Aussie Prof Questions 'Success' Of Iceland's Four-Day Workweek Trial

Prof. Anthony Veal, an adjunct professor at the business school of the University of Technology Sydney has questioned the rave reviews of a study on the four-day workweek in Iceland, saying the success of the experiment has been “greatly overstated.”

In an article from The Conversation republished in ZME Science on July 17, 2021, Veal said “It almost seems too good to be true: a major trial in Iceland shows that cutting the standard five-day week to four days for the same pay needn’t cost employers a cent (or, to be accurate, a krona). Unfortunately, it is too good to be true. While even highly reputable media outlets such as the BBC have reported on the “overwhelming success” of large-scale trials of a four-day week in Iceland from 2015 to 2019, that’s not actually the case," Veal argued. The truth is less spectacular — interesting and important enough in its own right, but not quite living up to the media spin, including that these trials have led to the widespread adoption of a four-day workweek in Iceland.

“The media reports are based on a report co-published by Iceland’s Alda (Association for Democracy and Sustainability) and Britain’s Autonomy think tank about two trials involving Reykjavík City Council and the Icelandic government. The trials covered 66 workplaces and about 2,500 workers. They did not involve a four-day workweek. This is indicated by the report’s title – Going Public: Iceland’s journey to a shorter working week. In fact, the document of more than 80 pages refers to a four-day week just twice, in its first two paragraphs, and only then as a reference point for what the trials were actually about: In recent years, calls for shorter working hours without a reduction in pay — often framed in terms of a four-day week — have become increasingly prominent across Europe," Veal stressed.

Read on to the third paragraph and you’ll learn the study “involved two large-scale trials of shorter working hours — in which workers moved from a 40-hour to a 35- or 36-hour week, without reduced pay. A four-day week trial would have involved reducing the working week by seven to eight hours.

Instead, the maximum reduction in these trials was just four hours. In 61 of the 66 workplaces, it was one to three hours. But these have provided for a reduction of just 35 minutes a week in the private sector and 65 minutes in the public sector (though larger reductions are available for shift workers). That’s a long way from making a four-day week the norm.

In regard to this and similar experiments, it is always possible the “Hawthorne effect” might have been at work. This effect refers to 1930s experiments with factory workers in the US that showed how their awareness of being the subject of experiments affected their behavior, and hence productivity levels.

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