It’s Well Past Time for a Four-Day Workweek
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It’s Well Past Time for a Four-Day Workweek<br>BySteve EarlySuzanne Gordon<br>Experiments with a shorter workweek have 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)<br>Our summer issue is out now. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today.
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Review of Four Days a Week: The Life Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter — A Blueprint by Juliet Schor (HarperCollins, 2025)<br>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.<br>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.)<br>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.<br>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.”
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.<br>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.)<br>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.
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.<br>But the arena of struggle narrowed to labor-management negotiations about paid time off, premium pay for overtime, and contractual limits...