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Iceland approved the 4-day workweek in 2019: nearly 6 years later, all the predictions made have come true.
(farmingdale-observer.com)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
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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.)
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.
Oh yeah? As a swede I am already at work for 9 hours every weekday. 1 of those hours are breakfast+lunch. Wouldn't mind staying another hour if I could go there one day less each week.
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.
Probably four 9 hour days
There's nothing probable about the combination of a Nordic country and a 9-hour workday.