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Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

The Netherlands is arguably one that heavily embraces the 4-day workweek. In this country, employees can request a shorter work week (4 days) for proportionality less wages (so eg for 4 days get 80% of wages).

More than 80% of working moms utilise this option and around 10% of dads. [1] Among my friends I have parents where both of them work 4 days, taking the 5th day off on separate days, and their kid goes to daycare 3 days a week.

Note that most government subsidies (for childcare) are set up to encourage working at least 32 hours per day.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/economy/2013/07/10/worlds...

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The outrageous cost of daycare means that as a young parent switching to 32h, you're giving up 20% of your pay but saving a few hundred euros a month in daycare costs. So the pay cut ends up being closer to 10%, depending on their income.

Then the kids grow up and go to school and the parents, if they have enough money, have essentially no incentive to work more hours.

32 hour days? Don't know if I could handle that :)

Lazy ass. Back in my day, before walking up hill both ways to school, we had to wake up before we went to sleep and our parents would kill us every night!

> would kill us every night!

Luxury! I used to dream of my parents killing us every night.

In the Netherlands, they're also looking at high labor immigration, and a (probably at least in part) related housing shortage. There are real questions about the sustainability of this part-time "culture".

I used to work for a Dutch bank (in London) ~20 years ago and pretty much all of our colleagues in The Netherlands worked a four day week although with full pay and hours, just working longer days over the four day week.

In France primary schools are traditionally off on Wednesdays and when I was there it wasn't uncommon for mostly women to have that arrangement: 80% pay but Wednesdays off.

However, they also traditionally had school on Saturday, right? For some reason, that made me irrationally upset when I thought of my kids going to school on Saturdays. I get the argument behind it (it let's the parents take care of things outside of work), but it seems like it also would prevent family outings.

Best I can tell, most schools no longer have classes on Saturday, but they do have Wednesday morning at least. And, at least at my daughter's school, most are there (or at another _recreation center_) in the afternoon.

Yes, used to be Saturday mornings.

No school on Wednesdays but school on Saturday mornings is definitely not the most convenient from the parents' POV.

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