Is Ukraine Ready for a Four-Day Workweek and What Would It Mean for the Economy?
The idea of a four-day working week is appearing increasingly often in Ukrainian public debate. Its supporters point to accumulated fatigue, professional burnout, the deteriorating emotional and psychological condition of employees and the need to reconsider the traditional approach to organising work. Opponents, meanwhile, emphasise the war, labour shortages, low productivity and risks for businesses. Both sides have rational arguments. The problem is that the four-day week is often discussed as a single universal model that can be introduced simultaneously in offices, factories, hospitals, farms, shops and transport companies. In reality, several different formats are involved, and their economic consequences differ significantly.
Ukraine is currently unlikely to be ready for a mandatory transition of the entire economy to a 32-hour working week while preserving full pay. However, this does not mean that a shorter schedule is impossible for individual companies, professions and sectors.
A petition has been registered on the Cabinet of Ministers website proposing that the standard working week be reduced from 40 to 32 hours during martial law. The main argument behind the initiative is the emotional and psychological exhaustion of society. This motivation is understandable: prolonged war, constant air-raid alerts, overnight attacks, power outages, losses, the mobilisation of loved ones and uncertainty directly affect people’s ability to work under normal conditions. However, reducing working time by 20% is not merely a social decision. It has a specific economic cost. If an employee receives the same monthly salary for 32 hours instead of 40, the cost of one hour of their work for the employer increases by 25%. The company must compensate for this difference through higher productivity, automation, the elimination of unproductive processes or higher prices. Otherwise, it risks receiving a lower volume of output while maintaining the same personnel costs. In part of the office economy, this may be realistic. In many companies, the working day consists not only of directly completing tasks but also of lengthy meetings, excessive reporting, duplication of functions, constant correspondence and other processes that do not create corresponding economic value. After these are reviewed, employees may indeed sometimes complete the same amount of work in fewer hours. This is why international experiments with shorter working weeks have produced their strongest results in IT, consulting, marketing, financial services, education, creative professions and some administrative work. In these areas, the result does not always depend directly on the number of hours spent at the workplace.
However, even here, a shorter schedule does not happen automatically. Companies that move to a four-day week usually change the structure of meetings, methods of communication, task allocation, performance evaluation systems and the level of employee autonomy. The additional day off becomes the result of work reorganisation rather than a substitute for it. The situation is entirely different in industry, construction, transport, logistics, healthcare, retail, agriculture and household services. Here, the volume of output often depends on the physical presence of the employee, the operating time of equipment or the duration of customer service. A shop cannot shorten its opening hours without risking the loss of part of its revenue. A hospital cannot stop providing care for an additional day. Construction will not accelerate solely because workers are more focused. A factory that reduces shift duration or the number of working days will most likely produce fewer goods unless it increases the number of shifts, hires additional people or automates its processes. For such sectors, a four-day schedule for an individual employee is possible, but this does not mean that the enterprise itself will operate only four days. It can continue working five, six or seven days through shift work and staff rotation. However, amid labour shortages, organising additional shifts is difficult and expensive. Therefore, the continuous nature of production does not make a four-day week impossible, but it significantly increases the cost of introducing it. The agricultural sector is particularly illustrative. Fieldwork depends on the weather, season, soil conditions and narrow technological timeframes. During the sowing or harvesting season, an enterprise cannot postpone work simply because employees have used up their weekly hours. In livestock farming, storage and processing, production cycles do not stop at all.
For agricultural businesses, flexible schedules, seasonal redistribution of workloads, shift work, annualised working time and additional rest during less intensive periods are more realistic. A formal four-day week that remains the same throughout the year would indeed be poorly suited to this sector. Another argument against a general reduction in working time is the shortage of employees. Ukrainian companies are already reporting difficulties in filling vacancies. The causes include mobilisation, migration, demographic decline, professional mismatches among candidates and population movement between regions. Under these conditions, an administrative reduction in working time may increase businesses’ need for additional staff precisely when finding them is most difficult. Small and medium-sized enterprises will feel this especially sharply, as they have fewer resources for automation, digitalisation and hiring new employees.
However, a labour shortage is not unequivocal proof that a shorter working week is always harmful. Exhausting working conditions can themselves deepen the shortage of employees. People resign, change professions, leave the country or reject formal employment altogether when work leaves them no time to recover. Under certain conditions, a shorter schedule can reduce staff turnover, sick leave and professional burnout. It may also bring back into the labour market people who are not ready for standard employment because of childcare, education, health problems or other circumstances. The labour shortage therefore needs to be considered more broadly. An enterprise may lose some working hours because of an additional day off but save money on constantly searching for, hiring and training new employees. The final result depends on the specific industry, profession and organisation of work.
International experience requires separate attention. Supporters of the four-day week often refer to experiments in the United Kingdom, Iceland, Spain, Germany and other countries. In many pilot projects, companies did manage to preserve performance while improving employees’ well-being. However, these results cannot be mechanically transferred to the entire Ukrainian economy. Participation in such experiments is usually voluntary. They are more often joined by companies that already have flexible processes, modern management and the ability to measure productivity by results rather than by the number of hours worked. In addition, the term “four-day week” can refer to different models in different countries. In one case, people work 32 hours while keeping their salary. In another, the same 40 hours are distributed across four longer days. In yet another, it refers only to a flexible schedule or the employee’s right to agree on a different arrangement with the employer. Four ten-hour days do not constitute a reduction in working time. They are merely a compressed schedule that creates an additional day off but does not reduce the overall workload. International examples should therefore be assessed not by the name of the model itself but by the actual number of hours, pay level, employee coverage and results for the business. The claim that a shorter week almost guarantees productivity growth of dozens of percentage points also appears exaggerated. Such an effect may be possible in some companies, but productivity is difficult to measure in the same way across different sectors. For an IT team, it may be the number of completed tasks; for a factory, the volume of output; for a hospital, the quality and accessibility of care; and for a shop, revenue and the number of customers served.
It is more accurate to say that in a number of pilot projects, the reduction in hours did not lead to a proportional decline in results, while employees reported improved well-being. This is an important argument in favour of experiments, but it is not a sufficient basis for a universally mandatory reform. Artificial intelligence is also often described as a technology that will make a shorter working week possible. It is already reducing the time needed to prepare documents, search for information, create texts, write code, process requests and perform some analytical tasks. At the same time, the automation of individual operations does not automatically mean a 20% reduction in overall employment. Companies may use the freed-up time to increase output, work with new clients or complete tasks that were previously postponed.
In addition, the capabilities of artificial intelligence remain uneven. It can help an office employee prepare a report more quickly, but it cannot replace a driver, nurse, electrician, construction worker or farm employee where physical presence and responsibility for a real process are required. Under martial law, a nationwide transition to a shorter week appears even more complicated. The Ukrainian economy is operating under the pressure of defence needs, destroyed infrastructure, unstable energy supplies and limited access to capital. For some critically important enterprises, legislation allows for longer working hours.
However, the possibility of working up to 60 hours a week is not a general rule for all employees. It applies to conditions and categories defined by law. Therefore, using this figure as proof that the entire Ukrainian economy should move towards longer working weeks is just as incorrect as demanding the immediate transition of everyone to 32 hours. The main criterion should not be the number of hours itself, but the balance between performance, business costs, employee health and the needs of a particular sector. Ukraine does not have to choose between preserving the current model without change and introducing a mandatory four-day week for everyone. A more realistic path may involve voluntary pilot projects in companies capable of measuring work results accurately. Such experiments should assess not only employee satisfaction but also revenue, output, service quality, sick leave, staff turnover, personnel costs and the business’s ability to serve customers.
For some companies, a 32-hour model with preserved pay may prove effective. For others, four longer working days may be more appropriate. Others may benefit more from flexible starting times, additional days off, seasonal schedules or the possibility of reducing working time after completing a defined amount of work. The Ukrainian economy currently lacks sufficient conditions for a single mandatory 32-hour week, but it already has grounds for cautiously testing different models of reduced working time. This approach would not create an additional administrative burden for enterprises that physically cannot shorten their operating processes, while allowing Ukraine to test whether a shorter week can improve efficiency in sectors where results depend primarily on concentration, organisation and management quality. The discussion about the four-day working week should not be reduced to the simple question of whether it is “timely” for Ukraine. It is far more important to determine where shorter hours can work, what their cost will be and what conditions are needed to ensure that additional rest does not become an additional expense for businesses and the economy.
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