A few days ago, a commission of experts convened by the Government of Chile proposed something that reopened an uncomfortable debate: allowing, under certain conditions, work hours to be flexible up to 52 hours per week. The measure seeks to reactivate a labor market that has been dragging unemployment figures that have not fallen below 8% for a couple of years. But while in Chile there is a discussion about how to extend the workday during periods of higher demand, in other parts of the world the question has been exactly the opposite: what happens if, instead of demanding more hours from the same workers, we rethink the organization of work to obtain equal or greater benefits?
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The emergence of AI and the imminent technological change have made us question whether traditional forms of employment are sustainable, and even necessary, in a not-so-distant future. This is an older and more repeated question than it seems. Since the industrial revolution of the 19th century, the Fordist organization of work in the 20th century, and currently artificial intelligence, each technological inflection has put us at this crossroads: if machines do our work, perhaps we no longer need to work so much or we are simply dispensable. Economist John Maynard Keynes already posed this in 1930, when he imagined that his grandchildren would work barely 15 hours a week thanks to technological progress. Almost a century later, the United Kingdom decided to put that idea to the test (proportionally) with the largest work reduction experiment ever conducted.
In 2018, Andrew Barnes, owner of the trust company Perpetual Guardian, decided on his own to give his employees an extra day off per week, without touching their salary, just to see what would happen. The results were surprising: greater commitment to the company, less stress, the same productivity. The experiment caught academic attention and after several studies and consistent evidence, the organization 4 Day Week Global was founded by Barnes himself, responsible for coordinating similar trials in different countries. In 2022, the largest experiment to date began, with more than 3,000 workers from 60 British companies participating in a coordinated six-month trial: working 20% fewer hours, four days instead of five, with no salary reduction. The initiative was organized by 4 Day Week Global along with the Autonomy research center and evaluated by researchers from the University of Cambridge and Boston College.
The results were, according to the organizers themselves, a “breaking point” for the movement. At the end of the trial, 56 of the 61 participating companies — 92% — decided to maintain the four-day week, and 18 made it a permanent policy. One year later, follow-up confirmed that the results were not just due to the novelty of the change: the vast majority continued with the model, and workers reported sustained improvements in physical health, mental health, and job satisfaction. Similar experiences in Iceland, Belgium, and New Zealand yielded similar conclusions, suggesting that this is a model that transcends differences in organizational models and national cultures.
It is necessary to pause on this common belief. The most obvious objection against the four-day week is the supposedly linear relationship between fewer hours worked and lower productivity. However, data from the English experiment suggest that the relationship between these two variables is mediated by other factors that complicate it. During the trial period, the revenues of the participating companies remained practically stable, and several even reported notable growth in their billing.
How is it explained that working less did not mean producing less? It is not that the workers compressed the same effort into less time (at least that was not the most determining factor), but factors such as absenteeism and mental health — variables that normally do not enter the equation when talking about “productivity” — played a central role. Companies recorded a 65% drop in sick leave days and a 57% reduction in staff turnover, while 71% of employees reported lower levels of burnout and 39% said they felt less stressed than at the start of the trial.
In other words: workers with more time for themselves and their families got sick less, reported greater well-being, worked more calmly, and consequently missed significantly fewer days at work. Researcher Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College who participated in the follow-up of the trial, has pointed out that these results have remained stable over time, ruling out that it is just an initial effect.
This does not mean that hours worked do not matter, there is obviously a relationship between time worked and productivity, but that relationship is not so simple and direct. There is indeed a minimum floor of time necessary to complete certain tasks, which varies depending on the functions performed. That is why some of the sectors where the model worked worst were precisely those with more rigid schedules and less room for reorganization, such as construction or certain continuous care services, while sectors with greater flexibility to reorganize work — technology, professional services — were the ones that benefited the most.
Returning to the national discussion, it seems that the assumption that more hours equal greater productivity does not hold under any condition, and can even be counterproductive in extreme cases. The key does not seem to be how many hours are worked, but how that time is organized and under what conditions people are to perform their work.
The English experiment is a useful counterpoint to observe the debate established in Chile from a different perspective. The discussion about flexibilizing the calculation of the workday — and allowing weeks of up to 52 hours in high-demand seasons — starts from the belief that the way to face employment scarcity is to give companies more leeway to demand more hours when they need them. Knowing that the English case is not completely transferable to the Chilean reality, it does provide strong evidence to review our beliefs: before assuming that more hours mean more production, it is worth asking how much of that production actually depends on the people who work being healthy, rested, and happy to work in their organizations.
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Nurjk Agloni is a sociologist from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Master and PhD (c) from the University of Cambridge, England.
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