Sen. Bernie Sanders' proposed national shift to a four-day, 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay was greeted this week by a wide range of reactions, with proponents calling the arrangement "life-changing" for workers, and detractors panning it as a potential job-killer.
The Vermont Independent on Thursday introduced a bill that would change the standard workweek for the first time since the 40-hour norm was established in 1940, calling the notion "not a radical idea."
The self-described democratic socialist's proposal has been met with divided reactions.
Juliet Schor, a Boston College economist who was the lead researcher in a 2022 study of 61 British businesses that switched to a four-day workweek, testified at a Senate hearing Thursday that the switch saw worker attrition drop while revenue and productivity stayed the same.
"Participants tell us the new schedule is life-changing," Schor testified, noting that 91% of the companies involved in the trial maintained the four-day workweek a year later.
Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union, testified Thursday that the economic reality of 2024 is far different for the typical American worker than it was in 1940, when the 40-hour workweek was made standard.
"The truth is working-class people aren't lazy. They're fed up. They're fed up with being left behind and stripped of dignity as wealth inequality in this nation, this world, spirals out of control," Fain said, according to NBC News. "They're fed up in America. In America, three families have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of citizens in this nation. That is criminal."
Liberty Vittert, a statistics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, testified that while that four-day workweek may make sense for some companies and industries, it can't be assumed that it will for all.
"There is no statistical evidence to merit a nationwide mandate of a 32-hour workweek," Vittert testified, according to the New York Times. "If it works for some companies in some sectors, that is great, but it cannot be applied to all sectors."
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, argued that such a shift could disrupt the delicate balance of the American economy in the long term.
"We have a balance. We don't have people as they do in China working 80 hours a week, but we have that balance - this disrupts that balance," he reportedly said. "And we won't maintain the status of being the world's wealthiest nation if we kneecap the American economy with something which purports to be good for the American worker but indeed will lead to offshoring of jobs seeking for a lower-cost labor force."
Cassidy specifically cited small businesses and restaurants as among those that could be negatively impacted.
"It would threaten millions of small businesses operating on a razor-thin margin because they are unable to find enough workers," he said.
