Leisure World – Is the 32-Hour Work Week Coming?
A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.
-- Benjamin Franklin
There is an active adult retirement community just north of Washington, D.C. called Leisure World. It presents a positive view of the possibilities of retirement, but sometimes goes by the less flattering moniker “Seizure World.” Of course, the search for leisure time in the modern world isn’t restricted to retirement.
What brings that to mind is the proposal made by Senator Bernie Sanders to pare down the 40-hour workweek over a four-year period to a maximum of 32 hours before overtime kicks in for presumably nonexempt workers. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/WIL241041.pdf . The 40-hour workweek enshrined in the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) has been the de facto standard since the 1940s. Before that, it was first set at 44 hours a week, and then 42 hours. Prior to the enactment of the FLSA, it was common for workers to be engaged for 55 to 60 hours per week or more. Indeed, one of the first federal wage laws (enacted more than 100 years ago during the Progressive era) was the so-called Eight Hour Day Law which regulated work days and overtime for government contractors.
As to Mr. Sanders’s bill, The New York Times reports that:
In a hearing on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on the proposed law, Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, said profits from boosts in productivity over the decades had been reaped only by corporate leaders, and not shared with workers.
“The sad reality is that Americans now work more hours than the people of any other wealthy nation,” he said, citing statistics that workers in the U.S. on average work for hundreds of hours longer each week than their counterparts in Japan, Britain and Germany.
Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said at the hearing such a reduction would hurt employers, ship jobs overseas and cause dramatic spikes in consumer prices.
“It would threaten millions of small businesses operating on a razor-thin margin because they are unable to find enough workers,” Mr. Cassidy said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/us/politics/bernie-sanders-work-week-bill.html.
The 40-hour work week is a cultural touchstone now after more than 80 years. I find myself torn between the points made by Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Sanders. They are both right. The inflationary and productivity impact of a four-day workweek are unknown. Of course, Sen. Sanders is on to something when he says Americans work longer hours than citizens in other advanced economies. The dirty secret, however, is that the cause isn’t really the 40-hour work week; it is the paucity of leave benefits. Most European and advanced Asian countries offer more vacation and holiday leave benefits than is the case in the United States. We work more hours because we work more days, not that we work harder in any given day, although some of us may do that too.
Personally, I favor more government-mandated leave benefits as opposed to fiddling with the 8-hour day/40-hour workweek. Anyway, in my experience, plenty of Americans can’t seem to labor for 40 hours even if they are paid for 40 hours. What happened to a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work? It isn’t a question of going back to the sweatshop era to say that the productivity of the nation is built on the base of its laborers and their willingness to work. If Americans are not willing to work, then obviously there is a whole world of developing nations clamoring to do that work in our place. And no amount of “artificial intelligence” is going to make us competitive.
Of course, there may yet come a new leisure age of robots and machines that replace workers, raise unemployment, and create new social dislocation. One remedy to less demand for workers is to reduce the work week and spread the work around. Indeed, the 40-hour work week arose from those very conditions. The Great Depression had raised unemployment as high as 27%. After things got better in 1937, the consensus was that an overtime law to encourage employers to hire more workers, rather than work their existing work force harder, would be a social and economic good. And, thus, was borne the FLSA.
I once had a call from Hugo Black, Jr., a lawyer in Miami. Mr. Black’s father was the chief sponsor of the FLSA back in his senatorial days, before his ascension to the Supreme Court. The son told me the enactment of the FLSA was his father’s proudest achievement. But the senior Mr. Black surely knew that it was not chiseled in stone. And it could evolve with the times. In that sense, maybe Sen. Sanders is ahead of his time, and tomorrow belongs to him. But this week, I plan to work all five week days, and maybe a little this week-end..