News analysis: 32-hour workweek addresses worker safety

There’s an old saying that touches on workers’ real need for activities beyond occupations: “Work is more than a job; life is more than work.”

This month, we mark Workers’ Memorial Day, which is more than reverently reflecting on those killed, injured or sickened on the job. The somber occasion also remembers that employers must be held accountable, and that society must prevent unsafe and unhealthy workplaces.

Last month, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill addressing one aspect: achieving a work-life balance by setting a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay.

Each day, the U.S. economy sees 340 workers die on the job, and 6,000 other made ill due to preventable working conditions, says the AFL-CIO, and many more suffer stress. Workplace stress is real, and damaging, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which notes that workplace stress reportedly causes 120,000 deaths in the U.S. each year; about 65% of U.S. workers surveyed characterized work as being a very significant or somewhat significant source of stress in each year from 2019-2021; 83% of U.S. workers suffer from work-related stress; 54% of workers report that work stress affects their home life; almost one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness – and or every $1 spent on ordinary mental-health concerns, employers see a $4 return in productivity gains.

“Stress can be harmful to our health,” OSHA says. “While there are many things in life that induce stress, work can be one of those factors.”

Introducing his proposal, Sanders said, “we find workers working longer hours. We find workers working deep into their 60s, 70s, even 80s. We find the associated deaths of despair from addiction and suicide, of people who don’t feel a life of endless, hopeless work is a life worth living.

“It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life,” he added. “It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.”

The “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act” is “not radical,” Sanders said.

And it’s not new.

Cutting hours has been debated since the 1800s, when the struggle was to cut weekly hours to 40 and workers’ cry was, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.”

Conservative industrialist Henry Ford in 1926 on his own shortened his company’s workweeks to five eight-hour days, and in 1933 a 30-hour workweek passed the U.S. Senate, but corporate America defeated it in the House. However, progressive President Franklin D. Roosevelt took up the fight in the 1930s, and in 1938 got the ground-breaking Fair Labor Standards Act passed, setting the basic workweek at 44 hours, after which overtime pay kicked in. (Likewise, Sanders’ measure wouldn’t exactly limit workweeks to 32 hours; it would just mandate time-and-a-half pay for hours above 32.)

The last time federal law reduced the workweek was in 1940 when the FLSA was amended to drop the threshold of hours after which workers qualify for overtime pay from 44 to 40. Then: nothing.

A four-day workweek was proposed in 1956 – by Richard Nixon, the Republican then-Vice President.

“These are not dreams or idle boasts. They are simple projections of the gains we have made in the last four years,” said Nixon (who’d drop the idea before running for the White House in 1960).

Iin recent years, there have been pilot programs and studies worldwide – in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere – showing that four-day workweeks can boost workers’ productivity and happiness.

:Our research suggests that the four-day, 32-hour week is not only feasible; it's better for workers and employers,” according to Boston College sociology professor Juliet Schor, who has led a team studying four-day workweek trials across the globe, quoted in Common Dreams.

"Of more than 100 companies with thousands of workers around the world, nearly 70% experienced reduced rates of burnout,” she said. “Stress fell. Reported physical and mental health improved. People felt less anxious and fatigued, exercised more, and slept better. Their life satisfaction rose, and conflicts among work, family, and life plummeted.”

Sarah Jaffe in In These Times magazine wrote, “The COVID crisis put the issue of working time back on the table. Many ‘essential’ workers -- including a wide swath of manufacturing employees – worked forced overtime and risked their lives and health. Across the country and the world, they decided enough was enough.”

That got labor leaders such as UAW President Shawn Fain thinking about a long-term strategy for reviving the issue.

“It really made people reflect on what’s important in life,” said Fain – who unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a 32-hour workweek with the auto industry’s Big 3.

“I really felt it was imperative to get the dialogue going again,” he said, “to try to fight for a shorter workweek and get the public thinking along those lines.”

Testifying before the Senate Labor Committee, Fain said a lack of appreciation for how much workers toil exposes a class difference.

“There is an epidemic in this country of people who don’t want to work,” he told the committee, “ – people who can’t be bothered to get up every day and contribute to our society, but instead want to freeload off the labor of others. 

“But those aren’t the blue-collar people,” he continued. “Those aren’t the working-class people. It’s a group of people who are never talked about for how little they actually work, and how little they actually contribute to humanity. The people I’m talking about are the Wall Street freeloaders, the masters of passive income.”

Through their productivity alone, American workers have earned the right to a 32-hour workweek.

In the last 40 years, productivity has increased significantly, yet little has improved in terms of hours – much less wages.

“Today, American workers are more than 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s,” according to Sanders and Fain, co-writing a Washington Post commentary. “Despite this fact, millions of our people are working longer hours for lower wages. In fact, 28.5 million Americans now work over 60 hours a week, and more than half of full-time employees work more than 40 hours a week.

“Think about all the incredible advancements in technology — computers, robotics, artificial intelligence — and the huge increase in worker productivity that has been achieved,” they continued. “What have been the results of these changes for working people? Almost all the economic gains have gone straight to the top, while wages for workers are stagnant or worse.”

An obstacle to relevant reform has been Big Business and its handmaidens in the GOP weakening organized labor, which has less influence in Congress than past decades.

“The rise of globalization and other factors ended up leading to the reduction in the size of the labor movement and its power,” said University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, a labor historian.

Fain challenges organized labor, Congress and the American public to take up the cause again.

“With technology, we can do more with less,” Frain said. “It is the mantra we hear from management every day, and yet it never benefits the worker. So, who is going to act to fix this epidemic of lives dominated by work? Will the employers act? Will Congress act? How can working class people take back their lives, and take back their time?”