A four-day work week won't be on the horizon for decades
Billionaires and Senator Bernie Sanders agree on at least one thing: They see a four-day work week in America’s future. Hedge fund manager Steve Cohen is investing in golf courses because he anticipates a big increase in leisure time, and IAC founder Barry Diller is expecting people to be in the office only four days a week. Sanders has even proposed legislation to reset the work week to 32 hours.
Mark me as sceptical. Some big technological innovations promise to make people more productive, but a four-day work week will not be the norm anytime soon. And legislation imposing it over the next four years would harm the economy.
The first question is what a ‘four-day work week’ means. Sometimes it means working 40 hours in four days instead of five, though this tends to be less efficient. Or it may mean working an eight-hour day four days a week, which is what Sanders has in mind.
Both kinds of arrangements have become more common over the years in the US and elsewhere—though much of the increase is among people who work fewer than 40 hours. As for the merits of the idea: There are basically two arguments for a shorter work week. One presumes that people waste so much time at work that working 20% less won’t make a difference if they use the time more efficiently.
A few small studies, mainly in non-customer-facing service jobs, find that a 20% drop in hours does not result in a decline in revenue. But whether this finding applies to more labour-intensive jobs is doubtful. The only large experiment comes from France, which imposed a 35-hour work week in 1998 on large firms in the hope that it would increase employment.
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