Structural conditions for working-time reduction as an eco-social policy: stakeholder assessments across European welfare regimes

Working-time reduction (WTR) has reemerged as a prominent eco-social policy proposal in debates on how to enable 1.5 °C-compatible lifestyles. While a growing literature documents its potential benefits for well-being and sustainability, less is known about the political conditions under which WTR becomes acceptable and implementable across different welfare regimes and positions in the global political economy. This article examines how stakeholder acceptance of WTR is assembled, contested, and constrained in practice, and what this implies for its political feasibility as an eco-social transition policy. Drawing on a hybrid Policy Delphi and Stakeholder Thinking Lab conducted in Sweden, Germany, and Latvia, we analyze how stakeholders embedded in distinct welfare-state and work-regime formations reason about WTR’s desirability, feasibility, and political possibility. The findings show widespread support for WTR on well-being grounds, but highly conditional acceptance when assessed as an ecological and political intervention. Perceived political feasibility depends on income security, labor-market institutions, coordination capacity, and countries’ positions within European and global core-periphery relations. Where welfare institutions buffer individuals from labor-market risks, WTR becomes a negotiable reform; where working time functions as a survival imperative, it remains politically fragile. We argue that WTR operates as a diagnostic “stress test,” revealing where societies can translate support for well-being into coordinated redistribution of time and where the social and institutional preconditions are missing. WTR debates in Europe are not only nationally differentiated but also globally situated, exposing the temporal and political-economic constraints that condition Europe’s 1.5 °C transition strategies.