Podcast. The four-day week, soon a reality for all?

Since the confinements put in place during the Covid-19 epidemic, many French people continue to telework a few days a week. This new flexibility allows them to better reconcile their private life and their professional life, but also to have more autonomy in their work. So much so that for companies, which sometimes struggle to recruit, remote work has become an argument for attracting new talent.

But what about those who cannot work remotely, because their presence at their workplace is essential? To meet this demand for flexibility, some companies and administrations are experimenting with a four-day week, without changing the weekly working time to 35 hours. At the cost of longer and denser days, employees obtain a third day of rest.

Some bosses, even rarer, even go so far as to reduce the weekly working time: an idea that dates back to the 1990s and which is experiencing a resurgence in popularity thanks to questions raised by automation and the place that automation could take. intelligence in the workplace. And if the human being could come out a winner, his tasks being increasingly assisted by the machine?

In this episode of the “L’Heure du Monde” podcast, Béatrice Madeline, journalist with the Economy Worlddraws up the balance sheet that can be drawn from the experiments carried out on the four-day week in France and in Europe.

An episode of Cyrielle Bedu. Production and credits music: Amandine Robillard. Presentation and editor-in-chief: Jean-Guillaume Santi. In this episode: interview with MEP Pierre Larrouturou; extract from the INA archive of Jacques Chirac’s visit to the Brioche Pasquier company, July 13, 1995.

Learn more about the four-day week: