Thursday, March 28

The four-day work week continues to gain popularity in Europe. In Lithuania, yes, only for officials


Lithuania has just regulated the four-day, 32-hour workweek with no pay cut. Of course, it has been done for a very specific group: civil servants with children under three years of age. The measure has recently been approved by the parliament of the Baltic country and will come into force from 2023, according to Europa Press.

This policy has a dual purpose: on the one hand, the most obvious, is to improve the reconciliation of civil servants with their personal lives and with the upbringing of their young children; on the other, to attract professionals to the Lithuanian Administration, since it seems that public work in the Baltic country is not very attractive due to the fact that jobs in the private sector are much better paid.

the list grows. In this way, Lithuania has joined the list, quite short at the moment, of countries that have regulated, in one way or another, a four-day working week. Belgium did the same a few months ago, although in its case without reducing the number of hours worked: the Belgians offer their workers the possibility of grouping the 40 hours of their workday into four days, at a rate of ten hours per day. The measure, however, still has to be approved by its parliament.

France, for its part, carried out a similar initiative almost 25 years ago that is still in force today, although totally distorted. In 1998, the Gauls approved the Aubry Law, which reduced the working week to 35 hours at the initiative of the French Socialist Party, then in power. It was a very controversial rule that, as the EFE Agency points out, enormously divided the society of the neighboring country and that subsequent governments, of different political persuasion, gradually diluted until leaving a dead letter.

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As it remains in force, the French continue to have the option of working four days a week or accumulating the hours they work overtime above 35 to have more vacation days, although the majority choose to work 40 hours and get paid a little more. .

Public and private tests. In the rest of the states, the four-day work week is being tested to find out if it is really effective or not, with both public and private initiatives, but inclusion in labor legislation has not yet been considered.

Iceland did two experiments, in 2015 and 2019, to test the 32-hour work week without reducing pay for both public and private workers. The results of those tests were satisfactory and the resulting report is one of the reference texts for the defenders of this model. However, the Nordic country has not yet included the four-day shift in its legislation.

In Spain, the Valencian Community already has a pilot project underway, the central government plans to do the same shortly and several companies have already implemented it on their own. Scotland has promoted an initiative similar to the Valencian one, endowed with a similar amount to finance it: 10 million pounds. In addition, in the United Kingdom as a whole, a large-scale test will begin in a few months, which will include more than 60 companies and 3,000 workers, promoted by several universities and private institutions. And in New Zealand and the Netherlands several private companies have implemented it on their own initiative.

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