Greece: towards a six-day working week?

A law that came into force on 1 st July 2024 allows certain companies to ask their employees to work a sixth day in the week with an adapted remuneration . This law is unlikely to fundamentally change the labour market, as it concerns only a minority of companies, but it carries a certain stigma: the six-day week was one of the Troika’s proposals at the height of the Greek crisis in 2012. Although the Greek economy is recovering well from the pandemic , the scars of the painful austerity measures imposed in the wake of the financial crisis are still present: GDP and GDP per capita have still not returned to pre-crisis levels. Despite significant improvements, the labour market continues to be characterised by a relatively high unemployment rate and relatively low participation and productivity rates.