It’s Too Expensive to Shorten Work Hours

According to one Swedish study.

Long-term Billfolders might remember a story we shared in 2015:

Swedish Company Drops Workdays By 25 Percent, Profits Rise 25 Percent

The Guardian states that this is “the first controlled trial of shorter hours since a rightward political shift in Sweden a decade ago snuffed out earlier efforts to explore alternatives to the traditional working week.” It also notes that a Swedish Toyota service center that independently switched to a six-hour work day back in 2002 has since seen profits rise 25 percent. It’s interesting how the two numbers match; cut the workday by 25 percent, see profits rise by 25 percent.

So the Toyota service center, in this situation, saw profits rise. (It’s worth reiterating that the Toyota center was operating independently of the controlled trial.) Another company, the Svartedalens care home for the elderly, found that shorter work hours were too expensive to maintain long-term, due to the cost of hiring additional nurses and staff.

Here’s a two-years-later update:

Swedish Six-Hour Workday Trial Runs Into Trouble: Too Expensive

To cover the reduced hours for the 68 nurses at the home it had to hire 17 extra staff at a cost of about 12 million kronor ($1.3 million).

“It’s associated with higher costs, absolutely,” said Daniel Bernmar, a local left-wing politician responsible for running the municipality’s elderly care. “It’s far too expensive to carry out a general shortening of working hours within a reasonable time frame.”

If you read the full article—and you should—you’ll learn that both the staff and the patients experienced a higher quality of life during the experiment, and yet the costs are still “too expensive.”

Is there any way out of this? Is a manageable workload and a better life—plus seventeen new jobs—impossible? Is there a solution that would make so many things better, that’s this close, and we’re ignoring it because it would cost too much money?

Or do we have to work long hours and accept the job (and healthcare) we have because otherwise the care center wouldn’t have enough money to keep running? Is it better to take what we’ve got and keep it for as long as we can, because nobody wants to find a new job (or a new healthcare provider) and they’re all going to be the same in the end?

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