Sweden’s latest six-hour work day experiment was a complete failure

After year-long trial at the retirement home Sjjungfrun in Ume, Sweden, it is apparent that the six-hour work day didn’t achieve any of what was hoped for.
Similar to the experiment at the Svartedalen retirement home in Gothenburg, which was also completed this year, nurses at Sjjungfrun in Ume had six-hour days on eight-hour salaries for a year.
Proponents of shorter work days in Sweden, like the sociologist Roland Paulsen of Lund University, argue that the ever increasing productivity of society means that in the long run there wont be enough employment to go around for eight hours per person per day, and a that on average two hours of any person’s work day is filled with unproductive labor anyways.
The Ume experiment was motivated by (political) expectations that reduced working hours would lead to increased personal health and well-being, compensating increased costs – and any productivity losses – by savings on sick leave and health-related expenses in the long-run.
The results leave little hope of any such beneficial effects even in the short-run. Sick leave did not decrease over the year but actually rose, from 8% to 9.3%, reports Sundsvalls Tidning.

This post was published at Business Insider