Four-day week faces setbacks, but advances in the world

After remote work, the new wave resulting from the impacts of Covid-19 is the four-day week. In Spain, the giant Telefónica inaugurated the practice in mid-2021. And it is not the only one in the country.

Fashion clothing companies such as Desigual, e-commerce companies such as BigBuy, or software companies such as Delsol are part of this growing list. A list that grows at the same time that the controversy about possible salary changes also grows.

After all, we’re not talking about a fifth day working at home, but a free day to spend time with the kids, walk the dog or play video games.

“One of the main benefits of implementing this measure is the improvement of the work climate. We are convinced that a happy worker is a more productive worker and, therefore, will make the company grow”, he tells the Sheet Ana Arroyo, responsible for selecting and developing people at Delsol, a software company with 180 employees based in the city of Mengíbar, Andalusia.

“And the team is happy to take advantage of this free time that allows them to enrich their social and personal lives”, he explains. Arroyo presents data to corroborate that happiness can go hand in hand with profit.

“Productivity is not always directly observable. The best indicators to know our productivity have been annual revenue, which grew by almost 30%, referring to the year 2021, and the satisfaction survey of our customers, which we carry out annually, in which average score has been 8.91 out of 10.”

It is worth mentioning that the company would not have a working day on the fly, for example, Friday. What is done is to distribute people and each employee is off on one day of the week, it may be some on Monday, others on Tuesday, etc.

“A clear disadvantage”, says Arroyo, “is that we have fewer people working every day and we have to do the same work with fewer employees. We implement a rotation of days off and every day we have a 15% reduction in the headcount. That is difficult to manage when they have to take sick leave or any kind of absence outside of that rotation”.

Spain is not alone in this. About a month ago, a survey carried out by a group of American and European universities indicated that, among 33 companies that took over the four-day working week, none of them planned to return to the full five-day week.

Data from this survey say that companies also had gains in productivity and revenue. “The two-day weekend is not working for people,” lead researcher Juliet Schor told Bloomberg when the work was released.

Economist and sociologist at Boston College, in the United States, she joined in this investigation with colleagues from the prestigious University of Cambridge, in England, and from University College Dublin, the largest institution in Ireland. “In many countries we have a workweek, enshrined in 1938, that doesn’t fit with contemporary life. For the well-being of working people it is critical that we address the length of the workweek.”

But not all are laurels in this initiative. Professor of labor law María José López Álvarez, from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, in Madrid, points out some problems. “It’s a complex issue because there are many interests at stake. It’s not clear that all companies can maintain productivity by reducing working hours without decreasing wages. Hours could safely be reduced if workers could be more productive, but to do so there would have to be progress on a culture change,” she told Sheet.

In Spain, the maximum working day allowed by law is 40 hours a week, although there is room for negotiations for overtime. In the case of the reduction from five to four days, what matters is whether there will be a salary change.

The best of all worlds, for the employee, would be to work four days a week, reducing the total number of weekly hours, but maintaining the salary. This is the choice, for example, of the company Delsol.

“We work 36 hours a week in winter and 28 hours a week in summer, from June 15th to September 15th”, says Ana Arroyo. “The implementation of the measure was very well received by the workforce because they were working fewer hours a week, maintaining the same salary. We always consider this as a reinvestment.”

In legal terms, according to Professor López Álvarez, this situation can be settled “in a collective agreement or with the unions, but it is a complicated option for many companies because it can mean higher costs. There are some pilot experiences and, recently, the Spanish government approved a project to subsidize companies to implement this plan, reducing the working day to at least 34 hours a week for two years.”

The second possibility, continues the teacher, is to work the same number of hours. In this case, instead of eight hours for five days, the worker would do ten hours for four days. “It can be done collectively and it would be perfectly legal,” she says.

The third option is the most controversial. “They work four days a week, reducing the weekly workload and proportionally reducing the salary. At the moment, this possibility could only be made with the agreement of the workers’ representatives or in a collective agreement; or that the company voluntarily offers it to the workers.”

In fact, after adopting this option as a test in 2021, with only 150 employees, the telecommunications giant presented its entire workforce with the possibility of joining the four-day, eight-hour day with a proportional reduction in salary.

Called Bonus Flexible Weekly Hours, the proposal launched in the middle of 2022 provided that employees would work 32 hours a week, from Monday to Thursday, instead of the 37.5 hours they used to work five days a week. However, everyone would not be paid for 5 and a half hours a week (22 hours a month).

Telefónica even offered a bonus, in which it would pay back 20% of the lost amount. Ultimately, workers rejected the proposal almost unanimously. Only 1% of the workforce adhered to the proposal.

The moral of the story, as López Álvarez teaches, is obvious: “Workers do not welcome the reduction of their wages, even if it is in exchange for working a little less.”