"While the last two decades of the 20th century were characterized by a movement to reduce working hours in many European countries, primarily with the aim of "job sharing," the first decade of the 2000s saw an intensification of the process of flexibilization of working time, along with a trend towards increasing working hours. These changes have gradually led to making the issue of well-being and the balance between professional and personal life a key concern of working time policies, in the context of the growing affirmation of women's work. This context has restored legitimacy to working time reduction policies, which have seen a resurgence since the mid-2010s. Experiments in reducing working hours have multiplied since 2015 in several countries and in different ways. The 30-hour week with a daily duration of 6 hours per day over 5 days (referred to as the 6/30 model hereafter) has been experimented with, primarily in the healthcare sector, in Sweden. The case of the Sverteladen retirement home in Gothenburg has received particular media attention. Meanwhile, the city of Reykjavik and several entities of the central Icelandic government have experimented with various formulas for reducing working hours, the positive effects of which have prompted social partners to conclude agreements on reducing working hours covering almost the entire active population of the country. If the four-day workweek with reduced working hours (hereinafter referred to as the 4/32 model) has been the subject of experiments since 2018 with emblematic cases such as Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand, and sometimes very short-lived ones like Microsoft in Japan, it is mainly after the various lockdown periods caused by the Covid-19 pandemic that this model has been the subject of several pilot projects and has been included in the political agenda of several governments."

Support: Digital