A 4-Day Work Week Sounds Great. How Do We Get One?
Workers deserve far more time off the job. But getting to a shorter work week will require a labor movement that can wield power to extract such demands.
Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
Thirty-five years ago, a Boston-based labor economist named Juliet Schor published a best-selling book called The Overworked American. In it, she helped rebut the then-prevailing neoliberal notion that the United States was not competitive in the global economy because its hourly workers did not toil as hard as lower-paid laborers abroad.
A multi-millionaire Massachusetts senator,named John Kerry, was such a fervent promoter of this myth that he would tell blue-collar audiences in the Bay State that they needed to work harder and smarter. (Members of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), our own union, were subjected to one such Kerry lecture at a late 1980s labor conference, where he also touted the virtues of free trade.)
A professor at Boston College, Schor revealed how the eight-hour day/40-hour work week — won during the 1930s after a century-long struggle for shorter hours — had become a thing of the past. When Overworked American was written, Americans were, on average, already working about 164 more hours every year than in the early 1970s. In addition, they were spending more time on the job than workers in most other advanced industrialized countries at the time.
Plus, U.S. 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. Schor urged more U.S. employers — and policy makers — to embrace a different concept of productivity, measured not by “how many hours a person worked, but how productively he or she works them.”
In her new book, Four Days a Week: The Life Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter, Schor expresses disappointment that — “despite widespread agreement that Americans were working too much — the issue died” during the Clinton era, as neoliberal economics became ascendant.
Schor has returned to the subject of shorter hours with good timing. In our new “age of galloping artificial intelligence (AI),” millions of hourly and salaried workers are starting to get very worried about job elimination — and not just in the tech industry, where downsizing is already underway.
In response to this development, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, and Labor and Pensions invited Schor to testify about a bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) “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, president of the United Auto Workers. He reported that a 32-hour work week 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 necessarily expecting congressional action any time soon. The democratic socialist senator from Vermont used the hearing to highlight the fact that “productivity gains in recent decades has gone to people at the top, while wages have stagnated and hours have risen.”
Productivity impact?
In The Overworked American, 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 U.S. labor history knows that work time reductions were not the result of employer enlightenment or beneficence. As Schor recounted in Overworked American, such reforms were the result of a labor-based movement — focused on shortening the work week and winning a statutory requirement of over-time pay after 40 hours. This culminated with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) during the 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 40-hour work week. (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 40 hours applies to those properly defined, as an hourly employee, not a supervisor or independent contractor. Such favorable classifications by the U.S. Department of Labor are 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 Overworked American, the steady decline in union legislative clout left most U.S. 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. As a contract negotiator for the CWA, one of us (Steve) personally aided some past efforts, by factory workers in New England, to win legally enforceable limits on forced overtime in manufacturing. This was not a bargaining table demand, popular with management in that industry or any other.
Today, much labor jousting about scheduling — in contract negotiations or in state legislatures — centers on protections for workers who have “compressed” work weeks. Even with the 12-hour-shifts that these often entail, management wants the ability to require additional daily “over-time” hours, as needed, to cover any unforeseen staffing shortages. As healthcare 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 (AFT)-represented nurses tried, earlier this year, to get their state’s Democrat-dominated legislature to provide statutory limits on forced overtime. Currently, 18 other states ban or severely limit mandatory overtime for nurses. In neighboring New Hampshire, the maximum shift length is 12 hours, with a minimum of eight hours off, between shifts.
Even with overtime limits, 12-hour shifts are much too demanding mentally and physically for nurses. They also increase the risk of care-giving errors, particularly in under-staffed facilities without minimum nurse-patient staffing ratios dictated by state law or union contract.
Workplace experiments
Most of Schor’s new research and recent consulting work has involved “white collar knowledge workers,” whose non-union “professional services and tech firms are over-represented among companies adopting four-day schedules.” Their voluntary embrace of shorter work week schedules does not always solve the problem of work pace and intensity.
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.” As she writes:
“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 work weeks will become “a transitional schedule” on the road to 32 hours — even, if currently, “there are likely only hundreds, not thousands of organizations,” on such schedules in the U.S. 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 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 is improved for the better. As a response to a much bigger workplace problem, it’s not going to get us far in the direction of societal solutions, which will be achievable only when and if organized labor regains past scale and clout.
In the absence of statutory mandates or union contract language, the most well-intentioned experiments with alternative work schedules — by a handful of white-collar employers — risk being just as short-lived as DEI initiatives became after Trump’s re-election, when the prevailing political winds shifted and management acted accordingly.
Steve Early was involved in organizing, bargaining, and strikes at AT&T and Verizon for 27 years, while serving as a Boston-based CWA International representative and, later, administrative assistant to the vice-president of CWA District 1, the union’s largest. He is an active member of the NewsGuild/CWA Freelancers Unit in the Bay Area and is supporting Sara Steffens for CWA president. He has written five books about labor or politics and can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com
