Illustration by Sarah Angèle Wilson
This article appears in the August 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
When organizer and researcher Aidan Harper first began advocating for a four-day workweek in Britain, six or seven years back, he remembers being treated like a novelty act, like surfing dogs.
Over the past couple of years, though, things have changed. Now, governments across Europe are backing trials of shorter workweeks, companies are offering it as a perk, and when he is invited on the radio, instead of being mocked, he’s earnestly asked how it will work.
A shorter workweek was long a part of the agenda for the left and the labor movement, and seemed to be common sense. In “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” first published in 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that over the next century, the workweek would fall to just 15 hours. Instead, workers have seen productivity diverge from pay, rising inequality, and for many Americans, increased work hours.
Can we reverse that trend, and reclaim some of our time? A growing number of labor organizers and advocates around the world say we can.
Juliet Schor, economist at Boston College and author of The Overworked American, has been trying to figure out how to shorten our working hours since the 1990s. In the last few years, she’s found people more receptive to the idea. “It feels like now, a four-day week has become common sense, whereas five years ago, it would have felt maybe nice but impossible.”
The pandemic has helped bring about that shift. COVID-19 completely upended many people’s relationship to their job. We realized that nothing about how we work is immutable—it can change, and change quickly. During the pandemic, it mostly changed for the worse. The workweek, studies found, stretched out longer for the work-from-home brigades, while in-person workers found themselves doing forced overtime to make up for colleagues’ illnesses and chronic understaffing. This was a key issue in major strikes at Nabisco, John Deere, and Stanford Hospital.
The high levels of stress and burnout that workers have been feeling through the COVID waves, Schor said, are leading to new interest in shorter hours. With companies having trouble recruiting and retaining talent, some employers have begun to think, “OK, a four-day week with more of an output-based focus rather than a time-based focus could be feasible.”
FOR DECADES, THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT made the struggle for a shorter workday and workweek—with no loss in pay—central to its demands. The fight for a ten-hour and then eight-hour day linked workers across the country and industries, across race and gender lines. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” was the slogan of the eight-hour movement. Political theorist Kathi Weeks reminds us that a big part of the demand was always for pleasure, for fun, for leisure time. The movement for shorter hours, she wrote, “can also serve to provoke an interrogation of the basic structure of work and the needs, desires, and expectations that are attached to it.”
Stress and burnout that workers have been feeling through the COVID waves are leading to new interest in shorter hours.
It is just such an interrogation that the pandemic has restarted.
When Juliet Schor released The Overworked American in 1992, with the subtitle The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, she recalled it not being terribly controversial to say that we should work less. But public policy went in the opposite direction. Instead of shorter hours, people were compelled to work longer as wages stagnated. The 2008 financial crisis revived the idea a bit, but mostly in Europe, where employees worked shorter hours as part of job-sharing programs that limited the scope of unemployment.
In the 2019 election, the British Labour Party put the four-day week at the center of its policy agenda.
But after its devastating loss, the party retreated into mush-mouthedness. Today, U.K. activists are doing their work outside of the party.
In the U.S., the AFL-CIO adopted a resolution at this June’s convention that states “the AFL-CIO will aggressively take up the fight for a shorter workweek and earlier retirement in the arena of education, collective bargaining and legislative initiatives, and will work with like-minded allies in these efforts.”
THE MOST EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS in the movement right now are the four-day-week trials. They’re organized by a coalition including the organization 4 Day Week Global and researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Boston College; Schor is one of the lead researchers. The first trial began in February, and includes companies with workers in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and the U.S. The official U.S. trial started April 1st; the British trial began June 6th. More trials are planned for 2023.
The team recruits companies to sign up for the trial, which includes a series of workshops to help them transition. The trials use a “100-80-100” model, which means 100 percent of pay for 80 percent of time, attempting to maintain 100 percent of productivity. The researchers survey the companies before the trial starts, collecting data on performance metrics at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the six-month trial. “We’re going to be putting together the largest-ever database of impacts and outcomes for four-day weeks,” Schor said.
Kyle Lewis, co-director of Autonomy, a London-based think tank helping to run the British trial, said, “We were hoping to get maybe 20 to 30 companies signed up to it. Initially we had 500 to 600 companies come along to the welcome events.” Seventy companies, with over 3,000 employees, eventually signed on. Those companies range from a fish-and-chip shop to small manufacturers to marketing to care work. In the U.S., the companies include a restaurant chain and a number of tech companies; the best-known enrollee is probably Kickstarter, while the best-known to political junkies is Run for Something.
While there is no data for the official U.S. trial yet, Schor did have some results from three months of the February 1st trial. Workers, she said, are experiencing “less burnout, less stress, better physical health, better mental health, people sleeping more, people having higher life satisfaction.”
