If You Like A 4-Day Workweek, You’ll Love The 5-Hour Workday
As always, the devil is in the details. Some companies are rolling out shorter workdays alongside fewer breaks and more worker surveillance in an effort to wring maximum output out of every minute. So that’s not great. And the tightly controlled implementation allows few opportunities for workers to form relationships or discuss shared problems, the building blocks of collective action.
The four-day workweek, meanwhile, is being tested on a larger scale in some European countries, and Rep. Mark Takano (D‑Calif.) has introduced legislation to shorten the standard workweek to 32 hours (making employees eligible for overtime pay sooner). But a longer weekend, for example, doesn’t do much for hourly workers or low-wage shift workers struggling to make ends meet.
As part of the larger project to make our working lives more humane, the question of shorter workdays or workweeks is a classic case of, “Why not both?”
