In quite a few countries the 32 hour workweek is already very normal, it creates a bit of extra scheduling work but nothing you can't handle in a larger organization. For smaller companies this is a bigger problem because they don't usually have the headcount to fill the resulting gaps and things tend to rely more on personal relationships.
But you won't be paid 100% for 40 hours, you will be paid 100% for 32 hours. And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours.
By the way, it is common to be paid far less for 40 hours than you should receive as well, and plenty of people work unpaid overtime who would be happy just to work the 40 hours they get paid for.
Salary negotiations are always tricky, especially if you don't know your true market value. Given the difference between compensation at different companies one way you could attack this problem is to find a company that will match your current salary but at a reduced number of hours. Employees have the same problem that companies have: it is hard to charge by value if you don't know your value.
As a gardener my work is worth less than as a computer programmer than as a financial advisor. Because each of those domains values time entirely differently, and because there are different levels of competition.
If you can show your boss that if you work less that your productivity will likely remain the same or that it will go up they will probably wonder why they've been paying you for all that extra time in the past... so instead I would just argue to try moving to a different company at a better salary for the same amount of work or for the same salary with less work.
That's not what the trial is; workers will be paid 100% of their salary for 80% of their usual time. That's what makes it different from a 'flexible hours' pilot.
Overtime is extremely uncommon even in Europe and has to be agreed upon in contract, and even then most employers just provide extra time off instead of money for full-time workers.
Yes, but eventually that will normalize to a raise if the trial is made permanent, the reason they structure it like that is if they revert that the employees won't see it as a pay cut.
Which is fine. The goal of the trial is to reward employees for increased productivity (historical trends tell an impressive story) by offering them the opportunity to keep their existing salaries by working (and therefore stressing themselves) less.
Sure, high performers should be rewarded using subjective metrics, which is already the case for blue collar workers. This trial gives people the opportunity to not be penalized for working less, which is the case with all the existing flexible hour arrangements. If successful, I have no doubt that this would lead to a longer term bigger change in what counts as full-time employment when it comes to taxation, immigration, and retirement.
It's already a success elsewhere, I really don't see the point of a trial, they should just do it. In NL I don't know all that many people that still have regular 40 hour work weeks, the vast majority are 32, 28, 24 or even 20 hour workweeks, which incidentally helps a lot with leveling the pay gap between men and women.
You interview for a job -- the offer is €X @ 40hrs/wk; you tell the HR that you'd like to only work for 80% of the time since you have childcare responsibilities. HR either writes back that the job requires you to work 40hrs or they revise their offer to €0.8X.
When 80% is the new 100%
You interview, get an offer for €X @ 32hrs/wk; you tell HR that you'd like to work extra since you're really passionate. HR either writes back that you could take extra time off or they revise their offer to €X + conditional bonus of €Y.
Like you said, working more doesn't mean more productivity, and so if a company is paying more just for you sitting in front of your computer more, we're not talking about the same jobs.
And if all of this normalizes, sure, salaries would be rebased, but the negotiation changes, as described above.
>> And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours.
This is not how it works currently. You get paid your salary and are expected to do a minimum number of hours + any more reasonably required. You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see why you would if they reduced the hours required.
> You get paid your salary and are expected to do a minimum number of hours + any more reasonably required.
This is a geographically limited factoid, and even then lots of companies do pay overtime. But in those cases where they do not: I always wonder how those companies would respond if I treated them the way they treat their employees.
> You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see why you would if they reduced the hours required.
UK tech companies can and do pay for overtime, just not all of them and the ones that don't would like to have that discussion squelched as much as possible.
Talking about a 'four day work week' is meaningless if you at the same time claim that you have to work more than those four days per week to satisfy your employment contract, it just turns one vague thing into an even vaguer thing.
It's up to the employer to decide for how long they contract someone, whether they are more or less efficient is something that is their problem, not the employees' problem, they are reserved for more time so they should get paid more. Lots of jobs are paid by the hour, and that is the sort of job that I believe we were discussing.
The variables then are: your hourly rate, how many hours you are contracted for. I've never seen 'efficiency' in a labor contract as a metric, though, performance reviews may indicate that compared to your peergroup you are not performing well. In the end that then becomes an economics exercise, which in turn might lead to the company deciding that employing people for 32 hours is more efficient.
But until then they should pay for what they receive in terms of time spent on the job.
Your question presumes that my opinion on this matters but that's not how employment works. Employment is governed by contract law/labor law. To reduce your example to absurdity: Person 'A' gets their work done in 40 hours a week and person B in one minute, do you think person 'A' should get more money?
Clearly, the answer is yes because the claim on the life of person 'A' is a much higher one than the claim on the life of person 'B'. And you could argue the opposite just as easily: Person 'B' should get more money because they've figured out a way to be much more productive that might scale to others, and besides, sometimes getting something done in one minute has immense value and getting the same thing done in a week has none. But in practice neither of these things will happen. There isn't really a free market when it comes to jobs, employers hold most of the power and the differences between employees for most jobs do not exceed the normal bandwidth available for compensation, almost nobody except a lucky few contractors get paid by the value they create for the company.
So what will happen instead is that employers will set a certain hourly rate for a certain kind of job with some leeway to incentivize people to come and work for them or stay and hopefully a career path so they can migrate into better positions if they perform well. This arrangement will be formalized using an employment contract which together with applicable law will govern the relationship. This is not without problems but in the end it is what we have as a solution. Whether your colleague (who gets their job done in 32 hours) and you (who work 40 hours) have different pay depends on who is in control of the relationship: if the employees have control then they might be able to get paid by the value they contribute but this is extremely rare for salaried employees. The alternative, an hourly wage is much more common.
And one of the fundamental reasons for that is that we (1) all recognize the value of our time and (2) have tried very hard to get away from labor that was paid 'by the piece', which was very common in the early industrial revolution days (and which is now returning through a backdoor as the 'gig economy').
