Is the 4-day work week proposed by Elly Schlein cool?
What do I think of the 4-day working week proposed by Democratic Party secretary Elly Schlein. Giuliano Cazzola's comment
Elly had missed the 4-day week cabal. In truth, it had already been talked about in recent months. The topic, however, was soon overtaken by another much more ''popular'' one – the legal minimum wage – which is still being talked about while awaiting the contribution of the CNEL, which is arriving – announced by the president Renato Brunetta – for half October.
Elly had not been able, in that period of time, to have her say about the ''ultra short'' week and she tried to make up for it in these hours with a statement that is also a program: ''It is a measure that brings with itself some important benefits: not just people's precious time, to dedicate to their interests and affections. It also improves from the point of view of reducing climate-changing emissions, because it reduces travel. And then it also helps in rebalancing gender in the world of work. In short, we have several reasons to try to experiment with this measure."
The fact that the secretary of the Democratic Party uses the word ''experiment'' is worthy of mention because Elly is a woman of great certainties, always ready to throw herself into the adventures of the Boheme left: a sort of ''safe second hand'', like the slogan ''work less, work everyone'' which has shaped entire generations of trade unionists.
Soon those who had launched the idea in recent months had put on the handbrake when they realized that, where the 4-day working week had been established, in reality there had not been a reduction in hours for the same salary, but only a redistribution of the weekly calendar over a smaller number of days, with the very ''progressive'' objective of extending the weekend and therefore discharging onto the motorways those ''climate-altering emissions'' which are rampant on other days on cities.
Then, it is true that the pandemic has introduced a different physical relationship with the workplace, especially in the case of particular tasks which, thanks to new technologies, can also be carried out remotely, albeit opening up new problems. However, evaluations of the results of the experiments carried out are premature. For now we remain within the scope of ''hearsay''.
Experimental HR projects to test the 4-day working week have been launched in various countries such as Iceland, Japan, New Zealand and Spain, some of which have provided extremely promising results. In the United Kingdom, around sixty companies have experimented with working from Monday to Thursday: the majority have decided to continue. We too had first experiences, at a niche level: Intesa San Paolo and Lavazza.
But according to Eurostat, the prevailing trends here are going in other directions. In Italy there are 2.7 million people who work more than 9 hours a day; according to Eurostat research, 9.4% of workers stay on site 50 hours a week, 25% more than the canonical 40 set by law as the maximum limit. The overtime rate is among the highest in Europe. It is certainly not a context to be proud of, if I think that my grandmother – a farm worker – sang a significant popular song between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century: ''If eight hours seems too few to you, try work''.
For the unions the four-day week has become a ''daring temptation''; companies do not exclude it a priori. «We are very willing to sit down and think, but not in an ideological way, or employability and employment in Italy will be in crisis», predicted the president of Confindustria, Carlo Bonomi. But before you start running you will need to learn to walk.
Of course, the topic of working hours – which flourished in the last century – disappeared from the debate decades ago. Yet it is an essential component of the organization of work also in view of greater productivity and, above all, the introduction of new technologies, presented as the killer of employment. These are reflections to be made, perhaps with less romanticism than that lavished by Elly Schlein.
But the scenarios must take into account another aspect: the demographic variant which, albeit in a perverse logic, could determine a paradoxical situation that magnifies the crisis we are already experiencing today with an imaginary pantograph. There is no investment in new technologies because the workers to entrust their use to them are not available – not only in terms of professional quality.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/e-una-figata-la-settimana-lavorativa-di-4-giorni-proposta-da-elly-schlein/ on Sat, 23 Sep 2023 05:29:12 +0000.