White Collar Worker Power and Its Impacts on Service Industry Workers

The pandemic changed only two things in American life. First, it politicized vaccines, which is a horrible impact. Ugh. Second, it empowered white collar workers to take control over their own worklives. Because they are white collar workers and thus have cultural and financial power, even if individualized, they get a lot of attention from the media. Here’s a good example–a recent story about white collar workers demanding and succeeding to get to work far away from their job’s location and how companies really aren’t going to get them back in the office.

At the same time, you have a lot of conversation right now about companies moving to a 4-day work week, especially in the UK. By and large, I think that’s great. I think a lot of work would be more productive done as a 4-day week for 5-days pay. There’s no good reason why we are stuck on the 8-hour day and 40-hour week as the ideal for work given the tremendous productivity of modern labor.

My question though is how this impacts service workers. All that extra time for white collar workers means a greater use of services. Whether it’s the bar or the canoe rental place or the yoga studio, demands will rise. Is there a path forward for service workers to have a 4-day week? Is there a path to use these ideas of modern work to empower the masses of low-wage workers in this sector? What I am seeing right now is that these new ideas of work are often being driven by those in the informational economy in some way (which very much includes the entire online left) without much thought about how to spin this through the masses of service workers.

I don’t necessarily have a solution here except to let in a lot more immigrants to fill these jobs. A win-win from my concern! But at the very least, we need to be thinking about these things all the way through the economy when articulating transitions in our work.