S T C E P S PRO
A Four-Day Week at Five Days’ Pay Workers (and their families) are stressed by the long hours they have to put in. It’s past time to cut those hours.
By Sarah Jaffe 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 16 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022
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 eighthour 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.”
