In a post at Vox, Ecole Polytechnique Professor of Economics Pierre Cahuc,  and Stéphane Carcillo, Associate Professor of Economics University of Paris, argue that short-time work can be effective in "combating unemployment" during global financial crisis, but that it is not without some problems.  They say 25 of 33 OECD countries have used the practice of short-term work schemes:

Cahuc and Carcillo write:

European countries with widespread and generous short-time compensation experienced a smaller rise in unemployment in the recent recession than those without. The leading example is Germany that makes a particularly intensive use of a short-time work programme (the Kurzarbeit).

This success has renewed interest in short-time work. But the idea itself is nothing new. The suggestion that it could be more efficient and more equitable to share jobs with short-time compensation rather than destroying jobs during has been repeatedly put forward by advocates of work-sharing. For instance, Abraham and Houseman (1994) argued that short-time work arrangements can be more equitable since they spread the costs of adjustment more evenly across members of the work force instead of concentrating it on a small number of laid-off workers.

But short-time compensation programmes are no panacea. They can induce inefficient reductions in working hours. Moreover, workers in permanent jobs have incentives to support such schemes in recessions in order to protect their jobs. Employers also have incentives to support short-time compensation programmes in countries where stringent job protection induces high firing costs. Therefore, there is a risk attached with using these programmes too intensively. The benefits of insiders can be at the expense of the outsiders whose entry into employment is made even more difficult.

Read Is short-time work a good method to keep unemployment down? here.