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 Photographer: Casper Hedberg/Bloomberg Photographer: Casper Hedberg/Bloomberg 
 
 Swedes looking forward to a six-hour workday just got some bad news: the costs outweigh the benefits. 
 
 A two-year experiment cutting working hours while maintaining pay levels for nurses at Svartedalen old people’s home in the Swedish city of Gothenburg is now nearing the end. The take away was largely positive, with nurses at the home feeling healthier, which reduced sick-leave, and patient care improving. 
 
 But the city has no plans in making the measure permanent or broadening it to other facilities. To do that it would need much more money and even help from the national government. To cover the reduced hours for the 68 nurses at the home it had to hire 17 extra staff at a cost of about 12 million kronor ($1.3 million). 
 
 “It’s associated with higher costs, absolutely,” said Daniel Bernmar, a local left-wing politician responsible for running the municipality’s elderly care. “It’s far too expensive to carry out a general shortening of working hours within a reasonable time frame.” 
 
 The Gothenburg experiment is just the latest in a series of shorter working day trials carried out in Sweden, a country that prides itself on its generous welfare state. The trial has been closely watched globally, with labor activists touting progressive Sweden as a role model in shortening working hours. 
 
 French Debate 
 
 The debate over working hours is taking center stage in France, where Conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon has vowed to scrap the 35-hour work week, which he says has “done a lot of damage.” 
 
 While historical data shows that the length of average working days has fallen in Sweden over the past century, there are currently no plans to establish six-hour working days at a national level. 
 
 Still, the added hiring by the municipality has helped the coffers of the national government by reducing unemployment costs by 4.7 million kronor during the first 18 months of the trial due to new jobs, according to the interim report. 
 
 Bernmar says he’d like to see more studies into whether an abbreviated working day could also result in long-term gains for society as a whole. One argument is that it could allow people employed in labor-intensive professions to extend their working life. 
 
 “I personally believe in shorter working hours as a long-term solution,” he said. “The richer we become, the more we need to take advantage of that wealth in other ways than through a newer car or higher consumption." 
 
 (Previous story corrected currency conversion.) ||||| Daniel Bernmar is amused by the attention. In his native Sweden, a country that exports pop stars, crime writers, and models, it’s unusual to stumble into the spotlight — especially when you work for the Gothenburg’s city council on issues surrounding eldercare. Bertram, a PhD student on an extended leave from the School of Public Administration at the University of Gothenburg, may not have gone looking for attention but he found it by seeking innovation, a traditional activity in Gothenburg, where Sweden’s old labor norms have historically gone to die. When Bernmar became the man responsible for his city’s six-hour workday experiment, he also became a prominent supporter of an idea thats audience — if not time — has come. 
 
 Bernmar, a member of the Left Party, is a reformer by nature who thinks work-time innovations can make both Swedish citizens and the Swedish economy function more effectively in the short term. He believes labor doesn’t necessarily function best when it functions most and that recoverable hours lead to better lives and better service. Not prone to ideological turns of phrase, Bernmar describes long hours and increasing demand on laborers in low-growth economies as “a tractable problem.” 
 
 His Gothenburg project first got traction in 2014 when the city’s governing Left and Social Democrat Party coalition agreed to start a program cutting work hours, but not pay for eldercare providers on government payroll at the Svartedalen Center beginning in February 2015. A separate group at the Solängen Centers were selected as control. 
 
 Naturally, opposition members of the Moderate Party described the initiative as a “dishonest and populist ploy” and a distraction going into an election season. Nonetheless, the program proceeded and, over the course of the following 18 months, has grown to include a significant portion of workers in facilities intended for patients with severe dementia. The government, roiled in elections early in 2016, tracked progress and began to see a trend. By the time the third report arrived in October of this year, it had become abundantly clear that the program was having profound effects on both caretakers and the caretaken. 
 
 Bernmar says that the efficacy of the trial program must be attributed to the specifics of the eldercare profession, but that the program itself might provide a rubric for innovation in a variety of other fields. 
 
 “There’s a suppressed need to talk about work life,” he says. “We’ve done 40 years at 40 hours a week and we’re six to seven times richer than we were. Why not discuss what to do with those riches?” 
 
 Hypothesis 
 
 A group of representatives from the Swedish Insurance Agency, the Swedish Employment Agency, and the National Board of Health and Welfare publicly stated at the outset of the program that its aim was to “find out how six-hour workdays impact health and life qualities for assistant nurses.” Secondarily, the Gothenburg program was designed to “examine how the reduced working day [would] impact the quality of the daily care for the tenants.” The targeted profession focus was no accident: Assistant nurses are the largest professional group in Sweden. They were of particular interest because of the nature of their physically and psychologically demanding profession. 
 
