For most people, labor law is boring. But when someone suggests working an extra day, people start to pay attention.
In Greece, new regulations that make this possible will come into force on July 1.
From that day, certain industrial and manufacturing companies, as well as companies that provide services around the clock, will be able to switch to a six-day week instead of the traditional five-day week, says Emmanouil Savoidakis, head of the labor law department at Politis & Partners, an Athens-based law firm specializing in commercial law. The tourism and hospitality sectors are exempt from this new regulation.
For those affected, this would mean that the normal legal working week would be 48 hours instead of the current 40 hours. In theory, employees can decide to work more if the company wants them to. Those who work more will also be paid more.
The Greek government says the new rules will simplify administration, shorten the probationary period to six months and regulate overtime.
The law also aims to fill gaps in the skilled labour market by combating undeclared work and offering incentives such as free employee training to “improve workers’ skills and adapt them to changing market demands,” says Savoidakis, who has 15 years of experience as a lawyer. Importantly, “the six-day week is not universal but limited to certain economic sectors.”
Can this be a model for other countries?
Spend more or fewer hours in the office
Greece is struggling with many problems such as low wages, high unemployment and a shrinking population. But the country is not alone. And yet the fact that people are working more is in stark contrast to most of its European neighbors.
Companies in several countries such as Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, Spain and Iceland are experimenting with different work week models. Either the 40-hour week is compressed into four days with more intensive 10-hour days. Or they simply do 100% of the work in only 80% of the time and still pay the full salary.
In Germany, Deutsche Bahn and the train drivers’ union agreed at the beginning of the year to gradually reduce regular weekly working hours from 38 to 35 hours. There are also calls for shorter weekly working hours in other sectors.
Greece recovers from bad times
Greece, however, is taking a different path. And it is not the first time the country has faced a six-day week. During the debt crisis that began in 2009 and nearly threw the country out of the eurozone, some lenders demanded that Greeks work more.
The country accepted bailout packages worth billions of euros, coupled with strict austerity measures, but a sixth working day was not introduced.
Now Greece is back on track, with GDP growth expected to be 2.2% this year and 2.3% next year, above the eurozone average, according to European Commission calculations released in mid-May. Unemployment is expected to fall from a forecast 10.3% this year to 9.7% in 2025.
Nevertheless, many young, well-educated Greeks have left the country over the past decade, seeing better opportunities abroad. The population is expected to shrink from 10.7 million in 2019 to around 10.4 million in 2029, exacerbating existing shortages of skilled workers in some sectors such as agriculture, tourism and construction.
At the same time, according to the OECD, Greeks already work some of the longest hours per year. Even if the OECD figures are sometimes difficult to compare, the trend is clear: Greeks work significantly more than their colleagues in Great Britain, the USA and Germany.
The law should reflect the Greek reality
On the positive side, the minimum monthly wage for employees has been raised to 830 euros ($887) since April 1, up from 650 euros in 2019. The average monthly wage is currently around 1,250 euros, and the Greek prime minister recently announced that he wants to raise that wage to 1,500 euros by 2027.
But these wage increases do not compensate for previous wage cuts and persistently high inflation, which force many citizens to take on two jobs to make ends meet, says Jens Bastian of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. in Berlin.
The new regulations would simply “adapt the legal framework retroactively to the reality that has existed on the Greek labour market for years,” he said. This simply means that many people already work longer than five days.
Working longer and earning more could even lead to “various employees ending up in higher income tax and social security brackets, thereby canceling out potential wage increases through longer working hours,” Bastian told DW.
Structural change instead of longer working hours
In addition, the new regulations give employers a lot of influence. Can job seekers reject the offer and still stick to their current five-day week?
“In negotiations between employer and employee, it can happen that the former demands and the latter refuses to work longer,” says Bastian.
In Greece, there are many working time arrangements without union representation, especially in small and medium-sized companies. “Keeping your job can be a greater incentive than refusing to work longer hours at the employer’s insistence,” says Bastian.
According to Emmanouil Savoidakis of Athens law firm Politis & Partners, several corporate clients are already interested in a six-day week “to increase their operational capacity and better serve their customers, especially in sectors facing labor shortages and high seasonal demand.” He could imagine this being implemented in sectors with fluctuating workloads such as retail, manufacturing and healthcare.
Much of this is only a short-term solution, however. A six-day week cannot solve Greece’s broader economic problems, says Bastian. Longer working hours cannot compensate for staff shortages in the long term, and other countries should take this to heart.
Greece needs to make structural changes that include “incentives such as viable career paths, equal opportunities and higher wages that reflect people’s professional competence,” Bastian said.
“In this respect, Greece still has a long and rocky road ahead of it to catch up with most other European countries. Longer working hours and Saturday work would be like going in the opposite direction,” he concluded.
Edited by: Ashutosh Pandey
