Financial Times - The
Netherlands has the highest rate of part-time working in the OECD. Average working weekly hours for people aged 20 to 64 in their
main job are just 32.1, the shortest in the EU, according to Eurostat.
It has also become increasingly common for full-time workers to compress
their hours into four days rather than spread them over five, says Bert
Colijn, an economist at Dutch bank ING. “The four-day work week has
become very, very common,” he told me. “I do work five days, and
sometimes I get scrutinised for working five days!”
It
all started with women. The Netherlands had a traditional male
breadwinner model until women started to join the labour force in
part-time roles in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, leading to what many
called a “one-and-a-half” earner model. The tax and benefit system
incentivised this arrangement. Over time, as these working patterns
became normalised, working part-time has become more popular with men
too, especially when they have young children.
How
can the experience of the Netherlands inform the debate in other
countries? For a start, it suggests the predictions of economic
self-harm are overdone. In spite of its shorter average working hours
per person, the Netherlands is one of the richest economies in the EU in
terms of GDP per head. That is because shorter working hours are
combined with relatively high productivity per hour, and a high
proportion of people in employment: 82 per cent of working-age people in
the Netherlands were in employment at the end of 2024, according to
OECD data, compared with 75 per cent in the UK, 72 per cent in the US,
and 69 per cent in France.
Women,
in particular, have high employment rates in the Netherlands,
especially compared with countries like the US, where average working
hours are longer. In addition, people in the Netherlands tend to retire
fairly late. It’s not that the population isn’t industrious, then — it’s
rather that the work is spread out more across the population and the
life course.
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