Short week and more services, as small businesses experiment with new hours
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The debate on the short week also enters the smallest realities, which try to experiment with new work organizations to better reconcile life and work, with the same salary, but also with the same service. Short week and more services, in short. Possible? They try it in Cinisello Balsamo, in the province of Milan, at UniAbita, the largest Italian cooperative of inhabitants which is part of Legacoop and has about 50 employees, mainly women. The new organization was discussed with the unions and led to an agreement with Filcams CGIL which provides for an experimentation of a different distribution of working hours which guarantees longer opening hours and allows workers to work on 4 days instead of 5. All for the same salary.
In fact, UniAbita’s short week consists in reducing one day of the working week but recovering hours on the days in which one works, extending the daily hours until 7 pm and during the lunch break. With a twofold objective: on the one hand to enhance the services for members who will be able to access them even during lunch breaks and for longer hours and on the other to improve the working well-being of employees and the family/work balance.
The new agreement will be tested from June to September and arises from a new balance between operational efficiency and new household needs.
As Mirca Carletti, director of UniAbita and head of the equal opportunities table at LegaCoop explains, «everything becomes easier when, as in our case, the majority of employees are women and the management is almost entirely female. There is a marked sensitivity on the issue of the rights of working women and that has touched all our female and male employees».
The flexibility in working hours and the path to experimenting with the short week at Uniabita is the result of a broader project which «began in 2015 with a corporate reorganisation, identifying clear roles and responsibilities, revisiting methods for increasing productivity and work efficiency and make control procedures more effective», says Carletti. For the union «this is a very important and positive result which testifies once again how the union representatives are always attentive and ready to collaborate to support the well-being of male and female workers – explain from the Filcams CGIL of Milan -. Sensitivity to the issue of women’s work is a battle we have been waging for a long time and which finds in this experimental project a significant starting point on which to continue working in the coming months».
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