If You Like the Idea of a 4-Day Workweek, You’ll Love the 5-Hour Workday

Economist John Maynard Keynes, in 1930, predicted his grandchildren would grow up to work just 15 hours a week. Advances in technology and education had already led to an explosion of productivity, after all.

Needless to say, the prediction hasn’t quite worked out as expected. Despite productivity gains in every sector — one study estimates a full day of office work in 1970 can now be completed in an hour and a half — Americans are working more than ever.

That’s because what’s been determining our working hours isn’t our collective material needs, but the pursuit of profit for the ownership class.

Why would employers let us have a five-hour workday?

A growing number of start-ups are already experimenting with shorter work days, and it’s not all a feel-good PR effort: Shorter workdays tend to make people work more efficiently. The human brain can’t concentrate on a task for eight uninterrupted hours anyway, and history is full of famous scientists and writers who stuck to a strict daily schedule of 4 – 5 hours of focused work.

Wait — I thought we wanted a four-day workweek?

As always, the devil is in the details. Some companies are rolling out shorter workdays alongside fewer breaks and more worker surveillance in an effort to wring maximum output out of every minute. So that’s not great. And the tightly controlled implementation allows few opportunities for workers to form relationships or discuss shared problems, the building blocks of collective action.

The four-day workweek, meanwhile, is being tested on a larger scale in some European countries, and Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation to shorten the standard workweek to 32 hours (making employees eligible for overtime pay sooner). But a longer weekend, for example, doesn’t do much for hourly workers or low-wage shift workers struggling to make ends meet.

As part of the larger project to make our working lives more humane, the question of shorter workdays or workweeks is a classic case of, “Why not both?”

What would I do with all of my “extra” time?

That one’s entirely up to you — which is exactly the point.

(‘In These Times’ is an independent, nonprofit magazine dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice.)

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Another article in Common Dreams (February 15, 2022) by Andrea Germanos, “Belgian Workers Win Right to Request Four-Day Week” adds (extract):

Belgium announced Tuesday a package of labor reforms that includes affording workers the right to request a four-day work week.

Under the deal, according to The Brussels Times, “employees can work a maximum of 9.5 hours per day, with the possibility of extending to 10 hours per day via a collective agreement between the company and trade unions to allow employees to complete their full-time working week in just four days.”

An additional part of the agreement, Reuters reported, “introduces the right to disconnect after normal working hours for companies with more than 20 employees.”

Other reforms affect so-called gig workers. According to Politico EU:

“Belgium will introduce a set of criteria to assess whether a platform worker is a contractor or employed, which aligns with the EU’s proposal’s approach. If enough criteria are fulfilled—it’s not yet clear how many or which ones—gig workers will automatically be classified as employees. That status can, however, be challenged in front of a court of administrative authorities.”

The new accord, however, left plenty of room for criticism from worker advocates.

“For companies, it will become easier to introduce evening and night work without prior agreement from all labor unions,” as Bloomberg noted.

In addition, employers could refuse requests for a four-day work week, though they’d have to put their justification with “solid grounds” in writing.

That a single day’s work could stretch into as many as 10 hours drew criticism from the 4 Day Week Campaign.

“We welcome more flexibility for workers to choose when they work,” the campaign said, “but compressing a normal five-day week into four days is not the answer to tackling burnout, stress, and overwork.”

“It’s essential,” the group added, for a shift to a four-day week to involve “a reduction in working hours, with no loss of pay.”

Experiments in four-day work weeks have taken off across the globe. A pre-pandemic pilot program in Iceland—in which workers were paid the same but worked less—was deemed an “overwhelming success,” and the Welsh government is among those considering such a proposal.

(Courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit news portal.)