Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation this week that would shorten the standard workweek in the United States from 40 to 32 hours without cutting wages. He said that despite advances in technology and productivity, Americans are working longer hours and getting paid less.
If passed, the law would reduce working hours over a four-year period and lower the threshold at which employees would be eligible for overtime pay. The 40-hour work week has been the standard in the United States since it was enshrined in federal law in 1940.
In a hearing on Thursday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the proposed legislation, Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, said gains from productivity improvements over the decades had only been reaped by business leaders and not shared with workers.
“The sad reality is that Americans now work more hours than people in any other wealthy country,” he said, pointing to statistics that show workers in the United States work an average of hundreds of hours longer each week than their counterparts in Japan, Britain and Germany .
Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said at the hearing that such a cut would hurt employers, send jobs overseas and lead to dramatic increases in consumer prices.
“It would threaten millions of small businesses that are operating on razor-thin margins because they are unable to find enough workers,” Cassidy said.
Mr. Sanders is far from the first to propose the idea, which was pioneered by Richard Nixon, put forward by auto workers and tried by companies like Shake Shack, Kickstarter and Unilever’s New Zealand unit.
But the concept has gained traction in recent years as the Covid-19 pandemic has led to fundamental changes in work culture and altered expectations of employment. Rep. Mark Takano, Democrat of California, introduced the 32-Hour Work Week Act in the House of Representatives in 2021 and reintroduced it as companion legislation to the bill introduced by Mr. Sanders in the Senate.
When Mr Sanders proposed the law, he cited a trial carried out by 61 companies in the UK in 2022, which found that most companies that switched to a four-day week found that sales and productivity remained stable, while attrition was reduced decreased significantly. The study was conducted by nonprofit organization 4 Day Week Global with researchers from the University of Cambridge, Boston College and think tank Autonomy.
Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College and lead researcher on the study, testified at Thursday’s hearing that 91 percent of companies that switched to a four-day week remained with the new arrangement a year later.
“Participants tell us the new schedule is life-changing,” Ms. Schor told senators.
Critics, including some who testified at this week’s hearing, say many of the pilot programs focus narrowly on the types of companies that can afford the flexibility in work hours, and many companies with employees who do hands-on work , be ignored.
“There is no static evidence to justify a nationwide requirement of a 32-hour work week,” said Liberty Vittert, a statistics professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “If it works for some companies in some industries, that’s great, but it can’t be applied to all industries.”
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2024-03-15 10:12:42
www.nytimes.com