The idea of shared work is over a hundred years old and has often been used to reduce unemployment in times of crisis. The basic idea is to introduce a general reduction in working hours to e.g. 35 hours per week, i.e. a reduction of 12.5%, thus spreading the available work among more people. This results in one additional job for every seven employees. In this way, current unemployment can be significantly and rapidly reduced, while at the same time the consequences of the crisis are shared in solidarity among all the population.
While a 12.5% reduction in working time also means a reduction in gross wages by the same percentage, the resources currently allocated to cash benefits and social assistance can be reallocated by the State to cover the shortfall in contributions and, as far as possible (especially for the lowest wage earners), to supplement the net wage, which would be lower in this scenario. However, redistribution of labour makes sense even if the state could not provide supplements to all wages (at the lowest wages, of course, supplements would be necessary), because in this way the loss of income would be shared by all citizens, and it is clearly fairer and easier for all of us to get by on slightly lower wages (with a shorter working week) than for 100 000 (and presumably many more) people to be completely unemployed for a long time, while the rest go on with their lives uninterrupted.
The social aspect is also important: unemployment as it is now and is growing will not be reduced in a year or two, but will produce large numbers of the permanently or long-term unemployed, who will thus also remain excluded from other aspects of social life and, as a result, will also be stigmatised personally. The redistribution of work through the introduction of a 35-hour working week would mean the social inclusion of a large number of people who would otherwise become and remain permanently marginalised.
It is also worth pointing out that shortening working hours also solves the problem of the large number of higher-skilled graduates entering a saturated labour market. A 35-hour working week would mean one new teaching post for every seven existing teaching posts, the same for lawyers, economists, engineers, etc. It is only in a few deficit professions such as doctors, where there is a shortage of staff, that more hours should be allowed in this scheme.
In short: the work available should be distributed among as many people as possible, and this can be achieved by introducing a shorter working week. While in times of crisis this often means slightly lower wages for all, in a renewed boom (if one follows), employees can start fighting for a return to the old wage increases while maintaining shorter working hours, which in turn means more leisure time and thus a substantial increase in quality of life.
To conclude: the idea of shorter working hours should not be seen as a naïve illusion. In the first half of the 19th century, workers worked 16 hours a day and more. It was not until a hundred years ago that workers chose to work 8-hour days. In 1932, after the Great Depression, a 30-hour working week was introduced in more than half of American companies in order to reduce unemployment. In recent decades, proposals to introduce, for example, a 30-hour working week, or a four-day working week (i.e. 32 hours), etc., have been seriously considered in many countries of the Western world.
Work is a commodity that needs to be distributed fairly among people. It is fairer for more people to work 35 hours a week than for fewer people to work 40 hours a week. At the same time, leisure is also a good, and the general reduction in working hours brings people more leisure.