Can A Country Like The U.S. Afford To Have Shorter Workdays?

Because happy worker is a better worker!

In 2016, the Swedish city of Gothenburg began trials for a corn-flake capitalism experiment. The government coalition proposed a year-long trial that would divide municipal workers into a test and control group at the same pay rate: with the test group working six-hour days, and the control group working eight-hour days.

The six-hour working day is promoted not only by Vänster (Leftist Party), but also a growing body of academics, who support this transition based on research. An audit published in mid-April concluded that the program in its first year has sharply reduced absenteeism, and greatly improved productivity and worker health. While eight-hour work day is the norm, not all of those are spent actually working. The average time spent on private activities, such as personal phone calls, chatting with colleagues, checking social media and emails, and online shopping, take up an estimated 1.5 to 3 hours per day. According to CareerBuilder (2016) most employees spend at least an hour or more each work day on personal stuff. So technically, workers spend only 6-hours each working on what they are actually getting paid to take care of. Now, this is an interesting trade-off, making a 35-hour work week, especially for millennials, who value work-life balance a lot more than previous generations.

In a 2012 article for Foreign Policy, Charles Kenny explored the complicated connections between output and work hours: