In 1956, a utopia-minded politician predicted a future in which Americans could work less and the forty-hour week would become a thing of the past. “These are not dreams or idle boasts,” declared the Marxist firebrand — one Vice President Richard Nixon — “they are simple projections of the gains we have made in the last four years.” In the “not too distant future,” he anticipated, “[the] backbreaking toil and mind-wearying tension will be left to machines and electronic devices.”

Nixon, it hardly needs saying, was neither a radical nor a friend of the American worker. But his sentiment nevertheless reflected a certain conventional wisdom about technology and the future of work. With the help of robots and automation, it was long assumed, machines could increasingly take on the lion’s share of mundane and laborious tasks, leaving ordinary workers with more time to spend however they saw fit.

The same logic can be found in Senator Bernie Sanders’s recently tabled “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act.” Introduced by Sanders earlier this month (and notably backed by a broad coalition of trade unions), the legislation would, as its title suggests, gradually reduce the standard forty-hour work week to thirty-two hours over a period of four years without loss of benefits or pay. (Workers, of course, could still work more but would receive overtime for every additional hour.)