The World Today for August 05, 2024

NEED TO KNOW

Pull Harder

GREECE

Greece recently adopted a six-day working week to maintain its workforce as its population ages, but also to clamp down on tax evasion stemming from undeclared work.

Under the new law – which only applies to industries that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the BBC explained – workers can’t work more than eight hours on their sixth day and should receive 40 percent overtime. Employers can also offer employees six-day work weeks when they are on the clock for only 6.5 hours per day, or 40 hours per week.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a pro-business conservative, said the new policy was “deeply growth-orientated,” noted CNBC.

Someone earning $100 a day, or $500 a week, would therefore earn $640 under the law, added Al Jazeera. The news service also noted that the extra hours would make up for the more than 500,000 Greeks who have left the country since 2010 in search of better economic opportunities in the wake of the financial crisis that started in 2008.

Meanwhile, labor unions are complaining. Living costs in Greece are increasing while Greek workers, who aren’t lazy as they have been labeled, have become more productive in recent years after struggling to reattain the productivity levels that were high until the 2008 financial crisis, reported National Public Radio. Now Mitsotakis wants workers to toil longer while many other developed countries have been experimenting with shorter work weeks. In other words, Greece is bucking a trend to push through policies that are more family-friendly, promote a work-life balance as well as increase productivity.

“It makes no sense whatsoever,” civil servant union boss Akis Sotiropoulos told the Guardian. “When almost every other civilized country is enacting a four-day week, Greece decides to go the other way.”

Ninety percent of Canadians might prefer a four-day work week, for example, according to a survey cited by McGill University professor of management Jean-Nicolas Reyt in the Conversation. He noted that, in the 1870s, Canadians routinely worked 12-hour days, six days a week, or 72 hours per week. When Toronto printers demanded a nine-hour workday in 1872, they were dismissed as crazy.

Meanwhile, Belgium, Iceland, South Africa, Japan and New Zealand are all tinkering with reducing the working week.

Some countries have also sought to reduce the amount of time that employees must deal with work. In Belgium, Kenya, France, and other countries, for example, authorities enacted laws that prevented managers from reaching out to their teams via email during non-office hours in the so-called Right To Disconnect laws. The intent was to allow folks to have time off rather than remain perpetually on call, contended the World Economic Forum.

Still, as statistics show, the Greeks desperately need to become more productive – they are 30 percent less efficient than their counterparts in the European Union bloc, even though they work longer than anyone in Europe. Meanwhile, around one in five Greek adults are teetering on poverty, and while the economy is far stronger than a decade ago, it’s still behind its fellow EU members on measures. And unemployment, at around 10 percent (almost double that for youth), remains stubbornly high.

Analysts say it’s unclear if a longer working week will change those numbers. But one thing it might do is lower productivity, because Greece’s move goes against much research that shows increasing hours actually hurts productivity, Brigid Schulte of the New America think tank told the Washington Post.

“The proof will be in the evidence,” Schulte said. “If all of a sudden Greece turns around its economy, maybe people will take a second look. But I don’t think that will happen.”

To read the full edition and support independent journalism, join our community of informed readers and subscribe today!