Linas Jegelevičius
Almost a hundred years ago, Henry Ford, the legendary American carmaker, saw the benefits of reducing his workers’ work week from 48 to 40 hours, but, with the year of 2024 out there, only 8% of Lithuanian employers support a four-day workweek, according to a survey of employers conducted by the Employment Service.
“Discussions about the four-day work week are not only fuelled by technological progress. After the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, most people have rethought the importance of work-life balance, their career path, and the place of commitment to the employer in their lives. However, such an innovation does not seem attractive to employers yet,” Inga Balnanosienė, director of the Employment Service, said in a press release.
Of four sources that BNN spoke for the article, only one, Vilma Vaitiekunaitė, CEO of Skyllence, a startup air charter broker and a family member of Avia Solutions Group (ASG), one of the largest and fastest growing end-to-end capacity solutions’ providers for passenger and cargo airlines worldwide, admitted that she, as head of the ASG Communication Department, had been in four-day workweek mode, and, as the Skyllence CEO now, allows her workers to juggle with their work schedules.
“The flexibility we have helps us single out ourselves. I noticed that, nowadays, many young people prefer employers who can offer a four-day workweek,” V. Vaitiekunaitė told BNN.
In the survey, more than half (54%) of employers said they did not support
the idea of a shorter working week. Most of them are in the transport and storage, accommodation and catering services, construction, and agriculture sectors.
So far, the idea resonates poorly with many job givers, especially in the provinces.
“We did not have an official discussion on this yet, but I assume that, if it took place someday, the majority of local businessmen would be concerned about lower productivity and higher labour costs, as a result.” Marius Jucikas, chairman of the Tauragė County Business Association (TAVA), told BNN.
He added: “However, the change will come sooner or later. If we were to look back at history, we’d see that, just a hundred years ago, even little children had to work, which, from today’s perspective, looks unimaginable.”
Vera Mileikienė, manager at the Business Community Department of Kaunas Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Crafts, told BNN she is not supporting the four-day workweek initiative.
“At the moment, our economy is not so strong to implement it.
Just the defence goals we have require immense resources,” she accentuated.
Meanwhile, Jolanta Girdvainė, director of the administration of the Klaipeda Industrialists Association, told BNN that local employers have never been surveyed on the topic yet, however, referring to the association-organized annual rewarding of responsible companies, she said she “evidently” noticed that many of the rewarded firms provide very flexible work schedules, both remote and in office and,
some of them, already offer a four-day working week.
“I think it is just a matter of time when companies will switch to a four-day workweek,” J. Girdvainė is convinced.
Fow now, V. Vaitiekunaitė, the CEO of Skyllence, is certainly the North Star.
“Being flexible and providing a four-day working week, gives us a competitive edge when it comes to hiring ambitious talented young people. I am definitely for it,” she emphasised.
But some other big business names, like Elena Leontjeva, president of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, believes that the topic of a shorter workweek has already poisoned work culture.
“The new idea is mostly supported by young people
(even two out of three young people) and, interestingly, the unemployed. Until now, young people have been educated with the hope of finding their dream profession, dream company, dream job. A popular roadmap was the idea that a hobby could turn into a job and then “you’d never have to work.” Expecting to work four days a week changes the trajectory of professional goals. It turns our dreams in one direction – to find a job where we need to work less, or to demand such a right from politicians. The utopia of a short week is becoming popular at a time when Lithuania needs to recover the reserves of economic productivity and foster a work culture that would be conducive to increasing that productivity. After all, while wages grew by hundreds of percent, productivity grew by only tens of percent,” she told delfi.lt recently.
Disagreeing, Tomas Tomilinas, Member of the Lithuanian Parliament Seimas’ Union of Democrats “For Lithuania”, said in his commentary, also for delfi.lt that his proposal is not simply a shorter working week, but
“meaningfully reduced working hours”, where the fifth day is dedicated to learning and development.
“It would be ideal to adopt the Lifelong Learning Directive of the European Union (EU), which would ensure that at least one day a week every working or self-employed person has the right for qualification or social competence improvement courses paid either by the employer or the state,” the MP argues.
In the Employment Service survey,
employers who are not in favour of a shorter workweek see more disadvantages than advantages
of such work organization. A larger part of them believes that shortening the working week would make it more difficult to organize work (60% of employers agree with this statement), and a four-day workweek is not suitable for their activities (77%). Such employers do not agree that a shorter workweek leads to higher productivity or helps to reduce operating costs (every second employer disagrees with such possible benefits of a shorter work week).
According to the survey, the largest number of employers who believe that a shorter working week would make it easier to attract talent are in the finance and insurance, electricity and gas supply, public administration, and scientific and technical sectors.
I. Balnanosienė, head of the Employment Service, believes that the topic of a shorter workweek has entered the stage of active experiments, and
the change is perhaps inevitable.
“The four-day working week in the United Kingdom is the best-known initiative so far, after which 86 % of employers considered the possibility of applying this model in practice. In Lithuania, we are talking about isolated experiments for now, but we are watching the stage of discussions becoming more active,” she said.
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