The Case For Israel To Move To A Monday To Friday Workweek
Could a redistributed workweek increase worker satisfaction, productivity, and help overcome Israel’s productivity paradox?
Like many countries in the Middle East — but relatively few around the world — Israel currently works to a Sunday to Thursday workweek.
Wikipedia’s handy visualization of the standard workweek underscores how the Middle East is an anomaly in the global picture, which is dominated by countries beginning their workweeks on Monday morning:
Israel, and Israelis, have periodically called the workweek into practice.
A proposal to add several Sundays per year to the working calendar — effectively creating some three day weekends, like the Bank Holiday observances common in Western Europe — was shot down by powerful trade unions.
While that proposal never went anywhere, I’d like to re-open the debate and present some reasons why I think the country moving to a Monday to Friday workweek like the rest of the world — with a conventional Saturday-Sunday weekend — might be in the country’s best interests.
Is What We Have Really Working All That Well? Possibly Not
A mainstay of arguments in favor of preserving any status quo is the “if it ain’t broke, don’t change it” line of thinking.
While the success of Israel’s high-tech sector — the engine of the economy — is beyond doubt, Israel’s economy has nevertheless historically had a sort of strange contradiction at its core: productivity per capita has historically lagged behind the OECD average.
Gilad Brand, formerly of the Taub Center — a social policy research institute — authored a paper entitled Why Does The Startup Nation Still Have Low Productivity.
As the data from that chart makes clear, Israel’s labor productivity, at the time the data was collated, lagged behind both the G7 and the OECD averages.
Israel’s closest neighbors on the chart — Turkey, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Portugal — aren’t the type of countries that one thinks of when imagining high-tech powerhouses.
Israel’s standard workweek — at 43 hours — is on the longer end of the scale. And that’s only the legal standard. The de facto standard in the high-tech industry tends to be 09:00 to 18:00 — which provides a total of 45 hours.
Meanwhile, despite the relatively low salaries paid to the majority of the economy working outside of high tech, Israel’s minimum mandatory vacation day entitlement, for employees on full time working weeks, at just 12, lags significantly behind that of many developed countries. The European Union (EU), by contrast, ensures that all its member states legislate a minimum vacation entitlement for full-time employees of 4 weeks’ paid time off (PTO).
Could excessively long hours and insufficient PTO be contributory factors to the Israeli productivity paradox?
Many countries have tried out four day workweeks and the results of some studies have demonstrated favorable outcomes for both productivity and employee satisfaction.
Japan is famous for its culture of grueling working hours (like Israel it remains something of a high-tech paradox and is one of the few countries still making regular use of the fax machine). But it nevertheless had success with an abbreviated work-week experiment.
When Microsoft tested out a four day workweek at its Japan site it found that its employees were both happier and more productive.
Remote Fridays Can Overcome The Shabbat Problem
The traditional argument in favor of maintaining the Sunday to Thursday Middle Eastern workweek is that it makes it easier for (Jewish) religiously observant employees to keep the Shabbat.
Shabbat starts on Friday night but — owing to religious restrictions — food has to be prepared in advance of the day.
Given that its start time is linked to sunset — which obviously occurs earlier during the winter in the Northern hemisphere — it’s not uncommon for Shabbat to come in as early 4PM or slightly earlier. (The earliest Shabbat occurs when Shabbat falls out closest to the earliest sunset of the year. This differs from the winter solstice by a couple of weeks).
Observant Jews are forbidden from using electricity on the Shabbat so families would actually begin preparing their homes for its arrival — setting electric timers and so forth — a few hours before its arrival.
Nevertheless, I think that there is a solution.
Like elsewhere in the world, the pandemic has proven the catalyst that has encouraged Israeli companies to re-evaluate their working arrangements and many employees are shifting to a hybrid in office-remote means of working.
Like shorter working weeks, flexible arrangements like these seem to both increase the productivity and satisfaction of workers.
(Jewish) religiously observant employees could work a half day on Friday — say from 08:00 to 12:00 — which would make their working week 4.5 days.
If employers felt strongly that they needed to recover those few lost hours — despite the fact that employees appear to be reasonably productive even working only four days per week — they could ask employees to pull one unpaid overtime shift per week to make up the remaining hours.
Admittedly, under this arrangement, the question of preparing food might remain somewhat problematic. In which case policymakers could consider officially abbreviating the workweek to 4 days. If every day of the 4 day workweek were legally standardized at 10 hours (09:00 to 19:00), Israelis would still work 40 hours per week.
The average working week in Ireland is 39 hour. In the Netherlands, men average just 34 hours of week per week.
If Israel were to mimic the Dutch model, employees could work 4 x 8.5 hour days — to total 34 hours (09:00–17:30).
In An Export-Led Economy, Sundays Can Be A Wasted Day In The Office
Israel’s high-tech sector — the backbone of Israel’s economic transformation — is overwhelmingly export-led, doing business with, and selling to, the rest of the world rather than the domestic market.
The US and Europe — both of which are on Monday to Friday workweeks — are major trading partners.
Creating as close a synchronization between the Israeli and world-predominant workweeks as possible — without violating Israel’s Jewish character — would:
- Help maintain jobs in Israel by allowing some labor to be provided on Fridays
- Eliminate lost productivity on Sundays when many Israelis are likely less productive waiting for work to be reviewed or approved by colleagues located overseas who do not start their workweeks until Monday
The above is intended merely to add a contribution to the debate that periodically surfaces in Israel about whether the country should maintain its workweek in sync with the Middle East or move towards a model that would put it in closer alignment with the rest of the world.
By eliminating the Sunday workday and distributing hours over other days, Israel could perhaps salvage some lost worker productivity while increasing satisfaction. On Sundays, Israelis could enjoy a leisure day like the rest of the world and explore the many wonders that the country has to offer.
