Chile cuts its working week to from 45 to 40 hours
Chile cuts its working week to from 45 to 40 hours
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.
Last year, Chile approved a law saying that businesses need to cut their employees’ hours from 45 hours to 40 hours a week to help give everyone a better work-life balance. The deadline for the new law is 2028, but every year, businesses must reduce the working week by at least one hour.
Pasteleria Biela is a cafe and cake store in La Reina, a leafy suburb of Chile’s capital, Santiago. It’s owned by Jorge Parodi and his wife. He’s worried about reducing the hours of the 12 staff in their two cafes.
“Probably you are going to have less hours to sell your products. We are going to have to hire part-time workers, we are going to have to reduce our working hours, and actually it’s going to impact on our costs,” he said.
Rising inflation means he can’t just put up his prices, “because there is no money and people are not going to buy your products because they are too expensive,” he said. “It’s not that easy.”
The law should be focused on big businesses, he said — not on the small ones, which he points out make up around 70% of the jobs market.
Andrea Mollenhauer is a senior sales manager for ADP, which specializes in HR services for businesses around the world. She’s currently working with companies in Chile to help them to make the changes. A big issue, she said, is the huge amount of admin in changing contracts — and getting employees to clock in and out of work, which they aren’t used to doing.
“We had an article in our contract, which is Article 22, which is very famous in Chile. It says that you don’t mark in and out. You have a free timetable in your job. And that’s a big change because it’s something cultural,” she said.
Another challenge for businesses is to decide how to pay staff extra money for working more than 40 hours a week, she said. “Because they have to end some paperwork or a job they didn’t finish. So, then you are going to have to come up with some process or control.”
Some businesses in Chile are ahead of the game and have already started working 40 hours a week. One of those is a store in the bustling center of Santiago called Vulko, which sells all the metal things you need to make belts, footwear, textiles and leather goods.
Upstairs is Cindy Nunez, who’s worked with the company for six years. She’s a big fan of the new working hours.
“When we were working 45 hours a week, the day seemed much longer. Now, I enjoy my days much more, because I get home earlier, I have more time to spend with my five-year-old daughter,” she said. “We play together. Our relationship is much closer now.”
Nunez also earns the same as she did when she worked 45 hours a week.
Past some noisy building works is the main office of one of the owners of Vulko, Rodrigo Ibarra. He and his brother inherited the business from their father; it’s been running for around 40 years. Introducing a 40-hour week has been easier than Ibarra expected.
“Once we had explained the new working hours to our clients, they all got used to it and it hasn’t really affected our profits,” he said.
Whether they like it or not, every business in Chile will have to follow suit and reduce the working week from 45 hours to 40 hours by 2028.
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