The Organización de Mujeres Salvadoreñas por la Paz (ORMUSA), a leading women’s rights organization in El Salvador, has raised concerns about proposals to compress the country’s standard 44-hour workweek into fewer, longer working days.
Under such schemes—often pitched elsewhere as a path to better work-life balance—employees would work the same total number of hours, but packed into four long shifts instead of five or six shorter ones. ORMUSA argues that this approach is misleading: it doesn’t actually reduce anyone’s workload, and in practice it can make things worse by increasing daily fatigue and stress.
The organization also points out that a compacted schedule fails to address a deeper problem facing many Salvadoran women: the so-called double burden of holding a paid job while also carrying most of the responsibility for childcare, eldercare, and housework at home. Longer workdays, ORMUSA notes, would leave women with even less time and energy to manage these unpaid duties, rather than freeing up meaningful rest or family time.
The warning comes amid broader public debate in El Salvador over how to modernize labor schedules without sacrificing workers’ health or deepening existing gender inequalities in the distribution of care work.
To read the full original report in Spanish, visit El Diario de Hoy.
Source: ORMUSA advierte que compactar la jornada no reduce el trabajo (El Diario de Hoy).
Image: Güel – Centro de Wellness Murcia, BY 2.0 (via Openverse).