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The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is set to introduce a 4-day workweek in a radical plan to boost birthrates which have reached all-time lows. Their hope is to replace workplace productivity with bedroom productivity as Japan’s fertility rate has plummeted.
Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has determined that the lifetime fertility rate in Japan has sank to just 1.2. It has also determined that in order for a population to remain stable the fertility rate must reach 2.1, meaning the number of children a woman has over the course of her lifetime is 2.1.
As a point of comparison, the fertility rate in the USA is currently 1.66 and it has also declined steeply in recent years due to numerous factors.
Will Tokyo’s 4-Day Workweek Work?
The population in the greater Tokyo area is currently over 41 million residents. Presumably, giving everyone an additional day off from work each week would boost bedroom productivity for some but it’s not as if ‘time’ is the only factor preventing people from having babies.
Raising children is wildly expensive in the modern era. The 4-day workweek would have the advantage of providing an additional day where parents of young kids would be free of paying for childcare but again, would that be enough to reverse the fertility rate decline?
The Japanese government has been pushing for a raft of “now or never” policies to reverse the population crisis, including ensuring men to take paternity leaves, while other local governments have also introduced measures to improve work conditions.
Many sociologists attribute the ever-plunging birth rates to Japan’s unforgiving work culture and rising costs of living. Grueling hours have long been a problem for corporate Japan where workers often suffer from health hazards and, in extreme cases, “karoshi,” a term meaning death by over work.
It is hard to fathom a world where something as radical as a 4-day workweek to boost fertility rates would ever be proposed in the United States. That said, the world will be watching how this goes in Japan and if it is a successful plan other cities/nations may soon adopt similar measures.