Short week, no drop in productivity, unchanged wages. To read it this way, the Icelandic experiment, made known this early summer, seems to be the dream of every worker, the answer to an increasingly widespread debate in Europe, from Nordic Finland to Latin Spain: it is possible to reduce working hours without damage wages for employees, burdens for the employer and repercussions on the products or services provided?
In Iceland, between 2015 and 2019, two successive experiments were conducted to reduce from 40 to 35-36 hours of the working week without cutting wages, involving a total of about 2,500 workers (over 1% of the active population) employed in different areas of the public sector, from offices to nursery schools, from social services to hospitals.
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The background: too many hours and little productivity
The starting point was an undeniable gap for the small Nordic country which, despite sharing high levels of income with its neighbors (sixth as per capita income among OECD countries, with about 47 thousand US dollars in 2017), low unemployment (3, 4%) and generous welfare, showed a low level of productivity (55.4 dollars per hour worked, 14th among the OECD countries) and a working week that was actually too heavy: 44.4 actual hours (2018 data) for jobs full-time, third place among the EU states.
Productivity aside, the side effect, well described by a 2005 study, was widespread unease and dissatisfaction, with one in four workers saying they were unable to cope with household chores once work was finished, complaining of poor life quality.
The results of the experiment
The results of the trials, released by the British think tank Autonomy and the Icelandic Association for Sustainable Democracy, revealed a “substantial improvement” in the quality of life of workers, from perceived stress to health to the work-life balance. work and private life. And so far nothing surprising (if not, perhaps, the fact that there has not been an excessive increase in overtime). The most interesting data, however, is the fact that productivity and supply of services were unchanged if not slightly improved in all monitored sectors.