While Americans cling to their hybrid times to have some flexibility at work, workers in the Netherlands silently abandoned their five -day working week, working on average 32.1 hours in 2024. And the country’s employees have to thank women for this change.
The new standard of work can help keep people in the workforce, as women workers in the US have been massive in the “return to office (RTO) pressures, or the return to the office.
From the pandemic, US workers have been clinging to their remote hours for as long as CEOs try to bring their teams back to the office. Loving the freedom that comes with flexible times, some even defend weeks of four -day work – but for a small European nation, this dream is already reality.
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Workers in the Netherlands between 20 and 64 years worked an average of 32.1 hours a week in 2024, according to Eurostat data. The country has the highest shorter weekly working week in Europe, followed by Austria, Germany and Denmark, all with weeks of work around 34 hours.
In contrast, full -time Americans worked an average of 42.9 hours per week by 2024, according to a Gallup survey – and this is actually an improvement compared to 2019, when US employees worked 44.1 hours a week. And it’s not just the Americans who are in the toil, as more than a third of people employed in the European Union spent between 40 and 45 hours at work weekly last year, according to Eurostat data.
How women helped the Netherlands adopt weeks of work of 32 hours
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There is a main reason why the Dutch silently changed to a four -day work week: women. After they entered the workforce, things were never the same.
As in many other nations around the world, the Netherlands used to operate with a man -centered model of work that placed men as providers. The weeks were longer, more like the traditional 40 -hour American week – but then women started to enter the workforce in mid -period positions from the 1980s.
In the following decades, women’s participation in the workforce has changed the family income structure and the country’s tax codes. The Netherlands adopted a model of “one and a half” performance, where one parent worked in full time and the other in the middle period.
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This trend system has been reinforced with tax benefits and advantages, and the work pattern became common among employees of all genres. Even the parents who work took advantage of the new structure, leaving work early to take care of their young children.
Green weeks of short work can also fight unemployment – and American workers women need it.
Today, the change in politics is not just helping parents employees to reconcile care responsibilities – it is also keeping people in the workforce, while other countries face difficulties with unemployment rates.
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In 1991, precisely when more women began to assume part -time positions in the Netherlands, the country’s unemployment rate was 7.3%, according to World Bank data. Just a decade later, this number dropped dramatically – only 2.1% of the population was unemployed.
Although there have been fluctuations in the following years, the unemployment rate has remained consistently low since 2018, it is currently just 3.6%. Because citizens have more flexible work weeks options, more people can stay in the workforce while reconciling their personal responsibilities.
Comparatively, the US unemployment rate was 4.2% in July, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. But with the American population covering more than 342 million people, compared to 17.8 million citizens of the Netherlands, the 0.6% difference in unemployment rates represents millions and millions of more unemployed Americans.
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And there is a group that may be more at risk of unemployment in the US: women.
Whether by returning to the office, the reduction of promotions, or for changes in the social scenario, women are being pushed out of the mass workforce: between January and June this year, 212,000 women 20 years or older left the American workforce, according to BLS analysis. Meanwhile, 44,000 men entered the workforce in the same period.
In this interval of six months, the employment rate of women between 25 and 44 years old living with a child under five fell from 69.7% to 66.9%.
This article was originally published on Fortune.com
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