A 35-hour working week for Iceland?
Photo: AFP/William West
Four Icelandic MPs – including three members of Iceland’s up-and-coming Pirate Party – are proposing legal changes to reduce the working week in Iceland to 35 hours.
Under current Icelandic law, the standard working week is forty hours – eight hours of day work, from Monday to Friday.
The parliamentary bill – moved by Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir (Pirates), Björn Leví Gunnarsson (Pirates), Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson (Pirates) and Sigríður Ingibjörg Ingadóttir (Social Democratic Alliance) – proposes reducing this to seven hours a day.
The bill references a recent OECD report on work-life balance which puts Iceland right down in 27th place of the 36 countries analysed. A reduction of the working week to 35 hours would lift Iceland up to tenth place, it is claimed.
The proposal points out that any change to 35 hours would not come in one go. The current forty-hour legislation came into force in 1971, but it was not until 2012 that actual average working time came down to forty hours a week, the four MPs indicate.
“The aim of the legislative amendment is to systematically increase the productivity and quality of life of workers in Iceland. OECD reports have shown that higher productivity does not necessarily go hand in hand with longer working hours,” the text of the proposal reads.
The full text of the parliamentary bill (in Icelandic) can be found here.
