Why Should I care about the Five-day workweek?
The concept of the four day work week isn’t an entirely new concept. Rather, it has always been in question whether or not the US should consider cutting back on the number of hours working citizens are required to give up to work. Now, it’s not just the idea of working less but exploring the benefits this would bring to the mental health of millions of people. With work, comes stress, anxiety and often depression. The World Health Organization states that, “Globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety at a cost of US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity”. So why is that we have the five-day workweek still implemented into our system after all these years?
As someone that struggles with mental health, the time I spend away from work and school are vital for me to catch up on other hobbies, chores and leisure activities that calm my anxiety and stress. The more time I spend away doing work, I find that the less productive I get, which had me thinking if the 40 hour work week is “over doing” it on the demands. In the modern day, people have other priorities such as family, friends and hobbies. Additionally, more work is done on the weekends, to catch up from running around during the weekdays.
Switching from a traditional five day, 40 hours, workweek to a four day workweek affects a variety of economic and societal factors such as productivity, GDP, mental health, and overall happiness of a country. Other nations like Iceland, Australia and Belgium have adopted this practice and they are continuously noted in top ranking countries in several categories. The fact that the US has yet to fully implement the concept of working less is intriguing as it is considered an economically innovative country.
History of the 40 Hours
When America was in the heights of the great depression, unemployment rates were at a concerning number. To combat that, the government officially implemented the 40 hour work week so that more workers could take shifts at factories. The concept, according to CNBC journalist, Marguerite Ward, is, “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest” . The 40-hour work week was actually reduced from 70 hours a week during the Industrial revolution. Revolutionary companies, such as Ford Motors, at the time reduced the working hours to protect workers safety and health. While the forty hours might’ve made sense at the time, there was a peak in the amount of work required. However, it is no longer relevant like it was in the late 1800s. Women were not permitted to work extensive and laboring hours back then, because they had a family and house to take care of, but in the modern age, women are allowed to work the hours they desire. The five-day work week is rooted in misogyny in this way and the most efficient way to combat that is to allocate less hours in work and more to the other, more important, aspects of a human’s life. Full-time employees are led to believe that working 40 hours is necessary to succeed in a capitalist society.
When Americans take out loans for education, paying for a car or for a home mortgage, it takes a lot to pay them off. The reason for this is because of America’s inflation and debt. When someone takes out a loan, the debt accumulates over time due to interest and inflation. Inflation in simple terms, is the decreasing value of money and increasing prices. Interest, which adds on to inflation, is the price to borrow money which accumulates over time. Money is circulated throughout the economy by debt when people take out loans. Interest coupled with organized ongoing debt within the nation has people in a constant state of owing money, leading to the blind acceptance and participation of the five day workweek.
What do I need to know?
In order to understand why the five-day workweek is unproductive, there are some terms that can be helpful to determine if it’s useful or not. To measure whether or not a nation is economically succeeding, the GDP, or gross domestic product, is measured to see how much product and services a country produces for a given amount of time. This can also be used to measure a country's productivity. Small countries, in relation to the United States, have a smaller GDP because they have a smaller economy but they are exceedingly high on global productivity rankings. The major ideas that give this debate importance are whether or not mental well-being is improved, does quality of life increase and if companies are actually losing from reducing the number of hours worked. Research is showing that nations like Denmark and Spain all have a higher economic productivity than the US. It’s also not a coincidence that the happiness levels are higher in those countries because they have dipped their feet into the concept of a 32 hour workweek. The graph, created by Berkeley Economic Review, shows that the GDP being higher relates to the overall happiness, in relation the mental health of the working class of a country.
How will switching to a four-day workweek affect the economic status of the US?
It is seen in other nations that have implemented the four-day work week that they have the highest ranking in productivity rates. In one way, reducing the number of hours worked a week by one person can give a hand to the unemployed to work the remaining hours, thus reducing the unemployment rate. Besides the statistics of what makes a productive nation, reducing the work week would give workers more time to rest and rejuvenate before performing better for a shorter amount of time. While this may seem counterintuitive, decreasing the amount of labor will reduce the physical amount of product made. In turn, consumerism will be reduced, thus improving the economic status of the US in an anti-capitalistic and climate conscious way. Less products being made leads to less consumerism. This can have a multitude of benefits, the biggest being climate conscious. Researchers Nicholas A. Ashford & Giorgos Kallis, approve of the lessened work week in the context that, “it can secure employment without growth making economic restrictions in the name of climate change socially stable and second, because it promises to reduce consumption”. Both professors have made arguments favoring both sides of this debate, however they point out some important conclusions. For example, the graph in their research conducted by OECD stat, reveals that Netherlands, Germany and Norway work the least amount of hours, yet have high economic productivity. They concluded that, “the more productive a nation gets, the more time it liberates for its workers” (Ashford & Kallis). This liberation allows for personal relaxation, enjoyment, and social interaction, which can be translated into more work done during the allocated hours.
