💬AP Seminar
PART A
Suggested time — 30 minutes
Read the passage below and then respond to the following three questions.
Identify the author’s argument, main idea, or thesis. (3 points)
Explain the author’s line of reasoning by identifying the claims used to build the argument and the connections between them. (6 points)
Evaluate the effectiveness of the evidence the author uses to support the claims made in the argument. (6 points)
The success of Iceland’s ‘four-day week’ trial has been greatly overstated
Anthony Veal, Adjunct Professor, University of Technology Sydney Business School (2021)
The following is excerpted from a Conversation article by an adjunct business professor arguing that media coverage overstated Iceland’s shorter-hours trials.
It almost seems too good to be true: a major trial in Iceland shows that cutting the standard five-day week to four days for the same pay needn’t cost employers a cent (or, to be accurate, a krona).
Unfortunately it is too good to be true.
While even highly reputable media outlets such as the BBC have reported on the “overwhelming success” of large-scale trials of a four-day week in Iceland from 2015 to 2019, that’s not actually the case.
The truth is less spectacular — interesting and important enough in its own right, but not quite living up to the media spin, including that these trials have led to the widespread adoption of a four-day work week in Iceland.
Four hours at best
The media reports are based on a report co-published by Iceland’s Alda (Association for Democracy and Sustainability) and Britain’s Autonomy think tank about two trials involving Reykjavík City Council and the Icelandic government. The trials covered 66 workplaces and about 2,500 workers.
They did not involve a four-day work week. This is indicated by the report’s title – Going Public: Iceland’s journey to a shorter working week. In fact the document of more 80 pages refers to a four-day week just twice, in its first two paragraphs, and only then as a reference point for what the trials were actually about:
. . .
Read on to the third paragraph and you’ll learn the study “involved two large-scale trials of shorter working hours — in which workers moved from a 40-hour to a 35-or 36-hour week, without reduced pay”.
A four-day week trial would have involved reducing the working week by seven to eight hours. Instead the maximum reduction in these trials was just four hours. In 61 of the 66 workplaces it was one to three hours.
Which is not to say the results – no adverse effect on output or services delivered – is unimpressive. Nor is the upshot. As a result of the trials, unions and employers have formalised country-wide agreements to make reduced working hours permanent.
But these have provided for a reduction of just 35 minutes a week in the private sector and 65 minutes in the public sector (though larger reductions are available for shift workers). That’s a long way from making a four-day week the norm.
. . .
In interpreting the results of such studies, we always need to be cautious.
In regard to this and similar experiments, it is always possible the “Hawthorne effect” might have been at work. This effect refers to 1930s experiments with factory workers in the US that showed how their awareness of being the subject of experiments affected their behaviour, and hence productivity levels.
Could this have been at work in the Iceland trials? The work units involved volunteers to take part in the experiments and so might well have been motivated to make them work as intended. This may not be replicated in more widespread changed working arrangements.
Veal, Anthony J. “The Success of Iceland’s ‘Four-Day Week’ Trial Has Been Greatly Overstated.” The Conversation, 13 July 2021, theconversation.com/the-success-of-icelands-four-day-week-trial-has-been-greatly-overstated-164083.
00:00
