Back in 1992, I read a fascinating book, "The Overworked American" by the Harvard economist Juliet Schor. I was blown away. I even reviewed it for the economics journal, Challenge.
Contrary to popular myths, the industrial revolution with its increased productivity in both agriculture and manufacturing did not translate into increased leisure for workers.
In fact, the opposite happened. Medieval work had been highly regulated by the myriad feast days that slowed down the pace of work over the seasons. And in the fields, that pace was set by the serf or the peasant. There were no overseers pushing the pace of work as had occurred under Roman slavery and would later be the method of control on large plantations in the American slave south.
There is an interesting debate as to how much “work” was done by medieval peasants. Required work for the Lord was about 150 days a year, per Schor’s book but there was always self-sufficiency work like milking the cows, feeding the sheep, making sure the fences were mended, etc. that was done all the time, even on holiday or feast days. If one goes on line and googles this issue one finds that historians continue to debate the question.
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the length of the work day was set and the speed of the work was also set. The numbers of days worked rose dramatically as well.
Even more important, there was increased intensity of work - time in the factory or performing wage labor on farms (the first step in the transformation of the British labor force that transformed peasants into wage laborers occurred in the agricultural sector) was focused on making sure that time on the job was spent actually working - there was supervision.
Of course, this increase in the intensity with which people were expected to provide work produced resistance on the part of the workers. They organized labor unions which over the 19th and 20th centuries fought for shorter work weeks, better working conditions and rising wages. For much of the 19th century, that fight focused on making 10 hours the normal working day.
Fast forward to the middle of the 20th century. When I was growing up, I remember a fragment of a song celebrating the 8-hour day:
“I’m a lucky son-of-a-gun. I work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours and have 8 hours for fun.”
The eight-hour-day became the normal work week in the United States with the passage in 1940 of an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law explicitly required that employers to pay extra (the usual rule was “time and a half” - a $2 per hour wage would have to be $3 per hour) once the 40 hours of work had been satisfied.
And that’s where it stood. Beginning in 1970, with gig work, temporary work, the decline of union density in the private sector, and spread of “salaried work” up and down middle management, the actual number of hours worked per week and year has crept upward. That was the evidence that Schor focused on to write her book - and it was shocking.
Here’s one example which notes how much of the work force routinely exceeds the 40 hours work week standard.
In recent years Professor Schor has been part of a long term research effort to document the effects of experiments with a four-day work-week, making 32 hours the norm. So far, the evidence is overwhelming. Workers report less burn-out, more ability to concentrate on the job and businesses report that productivity improvements have meant that even though the weekly pay has remained the same, the reduced eight hours is more than made up for the most part.
The book is entitled "Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter."
By 2024, they had studied 245 organizations in seven countries. They report that for many employees, “…it’s a 'life-changing' innovation.
• 69% of participants experience reduced burnout, and nearly 40% are less stressed and anxious.
• More than half experience fewer negative emotions, and nearly two-thirds feel more positive emotions.
• 42% have better mental health, and 37% see improvements in physical health.
• People also score much higher on work-family and work-life balance.
You might ask - workers are happy to get paid the same amount to work fewer hours. How about the businesses who hire workers to produce enough to earn profits? Well, it appears to be helping the majority of companies who have tried this experiment. Looking at revenue, absenteeism, and resignations, the four-day week (for the most part - there are some exceptions) has been a huge win for the companies.
According to Schor, “We ask them to rate the trials, and they give consistently high scores - an average of 8.2 out of 10. Employers are mindful of the fact that their employees are thriving. As one wrote, ‘We’ve just done our annual happy check, and it’s our best employee engagement result in 27 years (across 20 questions). And I think a lot of that is down to the four-day week.’”
Check out this short piece by Schor.
By the summer of 2024, 245 organizations and more than 8,700 employees have been part of Schor’s team’s research. They have done trials in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. There are research trials in Portugal, Brazil, and Germany, with more countries on the way.
Reports from the completed trials are available on the 4 Day Week Global website, and for the U.K., on the Autonomy Institute website under their research tabs.
These aren’t retrospective answers. Schor’s team surveys people before the trial begins and track their individual responses at three, six, 12, and 24 months. They have done statistical modeling on why people are so much better off as they work less, and find that it’s a combination of inside- and outside-of-work factors. Thirteen percent of their sample say they wouldn’t go back to a five-day schedule for any amount of money.
In measuring the judgment of the companies who have tried the experiment, Schor points to the fact that only 20 companies discontinued their four-day week by the one-year mark. These represent just 10% of the total.
These great results don’t happen automatically. There’s a strong focus in the trials on maintaining or improving productivity, and the expectation for many organizations is that they will get five days’ work done in four. To that end, the trials begin with a two-month period of “work reorganization” to eliminate time-wasting and low-value activities. As one participant commented, “In business, we plan better, utilize our time wisely. More productive. Everyone pulls their weight.”
We also find that some things they feared don’t materialize. Positive features of work, such as people’s sense of autonomy and control of their schedules, are stable or improve. The productivity results aren’t mainly due to speedup. People are not taking on second jobs. A measure of workplace sociability does not decline.
In another, perhaps unexpected result, customers seem to be fine with it. A senior customer-facing employee told the researchers that when she informed her main client she wouldn’t be working on Fridays, their reaction was “That’s great” and they would respect it. The four-day week now feels like common sense.
Check out the following links from Forbes and New America for more details.
Now, despite the fact that I was inclined to respond positively to Schor’s analysis and research, I wanted specifically to know the improvements in productivity to offset the shorter work week would work with traditional blue-collar jobs. To keep the machines running to make sure productivity doesn’t lag would require actually hiring more workers. One of the important points Schor made in her 1992 book was that businesses would prefer to have workers work longer hours than to hire an extra worker to fill in those hours. The reason is because workers do not just get paid an hourly wage, they get a benefit package. (Health insurance, disability insurance, maybe even life insurance or long term care insurance.). This benefit package costs more the more workers you hire. Thus, one might think that a mandated eight hour day and four day work week would be resisted by business.
One example I found in the most recent book refers to a Brewery named Pressure Drop Brewing. The best short summary is that the ownership of the business found that there was a (small) increase in the pace of work but mostly the “savings” were from re-organizing work and “working smarter.” Now of course this is a sample of one and the skeptical observer might find that a traditional manufacturing business with an assembly line would be hard pressed to hire the extra workers necessary to keep the line moving with each worker getting an extra day off a week. And then there is the argument that if there were all these increased efficiencies available to companies that go from a five to a four-day work week, why haven’t they already instituted them? Schor spends a significant amount of time in that book developing the reasoning and I for one found it convincing.
I would urge anyone whose interest is peaked by Schor’s policy brief to pick up the book. You will not be disappointed.
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author with Howard and Paul Sherman of the recently published second edition of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.
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