Stockholm, Sweden
Sweden has been experimenting with six-hour workdays, and the results have been costly. The latest gambit saw the city of Gothenburg cut working hours while maintaining pay levels for nurses at the Svartedalen retirement home.
After two years of the experiment, the city does not plan to make the measure permanent or expand it to other facilities, according to Bloomberg. It’s because Gothenburg bled money. To cover the reduced hours for the 68 nurses at the home, it had to hire 17 additional staff at a price of about 12 million kronor, or $1.3 million.
In short,the city discovered, very expensively, that when people work less, they produce less.
Nima Sanandaji, an author and researcher who lives in Sweden, is no fan of the six-hour workday in his country.
“A general reduction of working hours is one of the most damaging economic policies one can think of,” said Sanandaji, president of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform and author of “Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism.”
He acknowledged the common argument from advocates of shorter working hours: Employees will become more productive during the hours they do work. But he pointed to a study done by the Swedish government that found a six-hour workday would not make much economic sense for the country.
“The government report says that the assumption should be that a reduction of working time will lead to a proportional reduction in economic production,” Sanandaji said. “This means cutting the working day from eight to six hours would thus lead Sweden to lose a quarter of its GDP.
“Sweden certainly cannot afford this. The country’s finances are already strained with the cost of assimilating a large influx of recent refugees. The police, the health care services, the housing sector and the infrastructure of the country are all in need of more resources. Additionally, while the threat of Russia increases, it is widely known that the Swedish military has so limited resources that it cannot defend the country for more than perhaps a week.”
The effects of the six-hour workday experiment at Svartedalen were not all negative.
Nurses at the home reported feeling healthier, which reduced sick leave, and their quality of patient care improved, according to Bloomberg. Moreover, the added hiring by Gothenburg helped the federal government reduce unemployment costs by 4.7 million kronor during the first 18 months of the trial.
But those 4.7 million kronor were dwarfed by the 12 million kronor Gothenburg had to pay for additional manpower to cover all the necessary shifts. Bloomberg reported the city would likely need help from the federal government to cover that cost, which illustrates why the six-hour workday has not yet been implemented on a large scale in Sweden.
Sanandaji said the opportunity cost is just as big of a problem as the actual cost when it comes to this plan.
“Municipal politicians in Sweden decide to hire more workers in an elderly home, so that the same job can be carried out, at a higher cost to taxpayers, with fewer hours per worker,’ he explained. “Socialists applaud this. But what they don’t seem to realize is the municipality could have hired more people, asked them to work the same hours as before, and thus given more service to the elderly. Wouldn’t this be better, even from a socialist perspective?”
Sweden is not the only place that has experimented with shorter working hours. France adopted a 35-hour work week in 2000 with the goal of reducing unemployment by forcing businesses to hire more workers. However, it did not reduce unemployment over the long run, and French President Francois Hollande unilaterally scrapped it last May.
William Murray, chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, has studied various utopian societies throughout history, as he showcases in his book “Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning.” He told WND the Soviet Union was the only nation that institutionalized the concept of hours worked per day in its constitution. The USSR’s 1936 constitution stated citizens had the “right to rest and leisure,” which was to be ensured by the reduction of the workday to seven hours for the vast majority of workers.
“It took decades, but even the communists realized there were times when someone may need to stay past seven hours to complete a task,” Murray explained. “A newer constitution in 1977 enshrined 41 hours per week total in Article 41: ‘Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure. This right is ensured by the establishment of a working week not exceeding 41 hours, for workers and other employees, a shorter working day in a number of trades and industries, and shorter hours for night work.’”
However, the number of hours an individual was allowed to work in the Soviet Union had no relation to reality, according to Murray. Everyone worked for the government or a government enterprise, and most people other than upper management worked less than the limit.
“Most spent half their day in lines trying to buy bread,” Murray noted. “Shorter hours did not allow the more aggressive and productive to excel, which kept Soviet industry decades behind the West.”
So the Soviet Union was not worthy of emulation on this issue, and neither is Sweden, according to Sanandaji. The Swedish researcher finds it highly ironic that so many people around the world are looking to Sweden as a role model in reducing working hours.
“I think it is almost funny how people are already doing so, not realizing that overall Swedes have increased their hours of work,” Sanandaji revealed. “This has occurred due to reductions of taxes and of welfare benefits, which have increased the incentives to work. What keeps the Swedish economy afloat is that people are working more than before. The work hour reductions are small public experiments, which, by the way, are not giving bang for the buck.”
In “Debunking Utopia,” Sanandaji writes about the Nordic culture of hard work, which he credits with making the Nordic countries successful. He pointed out Sweden’s six-hour workday experiment is not in line with that culture, but with the culture that threatens to supplant it.
“It certainly is in line with the welfare-state attitudes which over generations have weakened the phenomenal culture of work and responsibility which underlines the Nordic success story,” Sanandaji concluded.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/duh-moment-people-produce-less-when-they-work-less/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2017/01/14/duh-moment-people-produce-less-when-they-work-less/
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