 Yes my name is Gudmundur, I'm a representative of ALDA. ALDA is a I think that we concentrate on democracy, sustainability and include working hours. Working hours is a pre-condition of course as Michael said for democracy. I have time for that. So I'm going to present to you trials of shortening of working hours that was conducted in Iceland for a number of years that has now led to contracts basically. So let me begin. So just a little bit about Iceland. Iceland is a country of 356,000, labor market of 200,000, a relatively small country. There's high workforce participation, 87% and 75% working full-time. Average working time is 44 hours a week, which is considerably higher than our neighboring countries that we usually compare ourselves to the other Nordics. And the duration of working life is quite long, 47 years, which is the longest in Europe. And however our GDP and living standards are very high and have been for quite a while that way. It is a service and exporter in the economy with all the characteristics of advanced economies, lots of digital services and so forth. So in summary it's an advanced economy. We have high living standards, however our working time is high, long and we have households whereby everyone basically might be working full-time, but there's still everything to do within the home. So this can lead to imbalance in work-life situation. And this is actually pronounced. If you look at the authorities such as OECD, you will see that Iceland is doing poorly in work-life balance and has been for quite a while. Their older studies let's show the same trend. So Altas position has been in essence that we have all the capabilities to do better here. That we can try to be a little bit more efficient with how we spend our time and gain a bit of more productivity, but use that to shorten working hours and gain more work-life balance. We view this as a first step in a much longer program, which maybe is slightly more complicated to explain, but yes. For us this is only a first step. So I'm going to switch to the trials themselves. So for a decade or so there has been increased public discussion on working hours in Iceland. Alta has participated in this. We hosted a conference last year for example, beginning of last year. There have been articles, reports. Alta has published one report and really increased awareness that you can work less, you can have less stress and burnout as a result, that you can still have high living standards even though you work less. There is more public understanding of this and increased in politics as well. Iceland is historically a country of long working days. This is an old trend. So around 2014 BSRB, which is the Confederation of Public Unions, that's the largest one in the country, proposed a trial with Reykjavík City Council, Reykjavík is the capital, and the government to trial a shorter working hours. The idea was to study effects on productivity and work-life balance and see if, study if it was actually possible to reduce hours, but still maintain same services, same output in the workplaces, still do the same things. This was actually agreed to by the Reykjavík City Council and the Finance Minister. So this is a rough timeline of the trials. And you can see 2010, then 2020 leads to new contracts. It's a long time. 2015, the Reykjavík trial actually starts with 66 participants. It included the service center, child protection service, and the next year the first results are in, and they are positive. So more workplaces join that point, about 280 participate. Year after that the government trial starts with 800 participants, included the tax office, police station, our registers, and so forth. The trial in Reykjavík was extended the next year. So 2,500 people were participating in 100 workplaces. 2,500 is more than 1% of our workforce. So on the scale of Iceland it's a big trial. The same year the government trial was extended and a hospital department joined. The point of having a hospital department was to study the possibility of shift our workers joining such a trial and how to make that function. It did. So in 2018-19 there was a number of studies, final results, and a conclusion of the trial basically. 2019 and 2020 new contracts nationwide were signed and they included shorter working hours or thousands of workers in many different sectors, public, private, service, production, etc., also healthcare. So the shorter working hours in practice, they were guided by committees. These were large trials and they were trying to find a way to do this. This was a bit new to people in a way. There was no reduction in pay. All workplaces had to apply except for the first two workplaces which were handpicked. Those workplaces that applied had to demonstrate ability to maintain services. There was criteria for eligibility in the government trial. So these were two different trials, one at the regular city level and one at the government level. They were slightly different but mostly the same. The strategies for shortening of hours were read. Some workplaces, offices, this included shortening meetings, simplifying processes, rethinking how things were done, etc., in workplaces where there were shifts, these shifts were changed. If there was an opportunity for having maybe less stuff at a certain time, this was done so that people's shifts would end sooner or begin later and those you can shorten their shifts, reduce the working hours, but still maintain the same service. These choose basically to change the shifts depending on circumstances. So there was no single template really. It was different between workplaces. These workplaces were so different by nature that this really was necessary. Also the number of hours shortened via it. So there could be one, two, three, four or five hours a week depended on workplace. There were a number of studies, qualitative, quantitative, both focusing on workers and managers. These were group interviews, questionnaires, individual interviews, and they focused on work-left balance, stress levels, home life, communications, side effects of the trials, etc. The point was to gain understanding of the impact of these trials and possible side effects as well. So there was actually a whole stack of reports on this. There's hundreds of pages of material. The results were, well, let's begin with a myth. There is no shortening of hours, only lengthening of overwork. This was propagated in Iceland here by the Employer Associations before and during the trials. But this did not materialize. People actually worked less. The numbers, because they kept track of how much people were working, the numbers show this. This was confirmed in interviews. And I should note that in these interviews, managers were not present unless they were contacting interviews with managers. So people had to try to make sure that people could speak freely. The researchers were independent academics. The workplaces were able to provide same services, maintain similar, same service as before. The idea was not to reduce service. There are some exceptions to this. For example, in one place they changed the opening hours and they actually reduced the hours of opening at the time when it was least used. This did not have an effect on how well the service was thought of by the users. That was okay. So there was positive effects on low work-life balance. People actually felt that it was easier to go through their daily lives to do their work and actually maintain their homes and do everything you need to do in regular home life. Man participated more in home duties. This was noted by pretty much everyone. There was positive impact on other family members, less stress, interestingly, and positive impact on burnout symptoms. People actually said repeatedly, we just have more time. So generally the effects were positive. If they were not positive, they were mostly neutral. And in some cases, they were negative. These measures mostly that some people felt there was a bit more speed. Everything happened faster. There was just shorter time to do everything at work. This was not a big factor. It was noted. Most people were happy and wanted to maintain and continue this. The general atmosphere was, well, if they're going to stop this trial, we will protest. So yes, people really wanted to continue this. They felt this is a significant change for their lives, impacted their lives. So in 2019 and 2020, after long negotiations, particularly for BSRB, it took a whole year to negotiate. They signed contracts. The trials did help the unions to negotiate. And as they could give good reasons for why they should implement shortening working hours, they had concrete examples of how to implement it. However, the number of hours shortened were variable. They were not always the same. And there were two forms of shortening that were common. So there's a flat reduction that everyone gets, for example, nine minutes a day, 45 minutes a week, flexible. And then additional shortening by two hours a week, or some minutes a day, flexible again, implementation. And the workers proposed a strategy to implement this. They might have to give up, for example, their coffee breaks so that they actually do get coffee breaks, but these might be at irregular times. People have commented on this and actually say in practice, it may not be such a big factor. It's because you get to leave earlier anyway. So the numbers worry. And the above is an example. There were dozens, tens of contracts, they all differ. So there's no single model for implementing shortening hours. This is flexible for each workplace. BSRB is probably the largest winner in this round of negotiations. And for regular daytime workers, their hours went from 40 to 36 per week, which is a significant change. Shift workers from 40 to 36, and even if possible to 32 hours. Also for shift workers, their work outside of the daytime amounts to more. So 80% work in the night leads to 100% pay. So all hours outside of the daytime count to more. Importantly, pay was not reduced because of these contracts. So yeah, we have a bit more information on our website and these contracts and how they're implemented. There's also information about a conference we had last year.