WHAT have these wacky Scandinavians been up to now? I will tell you what: experimenting with a six-hour working day, that’s what.
A typical Britisher will think: “Six-hour working day? That’s immoral. First, it was pornography. Now this. The Scandinavians need reining in.”
But your Scandinavian thinks out the box, you see. They can afford to. Well-off and coldly logical, they’re always looking for ways to improve things. The British way is to try and make things worse. At Westminster, this is instinctive. They want you to suffer.
But the Swedes – the Scandinavians under advisement in this instance – don’t hate their own people. Difficult to understand, I know. And they aren’t daft either. They think the six-hour day could improve efficiency as well as quality of life.
Nurses at a retirement home in Gothenburg switched from an eight-hour to a six-hour day in February and have never looked back. One told The Guardian that, where before she used to always be knackered, now she’s much more alert: “I have much more energy for my work, and also for my family life.”
Some doctors and nurses in hospitals have also moved to a six-hour day and, even in the evil private sector, several enlightened employers tried it and found staff turnover went down while productivity went up.
Some of this is offset, admittedly, by having to employ extra staff – Britisher: “See, it disnae work! It’s evil!” – but, overall, everyone is happier and the service is better.
It’s a shame it’ll never catch on here, unless the European Union follows Sweden’s lead (well, parts of Sweden) and forces us to do it. We’ve been stuck with the eight-hour day since the start of last century and seem to think it’s as natural as the sun rising and setting.
The Scandinavians in general like to knock off work early but use their time in the workplace to get the job done. The British way is to spend a long time at work, with only about two hours of actually doing anything. The rest is spent tweeting or having meetings about work.
You’d think we didn’t want to go home, whereas the Scandinavians are always dying to get home. Home is a concept upon which they place great importance.
All right, once more I have taken a pudding and smothered it in eggs. We cannot believe everything they do in Scandinavia is good and everything we do is bad, despite all the evidence.
But it’s nice to have a beacon of hope, however illusory. And the thought that somebody somewhere is trying to organise society on sane lines gives us courage to carry on in Barmy Britannia.
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