Another thing she’s seen, though, is that working hours have not fallen by a full eight hours. “Some of the open-ended comments suggest that it sometimes takes people a little bit of time to extract themselves from a five-day week.” But the vast majority have gone to a 32-hour, Fridays-off schedule. At a company called Healthwise, Schor said, when a customer service employee told her clients she’d no longer be available on Fridays, “their reaction was, ‘Oh, that’s fantastic. Congratulations.’” Just that response “feels like such a sea change.”
Participation in these trials is coming from the top, from managers and owners willing to sign their company up, though Schor noted, “Management is responding to where they think workers are at. I think there’s a generational demand here, because the younger generations have been more vocal in their desire for a four-day week.”
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/AP PHOTO
A strike at Deliveroo in London. Britain is currently engaged in the largest four-day workweek trial in the world.
MANAGEMENT’S CASE FOR THE FOUR-DAY WEEK is far from the only one. “We’ve made the case from an environmental standpoint,” Lewis said, “made the case from thinking about it in terms of gender equality or the trade union’s perspective and how it can enhance workers’ lives.”
Eventually, Schor said, legislation will be required to implement a four-day week, as it was to establish the eight-hour day. “Companies are not going to do this voluntarily en masse,” she said. She’s heartened by government involvement in organizing or subsidizing trials, as in Spain, where the trial is forthcoming, and Iceland, where a government-backed trial took place between 2015 and 2019. There’s an incentive for governments, Schor noted, because the four-day week can have “social benefits that aren’t going to be captured by the individual companies, whether that’s impacts on family life or community or decarbonization.”
In the U.S., Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA) proposed a bill last July that would not mandate a four-day week but would require overtime to be paid beginning at 32 hours instead of the current 40. The Congressional Progressive Caucus backed the bill, but it has yet to move, and Takano’s office did not return a request for comment.
IT ISN’T EASY TO REVAMP the workweek—particularly when the biggest change in working time in recent years has been the shift back to what is essentially piecework: the gig economy. Schor noted that while gig work doesn’t lend itself to time-based innovation, gig workers might get paid more once employees are paid five days’ wages for four days’ work.
Questions like these lead Aidan Harper, who now works as an organizer with Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), to stress the importance of workers leading the fight for a shorter workweek. IWGB represents gig workers, outsourced workers, and foster parents, as well as those more traditionally employed. “If we’re honest,” Harper said, “bosses and workers can’t both always win out. They have conflicting interests and working time is one of those.”
Many employers aren’t likely to be persuaded that shorter hours can increase productivity. While burnout and illness increase turnover, which has a cost, we have seen in the strikes at Nabisco, Kellogg, and elsewhere the degree to which employers rely on pushing workers to labor for longer and longer hours.
Both Schor and Harper noted that in certain kinds of work—health care being a big one—budget cuts have led to absurdly long hours. “It’s not that doctors and nurses have to go to too many meetings,” Schor said. “It’s that there aren’t enough of them, the pace is too high already, they’re too stressed.” While reducing burnout would have some effect on efficiency in care, the reality is that what is needed is massive investment—and hiring—in these industries. “I think we have to be a bit more honest with the fact that in those types of work, it does need additional investment, and that will have to come from either increased taxation or moving money around in the economy in a way that benefits more people,” Harper said. “Or in a private company, it will have to come from profit margins.”
Autonomy’s Lewis also worries that companies might offer a shorter workweek, but in reality just speed up the pace of work and squeeze their staff harder. The shorter week has to come alongside things like the right to disconnect (in order to make sure workers aren’t just being forced to pick up the slack at home) and adequate government monitoring of work conditions inside factories.
FOR MANY WORKERS, a four-day week even at five days’ pay will still not pay enough. A shorter working week at one job might just create more time to try to squeeze in another, or some gig work. Getting to a shorter week for those at low wage levels will require significant wage increases, and an end to companies’ misclassification of workers as independent contractors so the companies can dodge wage and hour law.
To win the shorter week in industries without benevolent bosses (i.e., most of them), or in labor-intensive fields where workers are the only cost to be cut, in other words, it’s going to take a much stronger labor movement than the one we currently have. “Historically, the trade union movement has always been strongest and most dynamic when it’s organized around working time,” Harper said.
Shorter hours could also be a cause where the labor and climate movements could find common ground. Autonomy has published reports indicating that a shorter working week would be good for the climate, and Schor aims to focus more on this issue in her research. She points out that the biggest climate benefits will happen if the four-day week jump-starts an ongoing process of working time reduction. “I think this needs to be at the center of how we’re thinking about transforming our economy and society in ways that decarbonize but that also make people better off,” she said.
In sum, Lewis noted, a shorter working week is only going to come into being if a variety of actors and movements push for it from all angles. “We need those multiple fronts making the case. There has to be a range of different movements putting pressure on for this to happen.”
