Times change. Once upon a time it was said ''work less to work all''. Today the goal seems to be "work less to work, and live better." For some months now, the ghost of reduced working hours for equal wages has been circulating again in Europe under the guise of 34-hour work week. Under this label are collected several variables that try to respond to different needs. First, the differences concern the way the new timetable is implemented. In some experiences it is only a question of a redistribution of normal working hours on 4 days instead of 5 (longer day in exchange for a shorter week).
It seems that the final outcome is a longer weekend and that the greatest employment, thus, is achieved in tourism and related services. Thus, the relief of congestion in cities would correspond to greater traffic on the motorways. This would be a form of time reduction somewhat primitive and not generalizable where continuous loops are in operation. It would rather be said to be a measure in favor of administrative staff, which is growing, but does not run the automatic machines in the factories. More than a response to the goal of full employment (which in Europe is increasingly a problem concerning the job offer) it seems to be part of the new attitude that workers show towards value/work after the pandemic, the use of the smart working and so on. In essence we are in the field of a narrative that has traveled the world, immediately after the peak of the health emergency with the related limitations on the most basic personal freedoms.
The "fashion" of voluntary resignations has also infected Italy
Of this narrative the various episodes were, first, the Great Designation, where we wanted to glimpse the presence of a lifestyle choice (the return of the ''hippies'') rather than the imbalances in the labor market produced by the effects of the pandemic and the methods that have made it possible to continue in one's business through the appeal to smart working. Here, it was certainly a reaction to a blockage of personnel (through the suspension of layoffs for about 500 days) which had compressed the labor market like a spring that snapped all at once when it was freed from the unnatural compression imposed on the normal daily life of a company. The analysis of the data was then responsible for denying these suggestive interpretations and highlighted that those who resigned the resignation (to a much greater extent than terminations due to withdrawal by the employer) in reality they promised to sell their professionalism better, in a context of crisis than an adequate offer.
Reducing working hours for equal pay
But why strive to observe reality when it is more rewarding to imagine one closer to our expectations? By now it is said openly especially by those young people who complain about a difficult relationship with work. ''Life cannot be marked only by work'' say the workers and clerks, while the students go to the inauguration of the academic years to claim an identity that does not end with the exam sessions and with the competitiveness frenzy that sometimes it drives them to suicide. As always happens with fashions, there is always someone trying to recycle old models, such as the generalized reduction of working hours for equal wages.
Even a trade unionist among the most radical like the leader of the CGIL, Maurizio Landini, realizes that a time reduction so important, it cannot take place at the expense of productivity and plant saturation (including the depreciation of investments in new technologies): «Faced with the technological revolution, which leads to an increase in profits and productivity, we must practice – said Landini – the redistribution of wealth and how it is accumulated, also through the reduction of working hours». And how? «By negotiating – the trade unionist admitted – organizational models on four working days a week and for companies the possibility of using the plants up to six days a week. All this, providing for the right to training and updating for the entire working life». Basically, there can and must be a dissociation between the actual hours of the workers and that of the productive activity of the plant, through the work in multiple shifts, with a scheduling aimed at taking into account peaks and declines, not only in productions of a seasonal nature, but also in the case of transient production peaks linked to particular orders, where it is not considered necessary to resort to temporary contracts, fixed-term hiring or more trivially to overtime work (albeit within daily, weekly and annual ceilings). The seat of this exchange lies in the decentralized and proximity bargaining, which it also enjoys tax benefits improved in the budget law.
Hourly reduction of the working week: the case of metalworkers
when the metalworkers forcefully posed the question of reducing the weekly working time by 40 hours per week 1969 contract normally over five working days, the legal timetable was still 48 hours, but the contractual one varied in the various sectors: from 42 hours in the car up to 44 hours in shipbuilding. The contract stipulated that all sectors should arrive at 40 hours by the deadline, even if the last tranche in shipbuilding started in the Cesarini area. However, a new type of timetable was created which was called ''supplementary'', while overtime – this was the mediation – started after 48 hours. Since then, the working hours policy has undergone further reductions in collective bargaining, through a greater possibility of a flexible use of the workforce which has helped to remove the temptation to blindly adopt fashions from abroad.
Short week: the myth of the 35 hours
This is the case, for example, of the 35 hours per week established in French, at the time of the presidency of the socialist Lionel Jospin, by two laws in 1998 and 2000, to definitively enter into force two years later. As regards the effects of this measure – modified by Emmanuel Macron during his first mandate – on the economy as a whole, a divisive debate has been going on for years regarding both the creation of jobs and increases in the cost of work and its consequences on employment. In practice, the drastic reduction in working hours where it was applied ended up transforming the hours worked beyond 35 per week into overtime increase vacation days but not to actually reduce working hours. No other OECD country has implemented a policy of generalized short-time working. Also in Italy the myth of the 35 hours had a moment of glory, to the point of sinking the first Prodi government on the initiative of Fausto Bertinotti's PRC. Then, with us, the working time regulation was innovated by the law n. 66 of 2003 in which, without calling into question the classic 40 hours, collective agreements are allowed to establish, for contractual purposes, a shorter duration and refer the normal working hours to the average duration of work performance in a period not exceeding one year (so-called multi-period timetable).
Short week or long weekend? It doesn't apply to everyone
It is advisable to take into account these gradual paths capable of mediating between the needs of production and those of work. Without feeling ready to storm the Winter Palace. Just evaluate what is happening in other countries (in Iceland e UK and more recently in Spain, Scotland, New Zealand e Portugal) – who have experienced the 4-day working week – to realize that – despite the howls of satisfaction – we are dealing with niche cases (with a limited number of interested workers), destined to remain such for a long time to come in an attempt to find a strategy that can reconcile work and employment with the technological transformations underway and to be announced.
Precisely because the large collective subjects have not yet realized how to deal with the effects of the introduction of new technologies, they attach themselves to all the possible solutions that appear on the horizon, risking mistaking cough syrups for life-saving drugs. In Italy, companies that have already experimented with shortening the working week are reporting positive results and even some very large companies are launching trials. Among the latter we find for example Understanding St. Paul which since January has voluntarily proposed a new work organization model, with the possibility of working 4 days a week instead of 5, but increasing the daily hours to 9. In essence: short week, long weekend.
