In 2019, Iceland made headlines by becoming one of the first countries in the world to adopt the four-day working week, not through a general law, but through agreements allowing workers to negotiate shorter weeks or reduced hours. Five years on, the results are indisputable. The Icelandic experiment began in…
How does a 36-hour workweek work out to a four-day workweek?
Here in Norway everyone in sneezing distance of a union deal has a five-day workweek at 7.5 hours a day, for 37.5 hours in total. (The law says six days at 8 hours; the half-hour difference is in practice lunch, which is your own time with a union deal and the boss’ time without. I think we could go down to 7h a day and get an hour of lunch like our neighbours.)
Probably four 9 hour days
There’s nothing probable about the combination of a Nordic country and a 9-hour workday.
9 x 4 = 36
IANI (I am not Icelandic) but that’s my guess based on currently-accepted mathematical models.
Yeah, but there’s also no way anyone in the Nordics would be fine with a nine-hour workday. There’s something clearly wrong here.
I’d rather guess that they’re working a five-day workweek but have cut the hours per day from 8 to 7.2, or 8 hours Mon-Thu and 4 hours on Friday or the like. The article just comes off as weird.
That’d be a 5-day workweek. Sorry you can’t imagine someone only wanting to work 4 days a week, even if it means they have to work a little longer, it seems inexorably reasonable to me 🤷♂️
I think it’s far more likely that the article that doesn’t know what “sweep under the rug” means also got other stuff wrong.