A debate over shorter working hours has resurfaced in Finland after proposals for a four-day or 30-hour workweek drew criticism from National Coalition Party MP Henrik Vuornos.
Vuornos argues that cutting a conventional five-day working week to four days while maintaining the same monthly salary would effectively increase hourly pay by 25 per cent.
For such a model to make economic sense, productivity would therefore have to rise substantially, he said in a statement on Tuesday.
The calculation is straightforward: if employees receive 100 per cent of their previous pay for 80 per cent of their previous working hours, their pay per hour rises by 25 per cent. The employer’s total wage bill per employee would not automatically increase, however, if monthly salaries remained unchanged.
Vuornos was responding to renewed calls in Finland for shorter working hours. He said the Left Alliance has advocated a 30-hour week in the public sector, while the Social Democrats and Greens have supported reducing working time more broadly.
He also criticised a proposal by YKA, the union representing university-educated professionals in the social sciences, for shorter working hours and a new basic income experiment.
“Reducing working time to a four-day week with the same pay is the equivalent of a 25 per cent pay rise,” Vuornos said.
“Who would oppose that as an employee? But if productivity genuinely increased by a corresponding amount, the model would already have been tested extensively in a market economy.”
International trials have produced mixed results
The four-day week has attracted growing international attention, particularly through the so-called 100:80:100 model: employees receive 100 per cent of their pay for 80 per cent of their previous hours while aiming to maintain 100 per cent of their output.
Research published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2025 examined nearly 2,900 employees in 141 organisations across six countries that introduced a four-day week without reducing pay. The study found improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health and physical health compared with a group of organisations that did not shorten working time.
A separate 2026 study of Australian organisations using the model found that some employers reported higher productivity while others said output had remained broadly unchanged. None of the participating organisations that completed the trial reported lower productivity, although the researchers stressed that productivity was measured differently between workplaces and that evidence on the model remains limited.
That distinction is important in the Finnish debate. A four-day week does not necessarily require output per hour to rise by exactly 25 per cent in every job if employers gain elsewhere through lower absence, improved retention or changes in how work is organised.
But the equation is more difficult in sectors where staffing must be maintained for fixed hours, such as healthcare, education or other public services.
A difficult demographic equation
Henrik Vuornos argues that Finland is in a particularly difficult position to reduce working hours because its ageing population is already increasing the number of people outside the workforce relative to those in employment.
He says the growing number of pensioners and Finland’s low birth rate mean fewer workers will have to finance an increasing share of welfare-state expenditure.
“In Finland, it is not realistic to think that the people sustaining the welfare state should work even less,” Vuornos said.
He also rejected calls for another basic income experiment, arguing that an unconditional basic income would conflict with what he described as the Nordic welfare model’s expectation that people who are able to work participate in the labour market.
The wider question over shorter working hours is not simply whether employees prefer a four-day week. For Finland, the debate centres on whether workplaces could preserve output with fewer hours — and whether any gains in productivity, wellbeing and labour-force participation would be large enough to offset the reduction in working time.