 “In industry there has been automation and there are new technologies and it’s not like it was 30 years ago, but that’s not true for eldercare and it’s easy to forget that,” says Bernmar. “An issue here is that workers physically can’t do it. Their backs are shot. It’s a heavy duty job so many people arent working 40 hours anyway. For them, it’s just more pay.” 
 
 In essence, the idea at the core of the program was to disrupt a very stable industry by altering work-hour practices rather than by introducing machinery or attempting to create news systems. The effects of the program would benefit the nurses, but whether or not those benefits would trickle down to the patients was unclear. Bertram thought it would. The nurses’ union Kommunal was happy to give it a shot. 
 
 This is what a work-hour innovation hub looks like. 
 
 Experiment 
 
 Despite being designed to test out hard-to-implement policies and management theories, the Gothenburg trial was implemented with a checkbook and a calendar. The city department overseen by Bernmar hired 14 assistant nurses to turn what had been teams of four people working the same hours into teams of five people taking shifts in order to extend the work day. Because of the fluid nature of nursing work, this did not mean creating new schedules of predetermined duties. Overlapping work hours allowed teams to allot their time creatively. 
 
 “It was about what they could do that wasn’t strictly necessary,” says Bernmar. 
 
 The staffing shifts happened in the context of a department charged with caring for 64 seniors with relatively advanced to severe cases of dementia. Because of this, the patients were aware of the shift in strategy, but not actively participating in top-level decision-making about how added work hours were spent. Studies were also divided by worker ages. 
 
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 Data Collection 
 
 During the course of the Gothenburg trials, data was collected on three different fronts: health of staff, perceived quality of care, and economic effect. Specific statistics, like the number of social activities per patient and the number of sick days per nurse, were used as objective measures while other measurements remained essentially subjective, the product of self-reporting and survey analysis. Six-month reports were delivered to Bernmar and made available to the public. 
 
 Results 
 
 Experiments based on subjective analysis can be hard to parse, which is why Bernmar is quick to reach for the Gothenburg trial’s most impressive objective finding. Over the course of the first 18 months of the trial, social activities at Svartedalens went up 80 percent, considerably higher than expected. The other key objective statistic, sick days taken, was also striking. Nurses at the 30-hour-per-week facility took 6.2 percent few sick days than nurses at the 40-hour-per-week hospital. 
 
 As might be expected, the workers laboring under the new program cottoned to it quickly, reporting that they were less tired and more fulfilled by their work. Patients also reported increased quality of care to not only the writers of the reports but to international journalists swinging through Gothenburg on their way to stories about diminishing work hours and similar work being done elsewhere in Europe. 
 
 In Gothenburg there is always a twist on tradition. 
 
 Conclusions 
 
 From the perspective of the nurses being paid the same rate to work fewer hours and the patients receiving better care, the experiment was a smashing success with obvious ramifications. But the costs matter and, despite the early results — a final report will be released in March — some governmental issues remain. Though the program cost 3,000,000 Krona ($323,500) in wages, it effectively cost the city of Gothenburg twice that because of costs associated with nationalized social security. Because the experiment took place within a non-experimental government system. In short, the costs and benefits were localized within a system built on the idea of nationalization. 
 
 But the financial drawbacks don’t distract from what the study shows about nurses: They are more effective when they are well rested. Within the field, more work is not better work. 
 
 What’s Next? 
 
 Though the Gothenburg trial is not over, the results are — at least from a public policy perspective — already in. The enthusiastic media coverage and popularity of the project among Gothenburg residents and members of Sweden’s largest union signal a potential political win. The fact that the trial seemed to result in gains in the quality of life for caretakers and for those being taken of was significant, but no more so than the political reactions to the work, which have been engaged with the core idea if not uniformly positive. 
 
 “The right is irritated that we’ve got attention and by the prestige of this,” says Bernmar. “They’re now looking for other areas in which we can make work-time innovations, even if those aren’t transitions to six-hour work days.” 
 
