Greece has adopted a voluntary six-day workweek for businesses that offer round-the-clock services. “Voluntary” applies, of course, to the business, not the worker. That means bosses can force workers to come in for a sixth day, at a cost. Employers will get a 40 percent wage premium, which is to say, overtime. Except, of course, this is not extra pay for optional work performed outside normal work hours.
The origins of the law are predictable: a right-wing, market-fundamentalist government, an aging population, state anxiety about its capacity to produce enough workers to support the aging population and sustain the economy, and the lingering effects of long-term financial crises.
Globally, there’s a push to move to a four-day workweek. Shorter weeks have been proven to boost worker health, well-being, satisfaction, and, as it happens, productivity. They lead to less stress, anxiety, and burnout. They even lower pollution. While some countries, like the United States and South Korea, are flirting with a six-day workweek for some employees, the trend is moving toward four days or maintaining the status quo five-day week.
The Greek move to a six-day workweek takes a bit of the wind out of the sails of the global four-day workweek campaign. The austerity crew and market fundamentalists will use this as a precedent to argue that other countries should follow suit, claiming that the problems the Greeks face aren’t unique. After all, aging populations are a common challenge worldwide.
The very idea of the extended workweek is an insult to the long-fought struggle for humane working conditions. In the nineteenth century, the Ten-Hour Movement aimed to cut down working hours for minors under sixteen, which came ahead of the Factory Act, which so graciously limited the workday to a dozen hours for workers under eighteen — which is to say, adolescents. It also set an upper limit for the workweek for children between nine and thirteen years old at forty-eight hours — a six-day workweek, which puts Greece’s move in macabre historical context.
The Greek experiment will fail, dragging workers down with it in the process. Any country attempting to replicate it will also fail. The Greek case should be taken as a warning, not an example or template.
Writing in the Conversation, economics professor Constantin Colonescu criticizes the six-day workweek on productivity grounds — which is to say on its own terms. Colonescu argues we ought to “define productivity as output produced per hour,” rather than hours worked, which is not how Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis measures it.
As any economist worth their salt will tell you, burned out employees will become less productive. Over time, ratcheting up hours worked will lead to tired, broken-down workers, higher health care costs, and productivity losses. This is why a four-day workweek may be, perhaps counterintuitively, more productive than the six-day workweek. Plus it has the benefit of not frog-marching labor into one week of hell after the next.
Greece faces acute economic challenges, which have opened the door for exploitative measures like a forced six-day workweek. As brutal as the policy is, Greece’s economic challenges, lack of control over its own monetary policy as a European Union (EU) member, and pressure from larger EU states mean that it has no choice but to do something to support an aging population and keep the economy afloat.
Colonescu concedes that the six-day workweek may be “a solution in the short term,” but the government ought to make it clear if that’s the plan. The government, meanwhile, describes it as an “exceptional measure” that only applies in “specific circ*mstances.” Colonescu argues the country needs a “sustainable system,” which won’t come from a six-day workweek. Indeed, what’s more likely to happen is that bosses will push for an extension of the program, ensuring it stays permanent and applies to further industries.
Greek labor and social security minister Niki Kerameus told CNBC that the new law doesn’t create a mandatory six-day work week. “All it does is provide only in limited circ*mstances for the option of an additional working day, as an exceptional measure,” she says, noting “the additional working day option is permissible only in the case of an increased workload.”
The reality on the ground is unlikely to match Kerameus’s confidence in the law’s protections. Bosses will pressure and abuse workers, burning them out, and industry will ensure it gets more than its pound of flesh. Workers are in a position of weakness compared to their employer, unable to push back against abuse and exploitation, which is why the letter of the law isn’t enough to protect them against the reality of power relations between boss and worker.
As Yanis Varoufakis has argued, it was European elites who helped get Greece into its current mess, calling the Greek bailout “fiscal waterboarding.” The EU’s monetary orthodoxy is now being met with a right-wing plan to exploit workers, a plan that will betray any promises of worker protection or benefit in the long run, leading to less productivity and unhappier, unhealthier workers. The six-day workweek threatens to expand beyond its initial scope and may influence proponents of economic austerity and worker abuse to pursue the same policy beyond Greece. It’s a shambles.
Whatever the long-term solution for Greece’s structural economic challenges may be, it won’t feature an extended workweek. Workers in other nations should take this as a lesson and preemptively refuse to follow suit. Now is the time to double down on shortening the workweek and securing a safer, healthier, more productive, and more pro-labor work culture.
