I like to walk around old cemeteries and read the headstones. Here in Iceland, it has been customary to engrave people’s job titles below their names and as I age I find myself wondering if mine will say “Teacher”. Although I love my work, I kind of hope it will not.
Through the centuries, women’s headstones have rarely had titles other than “Housewife” or perhaps “Wife of [insert husband’s job title]”. Although today women in Iceland have all sorts of jobs, we have yet to reach full equality. But an important step on that journey has been the shortening of the 40-hour working week to 36 hours.
This change started in 2019 in response to campaigning by some of our biggest unions and following the success of trials that involved more than 1% of Iceland’s working population. As a result, close on 90% of the country’s working population now work shorter hours or have the right to shorten their working week.
Other countries are considering following Iceland’s lead. Germany, Portugal, Spain and the UK have run, or are running, pilot projects. And a year ago, Belgium became the first EU country to legislate a four-day week for anyone who wants it. However, unlike our Icelandic model, anyone signing up to work four days in Belgium has to condense the same number of working hours into fewer days. Maybe that’s why fewer than 1% of people have done so.
So how has it worked here? It had previously been more common for women in Iceland to work part-time so as to be able to juggle family and work commitments. Since 2019, this has meant a step towards greater equality because our shorter working week has also made it possible for people (mostly women) who worked 36 hours as a part-time job to have a full-time job working the same hours. And full-time jobs come with better pay and terms and conditions for working the same hours as before.
The change has also given many men who were always stuck at work the flexibility to be more involved with their children’s daily lives.
Tumi, my husband, works in a government office. At first, he chose to work until noon every Friday but soon decided instead to have two full Fridays off each month. On his free days, he loves to sleep in, then to make long phone calls to his fellow pigeon fanciers while cleaning the kitchen, before going to the shops in search of interesting books. Moreover, he is home in time to pick up our son from school at 13.40. Since I collect our son the other days, this gives me the freedom every other Friday afternoon to meet friends for a chat, volunteer, or simply to go to the swimming pool alone, which is an absolute gamechanger for a tired teacher who wants to escape burnout.
Most of us know that demob happy feeling the day before we take time off to go on holiday. There is a lightness and a sense of freedom. My husband enjoys that feeling twice a month now and I don’t have to remember which week it is, because on Thursday afternoons I can see it on his face.
Being a secondary school teacher, this change does not technically apply to me since my job is still deemed to be 40 hours a week. However, only 26 hours a week are spent actually teaching in a classroom. The rest of the time is taken up with meetings, marking and preparing lessons. We have the freedom to organise those non-teaching hours ourselves, so that means that by working a bit longer some days, I am able to take off the Friday afternoons my husband is off too.
Administrators, caretakers, cleaners and kitchen staff at my school belong to other unions and now work a shorter week, and we have changed our schedule so that there are fewer afternoon classes on Friday. The staff are happy and the students have not complained.
Different companies and institutions have different needs and obviously not everyone can close the shop at noon once a week. Some staff have cut their coffee breaks and lunches, and people have had to rethink how work is planned, which meetings could be shorter, which can be online or which decisions can be taken by email instead.
Of course, there are always people who want to go back to the way things were before and we have yet to fix all the problems, such as the stress some people experience if they leave the office early but their work keeps piling up.
It has definitely not been simple, and it does not apply to all jobs, but all qualitative and quantitative data indicates that most people who have reduced their hours love it – job satisfaction has increased, stress is reduced and employees feel happier at work.
And contrary to fears that productivity and the provision of services would suffer, nothing could be further from the truth. Extensive research has shown that they have remained the same or even improved, sometimes just by removing longer coffee breaks or prioritising work better.
My friend Bára works in a big car dealership. She explained to me how staff got together to figure out how to implement a shorter work week without affecting their customers. Office workers can now choose to finish earlier every day, have a half-day off each week, or a whole day off every two weeks, while the mechanics changed their shift patterns but fix just as many cars on time. Bára tells me that the staff are happy with the changes and none of them, bosses included, would ever go back to the way it was before.
And we aren’t spending our extra free hours going to the doctor or attending meetings at our children’s schools. In Iceland, we have always had the right to do these things without having our pay docked. None of that has changed.
Instead, we are using these precious hours for exercise, haircuts, shopping and meeting friends without the feeling that we are missing out on quality family time.
An added bonus for those of us living in Reykjavík is the reduction in the usual Friday rush-hour traffic, which makes getting around the city so much easier and more pleasant.
Changes such as this to the way we work may sound impossible but they can be made if people come together and rethink the way work is done. I am a full-time teacher but yet I am also a mother, wife, daughter, sister and friend, and having a few extra hours every other week when my husband is freed up to do the childcare allows me to better fulfil all these roles. I’m also just this woman who likes to walk around in cemeteries and ponder on the meaning of life. And I can do more of that, too.
María Hjálmtýsdóttir is an activist and a teacher at a secondary school in Kópavogur, Iceland
