Chile sets the path to a 40‑hour week. Cutting hours to boost well-being

Chile's weekly working hours have been reduced from 45 to 44. This is the initial measure in a five-year strategy aiming for a 40-hour work week by 2028, as reported by "La Tercera," a newspaper based in the nation's capital, Santiago.

"Five or six years ago, this seemed like an impossible achievement... The country has progressed and made advancements thanks to the persistence and pressure from its workers," said Camila Vallejo, a government spokeswoman, during a press conference.

Vallejo, who served as a deputy from the communist party in 2017, was among the proponents of this legislation. The project was ultimately passed by parliament in 2023, six years after its initial proposal.

The government has stated that the reduction in the workweek will be implemented by decreasing one workday by an hour. This approach, however, has faced criticism from business sectors, which proposed an alternative of distributing this hour across the week, adding approximately 12 minutes each day, possibly during the lunch break.

Until this change, Chile's 45-hour work week stood as one of the longest amongst the nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), where the norm is a 40-hour week.

Even though the law permitted a 45-hour week, Chileans worked less on average. Early 2023 data revealed that the typical Chilean worker logged about 36.8 hours weekly, marking one of the shortest average workweeks in the region, as reported by the BBC.