25 Hour Working Week

The reason why a 25-hour working week is preferable than a 40-hour week

The discussion for the optimal duration of the working week has stagnated since the eight-hour day movement. It may seem like ages since the renowned socialists, like Karl Marx, urged the societies to adopt a working system that is beneficial to the labour force.

However, in the recent years, scientists have been coming up with some intriguing discoveries concerning the mental capacity of the labour pool in employment. Following the news that Sweden has turned to a recent trend of cutting down the working week to only 6 hours per day, a surprising amount of data has resurged to back up the claims that this newly discovered balance between work and life is in fact prudent

Following a meticulous examination of the impact that the working hours have on the cognitive ability of the study group, the scientists ascertained that brain-based skills needed to properly execute any task, referred to as cognitive abilities, suffer tremendously when the working hours exceed the 25 hour mark. In layman’s terms, this means that there is only so much data we can process at a satisfactory level, and this seems to be particularly realistic for those over the age of 40.

This study distinctly isolates the problem in the declining cognitive functioning in the middle-aged and older adults; and names the differences in the working hours as a critical constituent for preserving a robust brain-power.

It is also worth noting that the authors of this paper did not find any statistically significant differences between the male and female participants in the effects of the working hours on their cognitive abilities. In a similar manner, the paper highlights the sentiment that too much work will lead to unfavourable results on the cognitive capacities of the workers. As remarked in the research, while the cognitive ability initially has a more gradual decline, it suffers a staggeringly pronounced steep drop as the working hours become much more

Conversely, after the 25 hour mark, the strenuous overload of working hours has a negative impact on the ability to properly utilise and analyse any information.

Despite all the obvious signs, the findings listed in this study cannot be taken into account as a clear representation of the common labour force, since it only assesses the cognitive abilities of workers aged 40 and above. This is perhaps the greatest weakness of the research, particularly because we still do not possess the data to analyse how our aging part of the working population fairs in comparison to the rest of the workers. In fact, it can be effortlessly argued that longer working hours are possible up to a point, without experiencing any major setbacks for the work performance.

Nevertheless, in an interview for the BBC, Geraint Johnes, who is a professor of economics at Lancaster University Management School, claimed that since the study only focuses on the workers that are over the age of 40, we simply cannot state that middle-aged and older workers are any different from the rest of the labour force.

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