It’s Well Past Time for a Four-Day Workweek
Experiments with a shorter workweek have shown that shown that working fewer hours improves worker well-being and productivity. But we can’t expect employers to implement this transformative change of their own volition.
The eight-hour day was the product of labor struggle, not employer enlightenment. The same will be true of further work-time reductions today. (Pascal Bachelet / BSIP / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Thirty-five years ago, Boston-based labor economist Juliet Schor published a best-selling book called The Overworked American. In timely fashion, she helped rebut the then-prevailing neoliberal notion that the United States was not competitive in the global economy because hourly workers here were not toiling as hard as hundreds of millions of their counterparts abroad.
Believe it or not, a multimillionaire US senator from Massachusetts named John Kerry was such a fervent promoter of this myth that he would even lecture his blue-collar constituents in the Bay State about their need to work harder and smarter. (Members of our own union were one such captive audience at a union conference held during that era.)
Contrary to Kerry’s claims, Schor revealed how the eight-hour day/forty-hour workweek — won in the United States during the 1930s after a century-long struggle for shorter hours — had become a thing of the past by 1992. When The Overworked American was written, Americans were, on average, working about 164 more hours every year than they were in the early 1970s. In addition, they were spending more time on the job than workers in most other advanced industrialized countries.
Plus, US workers lacked federal statutory guarantees of paid time off for sick days, parental leave, and annual vacations, a situation that has not changed much since (except in certain blue states, due to state legislative action). Schor urged US employers and policymakers to embrace a different concept of productivity, measured not by “how many hours a person worked, but how productively he or she works them.”
Productivity Impacts
Schor tried to counter conventional corporate wisdom by citing studies showing that shorter hours can actually raise productivity in both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces. She noted that “historically, each time the workday was reduced — first to 10-hours and then to eight — productivity rose” because of less fatigue, higher morale, and a faster resulting work pace.
Anyone familiar with US labor history knows that work-time reductions were not the result of employer enlightenment or beneficence. As Schor recounts in The Overworked American, such reforms were the result of a labor-based movement — focused on shortening the workweek and winning a statutory requirement of overtime pay after forty hours. This culminated with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) during the later New Deal era.
FLSA-mandated overtime pay was equal to “time-and-a-half” of what you were paid for regular hours. Unfortunately, the FLSA did not say anything about what workers should be paid if they were told by their bosses to keep working after eight hours in any particular workday, before they reached the end of a forty-hour workweek. (In a few pro-union states, workers are entitled, under state law, to a premium pay rate after working eight hours in a single day, regardless of their total hours for the week.)
The federal requirement of extra pay after forty hours applies to those properly defined as an hourly employee, not a supervisor or independent contractor. Such favorable classifications by the US Department of Labor have historically been dependent on a Democrat being in the White House; the Trump administration has moved in the opposite direction.
Union Decline
In the post–World War II era, as Schor noted in The Overworked American, the steady decline in unions’ legislative clout left most US workers with little “culture of resistance to long hours or a political movement to press for further government reforms.” Workers fortunate enough to belong to industrial unions, with some remaining bargaining strength, continued to make gains.
But the arena of struggle narrowed to labor-management negotiations about paid time off, premium pay for overtime, and contractual limits on mandatory overtime. One of us, as a contract negotiator for the Communications Workers of America, personally aided some past efforts by factory workers in New England to win legally enforceable limits on forced overtime in manufacturing. This is not a popular bargaining table demand in that industry or any other that is protective of “management prerogatives” related to scheduling.
Today much labor jousting with employers in contract negotiations and in state legislatures is about protections for workers who have “compressed” workweeks. Even with the twelve-hour-a-day schedules those entail, management wants the ability to require additional daily “overtime” hours to cover any unforeseen staffing shortages. As health care unions have pointed out, this leaves nurses further burned out and exhausted, without adequate rest time between shifts, and puts patient safety at risk.
In Vermont, American Federation of Teachers–represented nurses tried earlier this year to get their state’s Democrat-dominated legislature to provide statutory limits on forced overtime. Currently, eighteen other states ban or severely limit mandatory overtime for registered nurses (RNs); in neighboring New Hampshire, the maximum shift length is twelve hours, with a minimum of eight hours off between shifts. Even with overtime limits, twelve-hour shifts are much too demanding mentally and physically for RNs. They also increase the risk of care-giving errors, particularly in understaffed facilities without minimum nurse-patient staffing ratios dictated by state law or union contracts.
Life-Changing Solutions?
In her latest book, Four Days a Week: The Life Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter, Schor seems surprised and disappointed that “despite widespread agreement that Americans were working too much, the issue died” in the 1990s and thereafter, due to “neo-liberal economics being on the ascendancy.” But as she returns to the subject four decades later, Schor believes that work time is back on the agenda.
This is partly due to our new “age of galloping artificial intelligence (AI),” in which millions of people are starting to get worried about widespread job elimination, a process already underway in the tech industry itself. In response to this development, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, and Labor and Pensions invited Schor to testify two years ago about a Bernie Sanders–introduced bill “to reduce the standard work week from forty to thirty-two hours.” This was the first time the Senate had revisited “the topic since 1955.”
Another witness was Shawn Fain, new president of the United Auto Workers. He reported that a thirty-two-hour workweek was among his union’s demands in auto industry talks in 2023 that necessarily focused instead on reversing past contract concessions by his corrupt predecessors. A realist about progress on Capitol Hill, Sanders noted that he was, per usual, planting a flag, not expecting congressional action any time soon. The socialist from Vermont used the hearing to highlight the fact that “productivity gains in recent decades have gone to people at the top, while wages have stagnated and hours have risen.”
As reported in her book, most of Schor’s new research and recent consulting work has involved “white collar knowledge workers,” whose nonunion “professional services and tech firms are over-represented among companies adopting four-day schedules.” Those firms’ voluntary embrace of shorter workweek schedules does not always solve the problem of work pace and intensity.
Workplace Experiments
As Schor acknowledges, these “work reorganization” experiments have “a strong focus . . . on maintaining or improving productivity.” The management expectation of the workers involved “is that they will get five days’ work done in four,” by eliminating their “time-wasting and low-value activities” (aka “working smarter”). To her credit, the author is “not a fan of the ten-hour day”:
Labor fought long and hard to get to “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.” Ten hours on one’s feet, in front of a screen, or driving is not healthy. It’s true that many people prefer a compressed work week because they may have long commutes, childcare responsibilities, or maybe just want another day to themselves. However, it doesn’t yield the significant well-being of our trials.
Nevertheless, Schor hopes that compressed workweeks will become “a transitional schedule on the road to thirty-two hours — even if right now “there are likely only hundreds, not thousands of organizations,” on such schedules in the United States. Among the examples she cites is Inglenook, a winery in California’s Napa Valley owned by “a humane, family-oriented employer” named Francis Ford Coppola.
Even if we currently have to depend on the beneficence of a few employers to secure “life-changing solutions” to the problems of job stress and burnout, that’s good news for anyone on their payrolls whose work-life balance is improved for the better. As a response to a much bigger workplace problem, however, it’s not going to get us far in the direction of societal solutions. That will be achievable only when and if organized labor regains its past scale and clout. In the absence of statutory mandates or union contract language, the most well-intentioned (or self-serving) experiments with alternative work schedules will probably remained limited to a small slice of corporate America and are likely to prove short-lived.