Belgium's Legal Right to a Compressed Four-Day Week (2022 Labour Deal)

Belgium's Labour Deal, in force since 21 November 2022, gives employees a statutory right to request compressing their existing weekly hours (e.g. 38 hours) into four days instead of five, raising the daily cap to 9.5 hours; employers may refuse only in writing, and dismissal in retaliation for a request is prohibited.
Unlike Iceland's or Portugal's trials, the Belgian law does not reduce total hours worked — it only compresses the existing schedule. Legal analysis by L&E Global recorded roughly 60% approval rates among employees who formally requested the arrangement in the law's first two years.
Independent reporting by Newsweek in 2024 found actual uptake far lower than approval rates suggest: only about 1% of Belgian workers were using the compressed four-day schedule, a result commentators attribute to the law requiring longer, not fewer, total hours — a cautionary example of a legal right to flexibility that has not translated into workforce-wide retention gains.

Read the full analysis: https://www.newsweek.com/evaluating-belgiums-four-day-workweek-impact-1893298