries found a higher risk of heart disease and stroke, leading to about 745,000 attributable deaths. Long work hours are “the largest of any occupational risk factor calculated to date,” the authors wrote.

 
I loved working 4 on 4 off (the 4 on would be 12h shifts)

You literally only work 50% of the days in a year and you'd also only need 4-days holiday out of your annual entitlement and you'd be off for almost 2-weeks.

Then any unused annual leave you have, you can take days here and there and create 3-day working weeks.
 
“It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it / And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.” ⁠- Dolly Parton

as long as the rich rule, the working class will never have their way, my friends
 

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