U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders recently began pushing for a national four-day work week. This may not succeed, but it’s sure to spark another round of debate about this very old idea.
We tend to think of the eight-hour day, in a five-day work week, as being so standard it’s almost not worth mentioning. Anyone who works outside of this schedule – nurses and doctors, shift workers, truck drivers – are the strange ones.
But historically, from the start of the Industrial Revolution, the work week was six days long, with only Sunday off, and work days lasted anywhere from 10 to 16 hours a day.
It was factory work in Britain in the early 19th century that set the standards for the idea of a work week and set work hours. The factory owners were determined to get as much labour as they could out of their workers.
Almost from the start, workers and reformers agitated for fewer hours. The demand for a 10-hour day, and then an eight-hour day began in the early 19th century and continued for more than a century.
This was not a polite debate, either. There were intermittent battles, with strikes and demonstrations and gun-wielding strike-breakers. People died for the eight-hour day.
It wasn’t enshrined in legislation in the United States until the 1930s. In Canada, until the 1960s!
While this battle was entering its final phases in the 1930s, economists like John Maynard Keynes looked at increasing rates of productivity, and predicted that his grandchildren would work about 15 hours a week – two days out of seven.
He was right about the productivity. We are vastly more efficient and productive at making stuff than we were in 1930.
So, why don’t we all have more time off?
The standard story is that we made a choice to take a higher standard of living instead of more time off.
In other words, we have bigger and better cars and houses and home appliances and cool vacations. We have a lot more stuff than we did in the 1930s.
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There’s some truth to that.
Another way of looking at recent economic history is to say that the richest among us soaked up a lot of that extra productivity, and then they bought mega-yachts. You may have seen those graphs showing how much CEO pay has diverged from the pay of average workers over time, for example. And there’s plenty of truth there, too.
I don’t want to pretend that either side is the whole story. Yes, it’s nice to have more appliances and bigger houses and custom Star Wars pajamas and vacations to Aruba (never been, I hear it’s nice).
What we didn’t get was a choice. No one starts their working life by ticking a box that says ‘20 Hours’ or ‘40 Hours’ or ‘60 Hours’ a week. People who work part time are mostly economically precarious – they need to work more just for the basics!
I sure wouldn’t mind a four-day week. I think we all deserve a little more time.
But mostly, what I want is for people to be able to have a real choice.