A 32-Hour Workweek Is Long Overdue

Bernie is right. If we want increased productivity to benefit the working class, we need to take political action to make that happen.

Critics argue that it’s fine if technological advances deliver the shorter workweek without government intervention, but that “top-down” interference in the free market is a bad idea. This idea doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. If the reduction in hours was going to happen without being mandated, it would have happened long ago.

In 1940, the Fair Labor Standards Act reduced the workweek to 40 hours. Today, as a result of huge advances in technology and productivity, now is the time to lower the workweek to 32 hours – with no loss in pay. Workers must benefit from advanced technology, not just the 1%.

Earlier this month, Bernie Sanders renewed his long-standing call to reduce the workweek to thirty-two hours. He pointed out that there have been “huge advances in technology and productivity” in the eight decades and change since the Fair Labor Standards Act capped the workweek at forty hours.

Top-Down or Bottom-Up, Someone Better Mandate It

The idea is slowly gaining traction. Last year, a state-level version was proposed in California, and this March, there was an attempt in Congress to institute a thirty-two-hour workweek by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Right now, these efforts face an uphill battle to say the least. The California bill stalled out in 2022, though it could be amended and reintroduced this year. The federal attempt is going to be strangled in the crib as a matter of course. It was introduced in the House Education and Workforce Committee, whose chair, Republican representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, has said that “blanket federal regulations often cause more harm than good” because they don’t account for the “unique needs” of various groups, and that “Main Street America” doesn’t need “more top-down federal mandates.”

When the California version was proposed last year, Reason magazine’s Scott Shackford made similar complaints:

If modernization inevitably leads to people getting as much (or more) work done in fewer hours than they did in the past, then shorter workweeks are an awesome byproduct. We’re certainly not going to complain about people having to work less. . . . However, it’s not something that can be ordered top down via fiat by government officials who don’t have to deal with the consequences.

All this talk of “top-down” mandates makes me wonder what Foxx or Shackford would think about “bottom-up” mandates imposed by strong labor unions. I suspect neither of them would support the PRO Act or similar efforts to create a more favorable legal environment for organizing unions.

In fact, Shackford treats as insidious the provision in the California proposal that would exempt companies that have collective-bargaining agreements with their unions. He equates this with extortion to accept unionization. “It would be a shame if something happened to your company’s business model.”

Personally, I find it difficult to sympathize with the plight of employers “extorted” to stop their union-busting efforts. And a choice between accepting blanket rules mandating shorter hours or negotiating directly with your employees about what hours and other conditions they’re willing to accept seems reasonable enough on its face. But the real point here is that all this talk of “top-down” regulations misses the point. What the critics object to isn’t really that the proposed mandate comes from the “top,” but the fact that it’s a mandate.

Shackford’s claim that he’d be fine with a shorter workweek if it resulted “inevitably” from technological advances willfully misses the point. We know perfectly well that it won’t happen that way. There was a 299 percent increase in labor productivity from 1950 to 2020. As Senator Sanders rightly suggests, the benefits of that increase largely went to the top of society. It certainly didn’t automatically generate a shorter workweek.

The nature of capitalist property relations make such “natural” decreases deeply unlikely. If workers collectively owned and democratically ran their own workplaces, they would have the option of responding to laborsaving technological advances by simply voting themselves reduced hours with no reduction in income. But with labor and ownership separated, owners have little incentive to make that decision.