Work 4 days a week for the same salary on trial in the UK

It is one of the great ideas of the labor market, arising after the automation and technification of the tertiary sector, responsible for driving a large part of the economy. Now they want to test whether reducing the shift from 5 to 4 days really works.

There are 3,000 workers who are about to put one of the great labor theories of our time to the test: can the working day be reduced to four days a week without losing productivity? That we are going to discover and the result can affect hundreds of millions of people in the world.

The experiment will be carried out in the United Kingdom, where for six months some 60 companies will check if their workers perform the same as when they worked five days a week and rested two. At first it seems difficult, although very appetizing.

The initiative of this experiment has been carried out by the organization called 4 Day Week, in Spanish: 4 days a week. This organization has been working for years to convince that this production model is the future of society, working less but producing the same.

As the proponents of this measure explain, by reducing the working day to four days a week, companies will be able to retain young talent that so much rotation has to look for places with good quality work, something that the new generations demand more and more.

The question that will have to be answered is whether with four days of work the same can be produced as in five, since if this is not achieved it will be very difficult for companies to accept this new reduced working day. Will resting one more day allow us to give more at work? That is the big question.

After six months of trial, the organization will carry out an exhaustive study to obtain results and check if it has been a success or if the groups that reduced the working day also reduced the volume of work.

You have to remember that in Spain there are some political parties that have been advocating for a short four-day shift for a long time and that experiments have been carried out in private companies to see the viability of this labor measure. If it goes well, we all win.