Bernie Sanders wants the US to adopt a 32-hour workweek. Could workers and companies benefit?

The 40-hour work week has been the standard in the US for more than eighty years. Now some members of Congress want to give hourly workers an extra day off.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the far-left independent from Vermont, introduced a bill this week that would cut to 32 hours the amount of time many Americans can work each week before being entitled to overtime.

Given advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Sanders says American companies can afford to give workers more time off without cutting their pay and benefits.

Critics say a mandatory shorter week would force many companies to hire extra workers or lose productivity.

Here’s what you need to know about the problem:

The bill that Sanders introduced in the Senate on Wednesday would reduce the standard work week from 40 hours to 32 hours. Employers would be prohibited from cutting their workers’ wages and benefits to compensate for their lost hours.

This means that people who currently work eight hours a day from Monday to Friday can add an extra day to their weekend. Employees who qualify for overtime will receive extra pay if they work more than 32 hours per week.

Sanders says that the reduction in working hours will be phased in over a period of four years. He held a hearing on the proposal Thursday in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Sanders chairs.

A recent study of British companies that agreed to introduce a 32-hour working week found that employees went to work less stressed and more focused, while revenues remained stable or increased.

In 2022, a team of university researchers and the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global called on 61 companies to reduce working hours for six months without cutting wages. Afterwards, 71% of the 2,900 employees said they felt less burned out and almost half reported being more satisfied with their jobs.

Meanwhile, 24 of the participating companies reported revenue growth of more than 34% over the previous six months. Nearly two dozen others saw a smaller increase.

“The majority of employees recorded an increase in their productivity during the trial. They are more energetic, more focused and more capable,” Juliet Shor, professor of sociology at Boston College and lead researcher on the British study, told Sanders’ Senate committee.

Critics say a 32-hour work week might work for companies where workers spend most of their time in front of computers or in meetings, but could be disastrous for production in factories that need hands-on workers to keep assembly lines running. to hold.

“These are concepts that have consequences,” Roger King of the HR Policy Association, which represents corporate HR officials, told the Senate committee. “It just doesn’t work in many sectors.”

With significant opposition from Republicans, and possibly some Democrats, don’t expect Sanders’ proposal to get very far in the Senate. A companion bill from Democratic Rep. Mark Takano of California is likely doomed in the Republican Party-controlled House of Representatives.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said paying workers the same wages for fewer hours would force employers to pass the costs of hiring more workers on to consumers.

“It would threaten millions of small businesses that operate on razor-thin margins because they can’t find enough workers,” said Cassidy, the ranking Republican on the committee. “Now they have the same employees, but only for three years. -quarter of the time. And they need to hire more.”

Sanders has used his platform as committee chairman to push legislation aimed at making big companies more accountable to workers. He blamed greedy executives for pocketing extra profits because technology has increased worker productivity.

“Do we continue the trend of technology only benefiting those at the top, or do we demand that these transformational changes benefit those working?” Sanders said. “And one of the benefits should be a shorter work week, a 32-hour work week.”

The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, limited child labor and imposed other workplace protections, including limiting the workweek to 44 hours. Two years later, the law was changed to make it a 40-hour work week.

The landmark law followed a century of union efforts to provide protections for the many overworked people in the U.S., said Tejasvi Nagaraja, a labor historian at Cornell University’s School of Industry and Labor Relations.

“The issue of time has always been as important, if not more, than money for unions and union lawyers,” Nagaraja said.

In the 1830s, miners and textile workers began to oppose working days of up to 14 hours. After the Civil War, the abolition of slavery caused people in the US to reexamine workers’ rights. Unions rallied around the slogan: ‘Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you want.’

The federal government has taken cautious steps to limit working hours. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered an eight-hour workday for government employees. In 1916, Congress required the same for railroad workers.

Other reforms came from private industry. In 1926, Henry Ford instituted a 40-hour work week for his auto assembly workers, more than a decade before Congress mandated it.

Ford wrote, “It is high time to rid ourselves of the idea that leisure for workers is either wasted time or a class privilege.”

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Associated Press reporter Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed.