January 9, 2023 - Work Croatia: a four-day work week is the desire of a growing number of young people in Croatia who strive to balance work and private life, while employers say that there are no legal obstacles to its introduction. Trade unions warn to be careful and avoid the ten-hour workday.

As Index writes, in the four-day organisation of the working week, employees work eight hours on four days while receiving wages for five days. The number of working hours per week is therefore reduced from 40 to 32.

The idea of shortening the working week is not so new, and the pioneer, as in many other industrial solutions, was Henry Ford.

In 1926, he shortened the working week in his factories from six to five days. Ford realized that if a worker has a weekend, i.e., two days off, they would want to buy a car to go somewhere. He realized that people need more time to spend the money they earn, and he wanted to sell as many cars as possible to his workers.

The eight-hour workday became a practice in the 1940s

Although many thought such a move would reduce productivity, the opposite happened. Workers have shown greater productivity and loyalty than before.

Ford's move reverberated across America and sparked many strikes in which workers demanded a five-day work week.

Since the early 1940s, the eight-hour workday and 40-hour work week have become standard practice in various industries worldwide.

This will take decades, but due to the progress of technology, and recently the pandemic and working from home, as well as the abandonment of overtime by millennials and generation Z, the idea of further shortening the work week is starting to gain momentum. In some countries and industries, the lack of workers also forces employers to shorten the working week.

Croatian trade unionists: Strive for a balance between private life and work

The four-day work week is also being discussed in Croatia. A lot of companies have introduced working from home, and most of them are in the IT sector, which allows more work flexibility compared to other industries.

The president of the Independent Croatian Trade Unions, Krešimir Sever, warns that the four-day work week should not be organized into four days of ten working hours.

"After a ten-hour working day, the worker does not have time for anything else in that working day," says Sever for Hina and points out that the implementation of the four-day working week would only be good if the working hours were shortened from 40 to 32 hours, but he claims that this would be difficult to do in Croatia.

"Employers would not react well because even now they complain when we advocate reducing working hours," he says.

One should strive for a balance between private life and work because a well-rested man who has time for himself in addition to his work will probably refuse other people's job offers or if they offer a raise, according to Sever.

Employers: There is no formal obstacle

The Croatian Employers'  Association (HUP) says that the introduction of a four-day work week has long been allowed, but the Labor Act defines a full working week as 40 hours, and the employer can divide it into four, five, or six days.

If the employer wants to introduce a four-day work week, they say there are no obstacles to that.

"If there is an agreement between the employee and the employer to work 35 hours a week, or four days a week, there is no reason to prevent such work organization by legal provisions; however, the same should apply to the agreement if there is an interest of both parties, to work even more working hours than 'prescribed'", they say from HUP.

They note that the pandemic accelerated digitalization and brought significant changes in work organization, such as remote work, and a greater understanding of the balance between private life and work.

The development of technology has brought platform work, job or employee sharing, casual work, or voucher work. All these forms of work are a reality, and should not be administratively restricted, says the HUP.

"At the same time, we face a significant labor shortage, primarily due to demographic processes. In such a situation, it is necessary to enable significantly greater flexibility for workers and employers," they said.

HUP: Croats actually work 37.5 hours a week

That is why HUP insists on adopting new legal solutions that will reflect the actual situation in the labor market.

Since Croatia is oriented towards tourism, employers say it is difficult to shorten the working week due to the smaller workforce.

"All this, of course, should not prevent companies that realize a shift in productivity and can offer more flexible working conditions to reduce the number of working days and thus invest in the satisfaction of their employees," they say in HUP.

They note that in Croatia, the daily break is included in the working hours, which is not the case in most other EU countries, so Croats actually currently formally work 37.5 hours a week.

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June the 30th, 2021 - As many as 132,000 Croatian residents who work, pay their contributions and taxes, are considered to be poor. These alarming figures raise many questions which have plagued the Croatian labour system for a long time.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, every tenth Croatian resident with employment, so a total of 132,000 of them, received a salary of less than 3,800 kuna for their work during the month of April this year.

The average salary of all 1.3 million employees in legal entities in April amounted to 7,082 kuna, but more than 60 percent of people, or 792 thousand of them, earn far less than that. Every other employee, 660,000 of them, receives less than 5,956 kuna, which is the median salary, writes Slobodna Dalmacija.

Back in April 2021, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) published data on the structure of employees by salary for March last year. It publishes this type of data once a year, and according to the latest data, 5.9 percent of full-time employees, or 64,810 of them, earned less than 3,400 kuna, which is this year's minimum wage, and their share is probably similar this year.

It is expected that Croatian residents earning such a salary should somehow be able to juggle living, eating, and paying for utilities, and those who have a family have more expenses to consider. According to the 2019 Household Budget Survey, average consumption expenditures amounted to 93,522 kuna per household, or 7,793 kuna per month. Even the current average salary of 7,082 kuna can't cover this level of consumption, in which food is the most expensive item.

Food accounts for 26 percent of total household consumption, or 24,538 kuna, which is 2,044 kuna in monthly costs for food and soft drinks. Costs for electricity, water, waste collection, repairs and the maintenance of apartments stand at around 704 kuna per month on average, and 410 kuna is the average monthly cost for subscriptions for TV, internet and phones.

When the food, utilities and communication costs are settled, the salary of 3,158 kuna has already disappeared. If the salary is 4000 kuna, there is a mere 842 kuna left for everything else, including transport, fuel, clothes, shoes, medicines, apartment maintenance, recreation, travel, morning coffees...

In order for someone to be statistically at risk of poverty, they need to have lower incomes than those set as the at-risk-of-poverty threshold, and in Croatia there were 742,644 such people registered in 2019.

The last published data on the risk of poverty are from 2019, in which the risk threshold for singles was 2,710 kuna per month, and for households with two adults and two children, 5,691 kuna per month. The median salary in 2019 was 5569 kuna, and the current medial salary for April this year was still 5956 kuna.

The average workers' pension received by one million pensioners is currently 2,635 kuna. Because of such incomes, people have problems surviving: 1.44 million Croatian residents, or more than a third, live in households that find it very difficult to make ends meet at the end of each month.

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