From April, 170,000 civil servants from Tokyo will work 4 days a week
From April 2025, about 170 civil servants in the capital of Japan will be transferred to a 4-day work week. Employees with children will be allowed to work two hours less per day. Thus, the authorities of Tokyo strive to give young people more time to start a family or take care of children.
Metropolitan authorities will continue to create flexible employment conditions so that women do not have to interrupt their careers due to the birth of children or their upbringing, said Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike.
The new policy is connected with the drop in the birth rate in Japan to a record low level at the beginning of this year. In the first six months of 2024, slightly more than 350,000 people registered in Japan. born children, which is 5.7% lower than the indicator for the same period in 2023, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of the country reported.
The total fertility rate in the country for 2023 was 1.2, and in Tokyo – 0.99. Maintaining a stable population requires a birth rate of 2.1, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Since the 1990s, the Japanese government has required local companies to provide extended parental leave. The authorities also offer parents subsidies for kindergarten and cash payments. In the summer of this year, the capital’s government funded the creation of a dating app to help young people find a partner and get married. For the last eight years, the birth rate in Tokyo has been consistently falling.
Years of experiments have shown that a four-day work week increases the productivity and well-being of employees, said Peter Myskovich, representative of the JLL real estate company. He pointed to the results of the introduction of such a measure in the form of reducing stress, burnout and costs, as well as improving the quality of sleep and rest.
Julia Hobsbawm, the founder of the consulting company Workathon, believes that the experiment in Tokyo will later be expanded to other cities in Japan.
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