​The Short Week Is Good for Workers. And for Companies as Well

Work four days instead of five, receiving the same salary. What worker would say no? Then, if the companies are also in favor, the game is over and the new rules ready to enter into force. Yet it is not so simple. First of all because the model cannot be replicated everywhere and in any business organization, and also because some cultural resistance remains very present in certain countries, including Italy, although it appears to be weakening. In this interview, we talk about a short working week with Elena Gramano, assistant professor of labor law in the Department of Legal Studies at Bocconi University.

There are various hypotheses of short week systems under study. The most interesting and tested one is based on the 100-80-100 scheme, that is, 100% salary, 80% hours worked, 100% guaranteed productivity. What are the first indications arising from these experiments?
In England, a research project was recently conducted involving about sixty companies for a total of almost three thousand workers who, from June to December 2022, adopted this model. Companies rated their overall experience positively, saying business performance and productivity remained high, revenues increased and turnover remained unchanged. These were service companies, mostly from sectors such as marketing and finance. About 18% of these companies have adopted this new organizational model and many others have decided to extend the experimentation phase.

The introduction of the short week also responds to the need, especially expressed by the young generations, for a better balance between private life and working life. Is it also a lever for companies to attract new workers?
Certainly, but not only to attract, also to retain those who are already under contract, because at this stage more and more companies have to deal with staff exodus. In practice, the opposite is true of what was thought a few years ago, namely that reducing the working week was essentially a way of creating new jobs. Offering flexibility, giving people the opportunity to manage their time more autonomously even within a full-time employment contract is a very effective tool to attract better prepared staff and to have more satisfied workers, with benefits also on their productivity.

The short week and more flexible working arrangements in general could lead to disparities within the company between sectors or tasks that can easily apply flexibility and others where it is not feasible. This issue is dear to the unions above all...
The unions generally looks favorably on the short week, provided that the equal wage-fewer hours scheme is actually respected. But it would not make sense to have a regulatory measure that imposes this new model on everyone. Ample room must be left for collective bargaining to determine to whom the reduced working week should be applied, in particular second-level bargaining. There is no standard model and besides, if we think about it, not even the traditional 40-hour model is applicable everywhere. In Belgium, a law on the short week was passed in 2022 that gives collective bargaining the role of establishing precise rules.

In a few decades the world has really changed. Between the 90s and the turn of the century the new economy saw the flourishing of companies that offered a series of benefits (gyms, meeting and leisure places, etc.) in the workplace to keep employees as many hours as possible on the premises. Now we are going in the opposite direction. What was the role of the pandemic in this?
If we take remote working as an example, we have a law on the subject, number 81 of 2017, which had already been introduced before the pandemic. However, no practical application followed. The pandemic first imposed this modality on everyone, which then remained present in many companies on the basis of an agreement between the parties even after the emergency phase. Smart working and the short week, although they remain two very different modes, are both attributable to the need to reconcile private and working life, and are made possible thanks to the change in the logic of work organization. It has finally been understood that working remotely, or working fewer hours, does not necessarily imply a loss of productivity - in fact the opposite is often true. It's up to companies to find ways to measure performance.