Aren't fewer workdays better for employment, because more people can be employed? I'm guessing it's more complicated, but is there some clear tendency?
Part of the complication if the enormous taxes and bureaucracy involved in companies hiring workers, it's a real pain for start-ups and smaller companies.
I will give you one concrete example: companies in Spain with more than 50 workers must carry out salary audits to avoid gender discrimination [1]. These and other perverse incentives keep many companies from growing, which in turn hurt the economy and reduces demand for workers, driving wages down.
It starts earlier than that: payroll tax in Spain is 36%.
If you're a micro-company, you can probably get away with paying each employee cash, or via B2B payments.
Once you reach any reasonable scale, you have to formalise those contracts.
This is a problem across the EU, apart from areas like the UK and Scandinavia which don't have payroll taxes (where interestingly tech seems to be flourishing).
If you make the definition of fulltime worker 30 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week, it certainly does make more people fulltime employed, but it also seems like cheating.
In the US underemployment was blamed on laziness, lack of training, etc etc for years but the actual cause is the Fed setting interest rates too high, and when they stopped we got more employment than ever (as of Jan 2020). If you simply make employers compete more to hire people, they will do a good job training them, making them more productive, ignoring minor criminal records and so on.
Yes, if you lower the bar for the definition of employment more people will fit the category. This doesn't fundamentally improve or worsen any problem. You are just redefining a term. The underlying reality hasn't changed.
