Does anyone have a better source? This seems to be blogspam based on a (linked) Spanish article that seems to be a partial translation of a Guardian opinion piece but I’m hoping there’s a real paper or findings somewhere?

Edit: this seems to be the study that various articles are based on https://autonomy.work/portfolio/on-firmer-ground-icelands-on...

    Today, almost 90% of Icelandic workers benefit from a reduced working week of 36 hours

    The offer of shorter hours has been widespread. In the two years prior to being surveyed, more than half (59%) of workers were offered reduced working hours.

I would love for this to be true, but who is the Farmingdale Observer to make these claims? A quick search suggests it's a small town American newspaper.

No sources cited in the text, a quote from an "activist". It's not much to go on.

Can't help but notice that their reduced 4-days work week still is 36h long. 9h work days would be considered long in most European countries, where the norm is around 40h for a five-days work week. So they are not just cutting a day, they are also working 1 hour more than average on each other day. This probably explains a lot in terms of productivity.

On a different note, the increased ability of men to participate in family life and household chores sounds amazing. It might sound weird to younger professionals without kids, but as soon as you have a child, having one extra day to deal with everything household related makes a huge difference.

It is more of an opinion piece due to missing numbers and percentages. I am not denying the effectiveness of a 4 day week but this is not an article to use for a good discussion.

I work 32 hours per week and I can't imagine myself working 40 hours per week anymore. I should have reduced earlier. Together with starting to work at 8AM, I have so much time in the afternoon for myself.

So they're moving to a 36-hour work week, which is actually an hour longer than some Britons who work a 35-hour week over five days.

> Today, almost 90% of Icelandic workers benefit from a reduced working week of 36 hours, compared with 40 hours previously, with no loss of pay.

> Unlike some countries, such as Belgium, where the four-day week means that hours not worked are compensated for by longer working days

40 hours/5 days = 8 hours per day

36 hours/4 days = 9 hours per day

The Icelandic workday increased from 8 to 9 hours, a 12½% increase. That sure looks like hours not worked being compensated for by longer working days.

The emphasis they put on internet infrastructure made me think that perhaps people also work more from home and might not properly count that toward work time.

I don't know about Iceland's work culture, but I can say as an American working in Denmark I've noticed that while Danes work FAR fewer hours than I'm used to, especially in startup culture, they tend to be extremely focused while at work. Nobody does their online shopping or reads news (cough cough what I'm doing now) while at work. In my old coworking space, a woman did CAD work and I never once saw anything other CAD open on her computer.

This article simply has it's facts wrong. I live and work in Iceland as a software engineer, I work a ~37hr week and work 5 days a week. Local councils tried a 4-day work week a few years ago and ended up not implementing it.

I'm not sure where they are getting their numbers from.

The title and the propaganda around this, is highly misleading.

Iceland reduced the weekly working hours from 40 to 36. That’s it, it’s not some grand 4 work days a week experiment gone right as they are trying to paint it.

Anecdotally, we introduced a 25 hours (5 days, 5 hours per day) work week at full pay in our company (digital services, creative) and maintained it for several years and observed a reduction of productivity (in terms of output) of 10-20% compared to the reduction of working hours of 37.5%. We also saw much higher employee satisfaction and self-reported mental health improvements. Most of the employees were women so the reduction in working hours also often translated to a significant relative increase in leisure time as much of their non-working hours was otherwise taken up by family, care work and chores (which isn't to say their partners were slobs but gendered expectations still exist in our society and it's not just the men reinforcing them).

Our biggest problem was that this was difficult to roll out to all people working for the company. E.g. you can't really cut the hours for cleaners coming in for a few hours per week because their hours are mostly defined by their workload and a 37.5% reduction across the board also means someone who previously did 20 hours would now do 12.5 hours, which translates to a much greater loss of productivity if spread out across more than two days. The founders also pretty much kept working full time as before.

The reduced number of working hours also really put the spotlight on people who were already struggling with productivity before, which one might argue is a good thing. Also for legal reasons the contracts remained unaffected as this was an open-ended experiment, not a legally binding benefit. The employees were also interviewed before and during the process and most were initially opposed to the idea because they feared they wouldn't be able to handle their workloads in less time.

It's worth mentioning that just like WFH policies, this is something that simply doesn't work for everyone. If you have a factory with a fixed output over time and productivity of an employee is tied to time at the machine, productivity loss will translate 1-to-1 from reduced working hours. Likewise in retail working hours are dictated by opening hours. You can still reduce working hours by introducing/adding shifts of course but there is no economic incentive for companies to keep paying employees the same for fewer hours in these jobs unless coerced to do so through collective bargaining. Remember that while many credit Henry Ford with popularizing the 40 hour work week and he did provide many rationalizations for it at his own company, the 40 hour work week only became law (along with many other improvements of working conditions) after massive protests from unionists and anarchists, including the Haymarket massacre[0]. It wasn't simply handed to workers, and certainly not voluntarily.

[0]: In case you're unfamiliar with the term, the Haymarket massacre or "Haymarket affair" refers to an incident where police shot and killed an unknown number of unarmed protestors and striking workers following an explosion that killed seven police officers and at least four workers. Eight people were charged and sentenced (seven being sentenced to death) for the bombing, though it's not clear if any of them were actually involved in the bombing itself or its planning. The police officers who had shot and killed protestors never suffered any consequences.