The 32-Hour Work Week

There’s greater attention being paid these days to the idea of a 32-hour work week. Bernie Sanders has now introduced a bill in the Senate to produce this as federal law.

Senator Bernie Sanders this week unveiled legislation to reduce the standard workweek in the United States from 40 hours to 32, without a reduction in pay, saying Americans are working longer hours for less pay despite advances in technology and productivity.

The law, if passed, would pare down the workweek over a four-year period, lowering the threshold at which workers would be eligible to receive overtime pay. The 40-hour workweek has stood as the standard in the United States since it became enshrined in federal law in 1940.

In a hearing on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on the proposed law, Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, said profits from boosts in productivity over the decades had been reaped only by corporate leaders, and not shared with workers.

“The sad reality is that Americans now work more hours than the people of any other wealthy nation,” he said, citing statistics that workers in the U.S. on average work for hundreds of hours longer each week than their counterparts in Japan, Britain and Germany.

Mr. Sanders is far from the first to propose the idea, which has been floated by Richard Nixon, pitched by autoworkers and experimented with by companies ranging from Shake Shack to Kickstarter and Unilever’s New Zealand unit.

But the concept has gathered steam in recent years, as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused fundamental shifts in work culture and reset expectations about employment. Representative Mark Takano, Democrat of California, introduced the 32-Hour Workweek Act in the House in 2021, and has reintroduced it as a companion bill to the one sponsored by Mr. Sanders in the Senate.

In proposing the legislation, Mr. Sanders cited a trial conducted by 61 companies in Britain in 2022, in which most of the companies that went down to a four-day workweek saw that revenues and productivity remained steady, while attrition dropped significantly. The study was conducted by a nonprofit, 4 Day Week Global, with researchers at Cambridge University, Boston College and a think tank, Autonomy.

I have a lot of thoughts here.

First, there is no good reason that the work week should have stayed at 40 hours after the Fair Labor Standards Act finally created the 8-hour day and 40-hour week as a federal standard. Many unionists wanted shorter workweeks at the time and this continued into the early 1960s in some quarters.

Second, the points about productivity are absolutely correct. American workers are so incredibly productive and yet employers eat all the profits while wages stagnate. Shaking up the system has a lot of value.

Third, happier workers are more productive workers and laboring a four-day week would make workers happier. We all know, from personal experience if nothing else, that when we are more tired and more bored, we are less productive. Most workplace accidents happen late in shifts, if you are in a field where such things can happen.

Fourth, AI and other forms of automation are just going to make the need to labor such long days even less necessary than they are now.

Fifth–and this is major observation–is how much discussions of labor post-pandemic ignore the gigantic service sector. This proposal absolutely makes sense for office workers and it can make sense for factory labor as well. But so much of our post-pandemic adjustment in work is really just about white collar workers. That very much includes the desire to not commute and work from home. That is not available to factory or service workers. And yet, let’s say Sanders’ proposal became law. That’s great, but all that extra time? That will lead to even more demand for service-related goods and thus more workers. Thanks to the low wages of the service industry, it’s hard enough to fill those jobs now. How will we create even more service jobs, especially if they are only working a 32-hour week? There is of course a perfectly reasonable way–open the borders to immigrants who want jobs. There’s no shortage of them! But no, we can’t do that because we have to protect the white race from hearing Spanish or something.

I really get frustrated that we don’t center service work in our discussions of labor. That’s a huge and growing part of the labor force. It’s where most of the growth going forward is likely to take place as well. We need to center their needs, not ignore them, when we create policy around work. I am fully behind the idea of a 32-hour week and I am fully behind the idea of not commuting every day and working from home. But if the upshot of this is putting more pressure on service workers, then what have we accomplished except centering even more of the benefits America offers in the elite workers?