Dispute over four-day week – “Shorter working hours are overdue in Switzerland”


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More and more companies are reducing the working hours of their employees on full wages, from global brands such as Panasonic to Swiss IT stalls. These are the pros and cons of this working model.

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Fewer and fewer companies are working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and from Monday to Friday.

imago images/Sven Simon

More and more companies are relying on the four-day week with full wages, including global brands such as Panasonic...

More and more companies are relying on the four-day week with full wages, including global brands such as Panasonic…

imago images/Fotoarena

... and Unilever ...
imago images/CHROMORANGE
  • More and more companies are opting for four-day weeks, including in Switzerland.

  • Tests show that employees are more productive with the extra free time.

  • But it could also make them more stressed.

Large corporations such as Panasonic and Unilever rely on the four-day week with full wages. This working model is also being well received by more and more Swiss companies. The additional day off means that the employees are better organized and more efficient, says Fabian Schneider from the Solothurn IT company Seerow in the “SonntagsZeitung” after a test phase.

After the experiences and feedback from the employees, his conclusion is positive: “It looks very much as if we will keep the four-day week,” says Schneider. The nine employees work 8.75 hours on four days. So there shouldn’t be any losses. The team is now considering which meetings are necessary and who needs to be present.

“Equal pay for less work is an illusion”

Despite the successful test by the IT company, it is not clear whether the four-day week will be used extensively in Switzerland. Such companies are still the exception. According to Daniel Lampart, chief economist at the Swiss Trade Union Confederation (SGB), dozens of employers want to increase working hours. It would be “overdue” for working hours in Switzerland to be shorter, says Lampart to 20 minutes.

Economiesuisse chief economist Rudolf Minsch has a completely different opinion. “Equal pay for less work is an illusion, that’s not possible,” he says when asked. In addition, he would find it unswiss if working hours were regulated centrally. “These are defined by industry or by companies within the framework of the OR and it should stay that way,” says Minsch.

The chief economists of SGB and Economiesuisse, Fabian Schneider from the IT company Seerow and the organizational and work psychologist Roland Schaad name the advantages and disadvantages of the four-day week:

Benefits:

  • deceleration: “The additional free time gives us the opportunity to calm down and slow down, which is particularly important in stressful times like the pandemic,” says work and organizational psychologist Roland Schaad about 20 minutes.

  • More possibilities: “The additional free time offers new opportunities to change our behavior. We can experience new things, learn and educate ourselves,” says Schaad.

  • More time for the family: “The four-day week has advantages for the compatibility of work and family, provided that the four working days end in time,” says SGB chief economist Daniel Lampart.

  • More performance at work: “The better work-life balance of the employees contributes to the increase in performance due to the additional day off without overtime and additional stress,” says Fabian Schneider, Managing Director of Seerow.

Disadvantage:

  • More stress: “If you left wages unchanged, you would have to increase productivity by 20 percent, which doesn’t work or leads to stress,” says Economiesuisse chief economist Rudolf Minsch.

  • Declining wages: «A reduction in working hours leads to falling wages, as the example of France with the 35-hour week shows. Nobody wants a minimum wage of 1,200 euros like in France,” says Minsch.

  • Declining Prosperity: “With lower wages, social security contributions and taxes are also lower. The state would have to get by with less, which also reduces prosperity in Switzerland,” says Minsch.

  • Bad signal for Switzerland as a business location: «Centralized solutions in Switzerland that overprice all sectors would send a bad signal. It would mean that Switzerland would move away from the federal system that allowed entrepreneurs a lot of freedom,” says Minsch.

  • More uncertainty: «Work is not only a stress factor, it also gives us stability. With a day less work, certain structures that can be unsettling also disappear,” says occupational and organizational psychologist Schaad.

According to Daniel Lampart from the SGB, companies in the IT sector in particular are currently breaking new ground when it comes to working hours. In other sectors, on the other hand, we are far from that far. “In construction it would be good if the workers regularly worked a 5-day week,” says Lampart. In many jobs, the four-day week would also be difficult to plan, says Rudolf Minsch from Economiesuisse, such as waiting tables or in the factory. “The shifts would have to be organized differently, that would be expensive,” says Minsch.

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