The 4-day week in Iceland
Forget Valencia or Scotland or Microsoft Japan. The future of work is being invented in the world's capital of geothermal energy. Also: a podcast, and a secret project!
Obviously it’s been a while since I wrote anything here, but as my last installment suggested, there’s been plenty of family stuff going on. It’s a reminder that we should think about work-life balance, and measure our work and productivity, in years not days. But I’m back, more or less.
Iceland and the 4-day week
I’ve started talking to folks in Iceland who’ve been involved in moving the country’s public sector workers to a 4-day week. I’d done a little research about them for Shorter, but that book was mainly about companies not governments, and at the time (late 2019), there had been some large-scale trials in “the city” (Reykjavik)*" and municipalities (everywhere else) from 2015 to 2018, and one or two companies that had implemented a shorter workweek.
Since then, though, some amazing stuff has happened.
In early 2020, the biggest public sector union, BSRB, negotiated a contract for government workers that moved all public employees to a 4-day week, in exchange for higher productivity (so no net decrease in services), and some other tradeoffs. They implemented this for office workers this January, and in May started phasing it in for shift workers as well. (As I understand it, shift workers have been covered by different contracts, because of rules around night work, overtime, etc., and because they include services and jobs where you might have emergencies and unpredictable, long hours.)
This means that about 15% of the Icelandic workforce is now working a 4-day week, or some equivalent reduction in working hours. Office workers, police, nurses, nursing home attendants, customs agents— all of them.
For BSRB, winning a 4-day week has been a huge thing, and they see it as both part of a long historical effort by unions to shorten working hours, and a continuation of efforts to improve gender equity in the workplace. I’ve also learned that the smaller-scale city experiments of a few years ago were consciously designed in order to test the viability of a shorter workweek for everyone. And the process they went through to prepare for the 4-day week was a lot more rigorous than what companies go through. It’s one thing when a 10-person company moves to a shorter workweek; it’s another when you have agreements covering everything from overtime rules to pension contributions, and you have hundreds of people who are working part-time who could potentially become full-time employees.
Valencia has gotten a huge amount of attention for just talking about how they’re going to trial a shorter week. Microsoft Japan generated a ridiculous amount of publicity for a simple, month-long trial. But the world’s biggest trial of shorter working hours is happening right now, and almost no one knows about it.
*People in Iceland talk about Reykjavik as “the city,” the way that people talk about New York City as “the city,” even though Reykjavik has a population of about 122,000, and is the size of Berkeley or Abilene or Elizabeth, NJ.
A new secret project!
A new campaign to spread the 4-day week in the United States will be launching later this month. It’ll be a 3-pronged campaign, including a petition drive, a pledge for companies to take to trial a 4-day week in 2022 (signing up will unlock some resources to support those trials), and some policy stuff. The team is genuinely awesome, has huge ambitions (they’re veterans of Kickstarter and other places where you think about users in the millions), and I’m having a great time supporting it.
You can sign up here to get notified when it goes live.
Also, some links
Business coach and online marketing genius Amy Porterfield has a great podcast episode about the 4-day week trial at her eponymous company. She talks about the motivation behind the trial, how she sold it internally, and how they designed it.
I write about Richard Nixon’s 1956 4-day week prediction. I’d discovered last year that Nixon had given a speech during the 1956 presidential campaign in which he talked about the 4-day week, and this week I finally got in touch with the Nixon Library and asked for a copy of the speech. It’s a brief mention, but still very interesting to see how someone as conservative and pro-business as Nixon and 1950s Republicans thought about working hours.