Spain to Trial Four-Day Working Week
In a further indication that the world will not return to normal after lockdown(s), Spain is set to trial reducing its working week to four days in the hope of preventing increases in Covid infections. Sky News has the story.
Spain is planning to use €50 million (£43 million) in EU funds to cut its working week to four days in a bid to prevent further coronavirus outbreaks.
The experiment is set to last for three years and will be funded by money from the European Union’s massive Covid recovery fund.
The money will compensate some 200 mid-size companies as they resize their workforce or reorganise production workflows to adapt to a 32-hour working week.
It will go towards subsidising all of the employers’ extra costs in the first year of the trial and then reduce the government’s aid to 50% and 25% each consecutive year. …
Reducing work hours from 40 to 35 per week in 2017 would have resulted in a 1.5% GDP growth and 560,000 new jobs, a study published earlier this year in the Cambridge Journal of Economics found.
Salaries would have also increased nationally by 3.7%, especially benefiting women who more often take part-time jobs, the research said.
Software Delsol, in southern Spain, invested €400,000 (£343,000) last year to reduce working hours for its 190 employees and has since then reported a 28% reduction in absenteeism, with people choosing to go to the bank or see their doctor on their weekday off.
Their sales increased last year by 20% and no single employee has quit since the new schedule was adopted.
However, the scheme’s critics say a pandemic-shaken economy is not the best scenario for experiments.
Work after the pandemic is likely to be very different from that before 2020. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about people spending more of their working hours at home. According to the workspace provider IWG (formerly Regus), “hybrid working”, where staff work from home some of the time, will become “the norm”. The BBC has the story.
Working from home some of the time, or hybrid working, will become “the norm” for many companies after the pandemic, says global workspace provider IWG.
Firms will be looking to save money and be more environment-friendly by using less office space, said IWG chief executive Mark Dixon.
IWG said 2020 had been a “challenging” year as fewer firms rented its offices.
But it said it was ready to take advantage of “accelerating demand” for hybrid working.
Sky’s report on Spain’s trial is worth reading in full.
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It’s not to reduce infections, it’s to reduce emissions.
So no reductions in wages then? And if I currently work 4 days does that reduce? Or do I work the same hours as those currently working 5 days but they get paid for 5 days and I get paid for 4?
They currently attend work for 5 days but only get 4 days worth of work done so what’s the difference?
should be madness slippery digit
Yep. Its happening!
Soon you will own nothing, not have a job, be very unhappy and beaten up by the police if you complain
Good afternoon Cecil.
The virus is really clever, it knows the difference between a four day working week and a 5day working week, An excuse for Spanish laziness and lousy economy.
Spain to Trial Four-Day Working Week
So it’ll be no change there then.
I’m surprised that any one in Spain actually worked a full 5-day week before the lockdown.
There are still reports coming out of Spain about municipal employees spending their entire careers either ‘off sick’ or ‘suspended on full pay’.
Think of the huge amount of money to be saved by sacking all MPs, House of Lords, and halving the public sector workers too.
Eh, there are so many office jobs that are an endless cycle of useless paper-pushing, budget approvals, and meetings that I don’t see this hurting overall productivity much.
That’s one of the reasons I left the corporate world – so much of it had become an endless cycle of micro-managed busy-work for its own sake, leaving me little time to do what I was actually contracted for.
Same here!
I don’t miss all the useless sensitivity training either.
Spain is to trial a four day working week – surely the Spaniards will be up in arms about an extra day being added to their usual workload?
Three days for bullfighting, four days for bullshit,
😂
I completely support this actually. Humans should not need to work the same amount year after year, decade after decade, century after century. WE HAVE MACHINES! The whole point of automation is to make our lives easier. Who really enjoys going to work 5 out of 7 days in the week? Everywhere you look you see computers or machines either doing all the work or making the job easier. Automated tills in shops, GPS in Taxis, tickets for everything bought online, shopping online, self driving cars, most trades on the stock market are made by machines… There are even computers that write computer code. We have less work to do. So we can either all make our lives easier, or we can have mass unemployment for some and the continued 8 hours a day 5 days a week overwork for the few that have jobs. The original May Day riots occurred for exactly this reason. The demand for the 8 hour working day. In the 1890s!!!! And there it remains. Bertrand Russel wrote in “In Praise of idleness” in the 1920s: “We overproduce, we change our fashions, we create unnecessary commodities, we throw out a ridiculous amount of waste, and… Read more »
are you ready for the 20% pay cut? If you are there’s no reason why you can’t do a 4 day week already.
“are you ready for the 20% pay cut?”
Are you ready for a 20% loss of sales if you do? Businesses earn what they spend.
If the pandemic has shown one thing, it is that the majority of work in the UK and across the world adds no more real value to the economy than a pay cheque from HM Treasury.
So we really do need to ask why we are all so busy doing nothing.
A prize for anyone who can point to the science behind this.
We’ve just run the entire country for a year with huge quantities of people shut away in their houses, yet we were all fed and watered and other than the crushing boredom nothing much changed.
What that tells you is that the majority of ‘economic activity’ is a complete waste of time. So why not share that time around and get rid of the pointless activity.
There is a reason why not: (Clue – the working classes end up doing all the necessary work and start to revolt)
Then, on the 5th day, people will be socialising with different people to those they interact with at work – hence there will be MORE chance for any infectious individuals to spread the virus. Is this how Spanish logic works then?
Ask me mañana.
All well and good to think of WFH on a regular basis if one has a room going spare to act as an office for the boss. Many people (probably most people) just don’t have a room they can “give to the boss”. Many don’t have enough bedrooms for themselves in their own home. Many only have a bedroom to call their own (eg because they are having to live in a shared house – which, quite likely, doesn’t even have a sitting room – because the landlord is renting that out as an extra bedroom). Then there’s health and safety at work considerations – no-one there to check your workstation is set up in a healthy way etc etc – and a lot will have to crouch over their own personal laptop (that they wish to keep for their own use – as it is theirs), with incorrect seating and the laptop perched on their lap or the kitchen worksurface.
Please, if possible don’t refer to any msm. The dishonesty, lack of clarity and integrity is difficult to ignore and does not deserve anyone’s attention. Turn off radio and tv, and stop reading MSM until clear, honest journalism returns.
Actually 32 hours of office work is way better than full time office. The best and only good outcome of this horse manure great reset show was reducing the mandatory office hours and compensating the rest with home office hours