Belgium offers a 4-day week, with no reduction in working time
Posted on October 29, 2022
The country has approved its “deal for jobs” which makes working time more flexible since workers have the choice of working four or five days. This reform without reducing working time aims to create jobs. Experiments with the four-day work week are multiplying all over the world.
In Belgium, labor law is turning a page, with the “job deal” approved by the Belgian House of Representatives on September 29, 2022. The new labor market reform law shakes up the sacrosanct eight-hour day, instituted in 1921 in our Belgian neighbors. Indeed, the government now leaves the choice of working over four or five days without reduction of either working time or salary. What changes is therefore the duration of work in a day: 9.30 a.m. per day for those who choose to work four days, 8 a.m. for those who decide to stay at five.
The transition to a four-day week must be done with the agreement of business leaders, who must justify their refusal. The agreement also paves the way for a possible alternation between a four-day and a five-day week, depending on the personal constraints of the employees. The aim of this “managed flexibility” is to facilitate job creation to bring the employment rate to 80% against approximately 70% in 2022. Proponents of a reduction in the number of days worked indicate that the week of four days is a way to share the activity. “Our obsession must be to know how to permanently distribute the volume of work existing at a given moment over the whole of the active population”, suggests Dominique Méda, sociologist of work and director of research.
Conclusive tests all over the world
The Covid-19 pandemic, work codes are constantly being shaken up all over the world. The four-day week then appears as a new social conquest. To measure the effects, Great Britain resumed in June 2022 a large study over six months. Thus, 3,000 employees from 60 companies in different sectors, catering, the pharmaceutical industry or consulting, only go to the office four days a week, without paying their salary.
The final conclusions have not yet been made but the first results of this test are conclusive since 86% of those surveyed plan to maintain this pace at the end of the experiment. Before Great Britain, Icelanders had already successfully tested the shortened working week.
In France also the idea seduced. Thereby, 64% of French employees would like to be able to condense their week into four days, according to a study by ADP, a figure up four points compared to 2019. For employees, the advantages of this organization are numerous. “A majority of employees considered that the reduction in working time improved their living conditions both at work and outside of work”, notes Dominique Méda who conducted a survey with Dares after the transition to 35 hours.
From an ecological point of view, the outcome of the initiatives is potentially favorable since it saves a home-to-work journey. “But that obviously presupposes that there is no no rebound effect, that is to say that, on this day, people do not move more”, specifies Dominique Méda, director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences (Irisso).
A way to attract talent
On the business side, the tests are generally positive. More than 400 French companies have taken the plunge. They note an increase in the productivity of employees, as evidenced by Laurent de la Clergerie, president of LDLC, who has moved all his employees to a four-day week, without loss of pay. The boss encourages his peers to follow him on this path which combines well-being at work and better productivity. “The company’s results are up,” he summarizes. Another non-negligible advantage: the organization of the work over four days helps the talents. “I’m overwhelmed with CVs”, says the manager of the company that sells computer equipment.
So many encouraged signals that push companies around the world to turn to this organization, even in Japan. “A situation once unthinkable in a country whose post-war prosperity depended on a workforce willing to sacrifice family life for the good of business,” writes the daily Asahi Shimbun. The electronics giant Hitachi is thus setting up a four-day week for 15,000 of its employees, as are other large Japanese companies which are struggling to recruit.
“For the four days to be an interesting solution, many conditions must be met”, however, qualifies Dominique Méda. The sociologist points to a new distribution of domestic and family tasks and attention paid to the movement of workers on the day not worked. She also believes that we must “find a balance between the almost certain increase in the volume of human work and the way in which we are going to distribute it over the entire working population”.