Bernie Sanders proposes reducing Americans’ workweek to 32 hours
Senator Bernie Sanders this week legislation unveiled to reduce the standard work week in the United States from 40 to 32 hours, without a pay cut, saying Americans are working longer for less pay despite advances in technology and productivity.
If passed, the law will shorten the workweek over four years, lowering the threshold at which workers qualify for overtime pay. The 40-hour work week has since become the standard in the United States codified into federal law in 1940.
At a hearing Thursday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the proposed law, Mr. Sanders, an independent of Vermont, said the profits from productivity increases in recent decades had been reaped only by business leaders and not shared. with workers.
“The sad reality is that Americans now work more hours than residents of any other wealthy country,” he said, citing statistics showing that U.S. workers work on average hundreds of hours longer per week than their counterparts in Japan, Great Britain Britain and Germany. .
Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said at the hearing that such a cut would hurt employers, shift jobs overseas and cause dramatic spikes in consumer prices.
“It would threaten millions of small businesses that operate on razor-thin margins because they can’t find enough workers,” Mr. Cassidy said.
Mr. Sanders is far from the first to propose the idea. The idea was suggested by Richard Nixon, pitched by autoworkers and experimented by companies ranging from Shake Shack to Kickstarter and Unilever’s New Zealand unit.
But the concept has gained momentum in recent years as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused fundamental shifts in work culture and revised expectations about employment. Rep. Mark Takano, Democrat of California, introduced the 32-hour workweek bill in the House of Representatives in 2021 and reintroduced it to complement the bill sponsored by Mr. Sanders in the Senate.
In proposing the legislation, Mr Sanders cited a trial carried out by 61 companies in Britain in 2022, where most companies that switched to a four-day working week saw revenues and productivity remain stable, while staff turnover fell significantly. The research was conducted by a non-profit organization, 4 Day Week Global, with researchers from Cambridge University, Boston College and a 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 work week had stuck 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 target only the kinds of companies that can afford the flexibility in work schedules, and ignore many companies where employees work hands-on.
“There is no statistical evidence to justify a national mandate of a 32-hour work week,” said Liberty Vittert, a professor of statistics at Washington University in St. Louis. “If it works for some companies in some sectors, that’s great, but it can’t be applied to all sectors.”