Another positive impact on the economy is that companies could be motivated to sell their building, or rent it out on the additional day off. There is also one less day that employees that work for the building need to be paid. Millions of people are saved from their commute to work on their day off. All these seemingly little factors all add up to a lot of money saved that could be used more productively. To connect back to global warming, less commute allows for less carbon emissions to be released.
Is moving to a four-day workweek already happening?
In a non-traditional sense, yes, companies are giving more paid time off to employees and offering additional benefits with a job that essentially gives the positive effects a four-day workweek would. After the global pandemic, COVID-19 altered how companies run their business. For example, as talked about before, some companies did away with going into work physically and now have a fully online business. The pandemic shone a light on how added freedom could also mean added trust between employees and employers and more work being done.
Stanford journalists have commented on the state of companies that were able to successfully move online. Authors John Fernald and Huiyu Li write that, “After accounting for these factors, industries where it is easy to work from home have grown somewhat faster than they did pre-pandemic”. The factors being the evaluation of mental health and economic pause due to the pandemic. This isn’t to say every single company was able to move remote and succeed, though. This also relates to the debate because not all occupations need to move to a four-day workweek, but that there are some that can do without the 8 hours. Those that were able to thrive, mentally and economically can consider moving to a less demanding work schedule because it’s clear that it has no effect on the success of the company.
How does this reduction improve societal wealth?
Because of the added day off, people have more time to focus on people and things that are important. Robert Grosse, author of The Four-Day Workweek, talks about what a person does during their time off. He splits up the various tasks into categories such as “Productive time, maintenance and expressive time” (Grosse). Within these categories there are several subcategories of all the little things a human does to maintain a satisfied emotional, mental and physical health. More often than not, a person neglects some of these subcategories such as working out or spending time with friends due to exhaustion from work. The added day allows for someone to take care of all aspects in their life before going back to work. This added rest time also can contribute to the energy levels in work because there is less time during the week to get a certain amount of work done. However, there isn’t an overwhelming amount of work added to these four days. Grosse explains this concept with the use of a teacher example. He writes, “A teacher would have four class days per week and three weekend days. This would not eliminate the need to prepare materials and prob-ably do some grading during the weekends, but it would not add to that burden” (Grosse).
Conclusion
Overall, the use for a five-day workweek is severely outdated and should be re-evaluated, especially in an innovative country like the United States. As Grosse puts it, “Given that in the 21st century there is no need to work just to obtain subsistence the question is: how much time should be dedicated to work for income and how much should be allocated to other activities”? If one were to dive deeper into such a broad question they could explore reasons why the five-day model should be kept and if an even shorter week, say three days, is in our future.
Some interesting things to take away from this is the constant ownership the government has on its people with loans and debt, the drastic mental health improvement that less work has on people and how the US can learn a great deal by looking at what other nations have done with the four-day workweek.
While there are, of course, downsides to switching to less work in that it can give jobs to less qualified people and there will never be an agreement on when to stop reducing the hours worked, but the benefits far outweigh the cons. A big factor, briefly mentioned before is the carbon footprint decrease that the US will experience with this reduction. Carbon emissions are especially important in today’s society because of the ongoing issue of global warming.
Works Cited
Ashford, Nicholas A, and Giorgos Kallis. “A Four-Day Workweek: A Policy for Improving Employment and Environmental Conditions in Europe.” Https://Www.researchgate.net/, The European Financial Review, 2013, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicholas-Ashford /publication/279835239. Accessed 16 Dec. 2022
Fernald, John, and Huiyu Li. “Working Paper Wrapper Page.” San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, 25 May 2017, https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/working-papers/2022/19/. Accessed 16 Dec. 2022
Grosse, Robert E. The Four-Day Workweek. Taylor & Francis Group, Routledge, 2018.
Russell, Emma, et al. “What Leaders Need to Know before Trying a 4-Day Work Week.” Harvard Business Review, 2 June 2022, https://hbr.org/2022/05/what-leaders-need -to-know-before-trying-a-4-day-work-week. Accessed 16 Dec. 2022
“The True Reason behind the 40-Hour Work Week and Why We Are Economic.” Act Now!, May 2015, https://actnowpng.org/node/25566.
Ward, Marguerite. “A Brief History of the 8-Hour Workday, Which Changed How Americans Work.” CNBC, CNBC, 5 May 2017,https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hou r-workday -changed-how-americans-work.html. Accessed 16 Dec. 2022
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