A church in Anafiotika neighborhood, part of the previous historic neighborhood known as Plaka, in Athens, Greece on March sixteenth, 2024.
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Greece has controversially launched a six-day working week for some companies in a bid to spice up productiveness and employment within the southern European nation.
The regulation, which got here into pressure on July 1, bucks a world development of corporations exploring a shorter working week.
Below the brand new laws, which was handed as a part of a broader set of labor legal guidelines final yr, staff of personal companies that present round the clock providers will reportedly have the choice of working a further two hours per day or an additional eight-hour shift.
The change means a standard 40-hour workweek may very well be prolonged to 48 hours per week for some companies. Meals service and tourism employees will not be included within the six-day working week initiative.
The professional-business authorities of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has mentioned the measure is each “worker-friendly” and “deeply growth-orientated.” It’s designed to help staff not being sufficiently compensated for additional time work and to assist crack down on the issue of undeclared labor.
Labor unions and political observers have sharply criticized the transfer.
A spokesperson for Greece’s embassy in London was not instantly obtainable to remark when contacted by CNBC.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis Prime Minister of Greece talks with media throughout European Council Assembly on June 27, 2024 in Brussels, Belgium.
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Giorgos Katsambekis, a lecturer in European and worldwide politics on the U.Okay.’s Loughborough College, described the Greek authorities’s introduction of the labor legislation as “a significant step again” for a workforce that’s already working the longest hours within the European Union.
Employees in Greece work greater than these within the U.S., Japan and others within the 27-member EU, in response to information from the Group for Financial Cooperation and Improvement.
Greek staff had been discovered to have labored a median of 1,886 hours in 2022, greater than the U.S. common of 1,811 and the EU common of 1,571.
“Greek individuals already work the longest hours per week in Europe. Now they might be compelled to work a sixth day, after this Greek [government] determination,” John O’Brennan, professor of EU Regulation from Maynooth College, Eire, mentioned through social media platform X on Monday.
“It’s ridiculous, set in opposition to the transfer to 4 day weeks in most civilised nations,” he added.
A report revealed by assume tank Autonomy earlier this yr discovered that almost all corporations concerned on this planet’s largest trial of a four-day working week had made the coverage everlasting.
All of the consulted mission managers and CEOs of the businesses concerned within the trial mentioned a four-day working week had a optimistic impression on their group, with greater than half describing the impression as “very optimistic.”
The report discovered, nevertheless, that employees — in companies the place the extra time without work was solely weakly assured, or supplied on the situation of assembly sure targets — had some issues.