 If experiments like the Gothenburg trial expand to professions beyond nursing, they will likely prove most effective at altering fields in which shift coverage is important for clients. It’s worth noting that the nurse-centric trial was inspired largely by a Toyota maintenance center that altered its shift schedule to remain open longer and, in doing so, built a loyal customer base. If Swedish politicians become enthusiastic about this style of management, a change could potentially sweep the country. Roughly a third of the Swedish workforce is on government payroll, which means that competition for workers could incentivize private employers to make work-hour changes in the relatively near future, assuming a broader rollout. 
 
 Still, there is a catch. The Gothenburg workers were paid the same for 36 hours of work per week as for 40, and additional team members were added. This means that quality of care went up with the number of hours being worked by staff. This does not represent a surprising finding. The somewhat staggering success of the program does, but businesses with concerns about overhead cannot reasonably be expected to take these results and run with them. Highly successful service businesses, however, will pay attention. Some 78 percent of Swedish workers are employed in service jobs as of 2012. That number is about average for Europe and America. 
 
 “We’re not answering a question of productivity and efficiency,” say Bernmar. “We’re answering a question about quality.” ||||| Pexels - CC0 
 
 After year-long trial at the retirement home Sjöjungfrun in Umeå, Sweden, it is apparent that the six-hour work day didn't achieve any of what was hoped for. 
 
 Similar to the experiment at the Svartedalen retirement home in Gothenburg, which was also completed this year, nurses at Sjöjungfrun in Umeå had six-hour days on eight-hour salaries for a year. 
 
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 Proponents of shorter work days in Sweden, like the sociologist Roland Paulsen of Lund University, argue that the ever increasing productivity of society means that in the long run there wont be enough employment to go around for eight hours per person per day, and a that on average two hours of any person's work day is filled with unproductive labor anyways. 
 
 The Umeå experiment was motivated by (political) expectations that reduced working hours would lead to increased personal health and well-being, compensating increased costs - and any productivity losses - by savings on sick leave and health-related expenses in the long-run. 
 
 The results leave little hope of any such beneficial effects even in the short-run. Sick leave did not decrease over the year but actually rose, from 8% to 9.3%, reports Sundsvalls Tidning. 
 
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 The difference in the accounts of Swedish trials of six-hour work days is puzzling. 
 
 The one-year trial at the Svartedalen retirement home in Gothenburg received international attention this spring when it was proclaimed a huge success, making the nurses happier, less prone to take sick-leave or vacation, and at the same time even more productive. 
 
 That study found that nurses in a control group at another facility were almost three times more likely to take time off and twice as likely to call in sick. The study also found that the nurses were 20% happier, Bloomberg reports - though it should be noted that measures of happiness are notoriously elusive. 
 
 The Umeå trial calls into question the miraculous results of Svartedalen. At the very least, it indicates that the success cannot wantonly be assumed to apply universally. 
 
 Kiruna was the scene for a much larger six-hour work day scheme, stretching from 1989 to 2005, which was finally scrapped because of lack of data to support any benefits. 
 
 And the debate isn't over yet. Starting tomorrow, September 1, social service workers at certain departments in Sundsvall, Sweden, will have six-hour work days at eight-hour salaries for a year. But in this upcoming experiment the six-hour work day isn't primarily introduced for the sake of health and productivity, but as a perk to facilitate recruiting and hopefully mitigate the shortage of social service workers, Sundsvalls Tidning writes. 
 
 NOW READ: 'Empty labor' is a huge crisis in offices — and the solution is to work less
– Think happier, healthier lives are worth any amount of money? The Swedes aren't so sure. Two years after adopting a six-hour workday, the Swedish city of Gothenburg says it will end the experiment over cost concerns, though it appeared to make workers happier and more productive. Indeed, in the first 18 months, 68 nurses at a Gothenburg care home for seniors with dementia who switched from eight- to six-hour workdays but kept the same salary reported feeling more fulfilled, less tired, and took 6% fewer sick days than nurses working 40 hours per week at a hospital, reports Inverse. Patients also reported improved care, while social activities at the facility increased by 80%. But all that came at a cost, reports Bloomberg: Gothenburg had to pay $1.3 million to hire 17 additional staff to fill out the workday. Instead of teams of four working eight-hour shifts together, teams of five were scheduled in overlapping shifts. And the expense wasn't worth the benefit. "I personally believe in shorter working hours as a long-term solution" but "it's far too expensive to carry out a general shortening of working hours within a reasonable time frame," says a local politician. He adds officials are "looking for other areas in which we can make work-time innovations, even if those aren't transitions to six-hour work days," though six-hour workday experiments are still taking place in other parts of the country, per Business Insider. (This country's workers can now ignore work emails at home.)