The four-day work week has received quite a buzz in the past year. Most recently, California is considering passing a bill that would shorten the work week from 40 hours to 32 hours for the same pay, and anything above 32 hours would receive the time-and-a-half overtime pay (although it only applies to employers with 500+ employees). For most Californians, yeah, this would mean a four day work week.
This comes nearly one year after the results of four years of massive trials with a four day work week in Iceland were released and held up as wildly successful. Employees were equally or more productive as they were during a 40 hour week, and they reported less stress and other positive outcomes. Further, a recent report suggests that a four-day work week may have benefits for the environment. So what do we know about work hours?
Let’s start with a history lesson. The push for an 8 hour work day dates back to the early and mid 1800s (although, Spain’s King established an 8 hour work day for the country and its colonies in 1593). There were some successful strikes within industries to shorten the workday to 8 hours (e.g., ship carpenters in Boston in 1842, stonemasons in Australia on April 21, 1856). The global push for an 8 hour work day came from the International Workingmen’s Association starting in 1864. In fact, International Worker’s Day (May 1) was established by this group in 1889 to honor the Haymarket Massacre-a bombing and firefight between police and protestors in Chicago on May 4th 1886 after days of peaceful protests being met with violence from police on May 3rd.
Legislation creating a national 8 hour workday for most employees in the United States was passed in 1937 called the Fair Labor Standards Act (which in its original form in 1932 actually proposed a 30 hour work week!). It established a minimum wage, overtime (effectively creating the 8 hour work day), and child labor protections. It is worth highlighting that these protections intentionally did not cover agricultural or domestic workers, and largely disadvantaged tipped workers, who were primarily Black. And this is largely where we’ve stayed from a legal perspective as far as the 8 hour work day, and 5 day work week, except a change in 2004 which essentially removed these protections for “working supervisors”- front-line supervisors who perform many tasks that aren’t purely supervision.
Moving into the science, there is a pretty solid case that higher work hours are associated with negative outcomes for individuals. For example, one study found work-life balance satisfaction decreases as work hours increase, especially for workers with less control over their work hours (Valcour, 2007). Another study found that for managers, work hours are strongly correlated with family alienation, work stress, and work overload, particularly for men (Brett & Stroh, 2003). Meta-analytic results suggest that across 48 studies and 17,000+ people, that work hours are consistently linked to higher levels of work-interfering with family, even after accounting for job stress, job support, and work involvement (Ford et al., 2007). But it’s not just family outcomes that are impacted by work hours. On days when employees (particularly women) work longer hours, they tend to eat high-fat or high-sugar snacks, consume more alcohol and caffeine, and exercise less (Jones et al., 2007). Further, work hours are associated with increased physical health symptoms if you also experience high levels of pressure at work and low levels of support, suggesting that companies that don’t invest resources to reduce pressure and/or provide support to overworked employees can exacerbate the negative impacts of these work hours (Tucker & Rutherford, 2005). Similarly, a study of physicians found that work hours are positively associated with burnout, and negatively with a sense of fit between work hours and desired work hours; but, for people who felt this fit, burnout symptoms were reduced (Barnett et al., 1999).
So knowing that increased work hours takes its toll on the psychological, physical, and emotional health of employees and their families, what should we do? First, support and advocate for regulations and legislation (at local, state, and national levels) reducing work hours without reducing pay. Second, provide increased schedule flexibility not only around when people work, but how much. This will likely require increasing staff, which benefits the broader economy as well, and creates redundancy in staffing pools that may aid in unexpected absences or unannounced turnover. Third, provide support, including financial compensation, for employees in the workplace if you aren’t providing schedule flexibility. Employees are not only selling their labor and time, but would also be selling their personal flexibility and this should be reflected in their pay and in the supports provided to them by the workplace. And fourth, as an employee, unionize. The history of the movement for a shorter work week is the history of unions, and the power of unionization. Shorter work hours for the same pay is likely not something an individual can negotiate or craft for themselves on the job, but history shows us, is something that unions (including cross-industry union efforts) can push for and create.
-Keaton Fletcher