Sweden is shifting to a 6-hour work day

[KamaAina]

http://www.sciencealert.com/sweden-is-shifting-to-a-6-hour-workday

Despite research telling us it’s a really bad idea, many of us end up working 50-hour weeks or more because we think we’ll get more done and reap the benefits later. And according to a study published last month involving 600,000 people, those of us who clock up a 55-hour week will have a 33 percent greater risk of having a stroke than those who maintain a 35- to 40-hour week.

With this in mind, Sweden is moving towards a standard 6-hour work day, with businesses across the country having already implemented the change, and a retirement home embarking on a year-long experiment to compare the costs and benefits of a shorter working day.

"I think the 8-hour work day is not as effective as one would think. To stay focused on a specific work task for 8 hours is a huge challenge. In order to cope, we mix in things and pauses to make the work day more endurable. At the same time, we are having it hard to manage our private life outside of work," Linus Feldt, CEO of Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, told Adele Peters at Fast Company.

Filimundus switched to a 6-hour day last year, and Feldt says their staff haven't looked back. "We want to spend more time with our families, we want to learn new things or exercise more. I wanted to see if there could be a way to mix these things," he said.

Well, I do like meatballs. And hockey. And kajsa could teach me some Swedish.

[joeybee12]

1. IKEA!

I actually went to the one in Prague a while ago...some differences, but a lot of the items are the same, and since the packaging is in Swedish, that makes it look even more similar!

[Cleita]

2. Sensible.

When I worked I usually got my work done in six hours and found myself looking busy for the other two hours. But that was in the days when we had decent labor laws.

[jmowreader]

3. I take it all Swedes are salaried?

[KamaAina]

4. A much larger proportion than here, I'd wager.

[LanternWaste]

9. No. They do however, have strong labor unions and established arrangements

No. They do however, have strong labor unions and established arrangements for collective bargaining, which means the government doesn't have to step in often if at all. The National Mediation Office is responsible for mediating between the different parties in the rare cases of disagreement. It also publishes centralized information on wage increases and on the general trends in the work market. Nordic countries prefer to have a collective agreement between unions and employers as the reference point for wages, not one set by the government.

It would be rational to extrapolate these specifics to a general whole vis-a-vis a reduction of hours.

[Maedhros]

5. But Sweden is a socialist hellhole!

[gratuitous]

6. It makes one wonder

As worker hours and productivity have gone steadily up in the United States over the last 35 years, compensation has remained stagnant. All the extra wealth generated by those workers has gone somewhere, but not into the pockets of the people whose efforts created it. Weird.

We also have all these "labor-saving" appliances (Does anyone call them that anymore?), yet any time saved by working people seems to have gone into more work at lower wages. Workers in America spend just under an hour each day going to and from work, and if you're in an urban area, it's probably safe to double that.

The U.S. doesn't even try to do things differently.

[LittleBlue]

7. Good test case

See if it works there.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

8. Working for a living is a highly overrated pastime.

I worked for 40 years. Looking back, it was a waste of time. There was rarely a day at work that went by without thinking there are a number of things I'd rather be doing.

[99th_Monkey]

10. There goes socialist Sweden goes again, making US look bad

[lumberjack_jeff]

11. Wages are low because there is too much labor available.

The solution is a 32 hour work week.

[ileus]

12. 6 hours wouldn't hardly be worth going in for.

8 is almost perfect...we get zero ot at my position and that's the way I like it.

Of course you could talk me into 6 hours if there was a bump in pay of about 10 bucks.