For some people, the four-day workweek is the new dream.
This measure, supposedly a panacea for employee satisfaction, even found its way into the United Auto Workers’ demands in their contract talks. Liberal bastions such as Massachusetts and California have pushed bills upon businesses to adopt a four-day work week.
We may not see it yet, but this measure threatens to undo everything that made our nation’s current prosperity possible.
America was built on a six-day workweek. The five-day week originated nearly a century ago with Henry Ford, who used it to remove incentives for his employees at Ford to unionize.
The argument for the four-day workweek is much more tendentious, making broad claims based on weak and flawed data sets.
Story after story in the media expounds upon how much “less stressed” employees are with a four-day workweek. At the risk of sounding pedantic, well, duh! Of course less work means less stress. Work is stressful, as any working person can tell you. But stress is part of life. You will never be stress-free until you’re dead. Has any society or economy grown or possessed any dynamism while everyone was lying in hammocks?
Given that so many news stories are making such expansive claims about how beneficial this is, why aren’t more companies doing it? Why is it that the number of four-day-a-week jobs has not changed in the last three years?
The short answer is that it just doesn’t work. A more complex answer is that it isn’t good for those employees’ companies. And if you want to see those same employees really stressed out, just see what happens when their employers lay them off or shut their doors due to falling productivity or lost profits.
Most of the studies behind this fad, extolling the benefits of shorter hours, are self-reported. In other words, employees are the ones saying they are less stressed and more productive. These data are not based on company revenue or any other objective metric.
It’s also worth mentioning that Japan already tried this. From 1988 to 1996, Japan shortened the workweek from 46 to 30 hours. The result was not ambiguous: Economic output fell by 20 percent.
But let’s take a closer look at the studies cited to support the shorter four-day week. Iceland did something similar when it shortened health care workers’ hours on a trial basis starting in 2015. The results were blasted all over the headlines (especially during and after COVID). Some are now calling it an “overwhelming success” for the four-day workweek.
Two think tanks that heavily shill for the four-day week base their case on this study. But the first thing to note is that this study didn’t actually test a four-day week at all. Rather, it shortened their overall hours in a five-day week. The trial included only about 1 percent of that tiny nation’s workforce, and (no shocker here) it showed that employee well-being did increase with a reduction in working hours. But it was a complete mess for the employers. The Icelandic government had to shell out almost $30 million extra each year to hire more health care workers because of the experiment.
Microsoft also tested a four-day workweek by shutting down its Japan office every Friday during the month of August. The claim is that this resulted in a 40 percent increase in productivity. But if that’s true, then why aren’t they doing this everywhere Microsoft operates? Again, the answer is simple: Productivity increased over a very short period of time during a low-productivity summer month, when overall productivity was already at a 75-year low.
In all fairness, who doesn’t want to work 80 percent of the hours for 100 percent of the salary and benefits? But the problem is that the four-day week doesn’t work for the bottom line, no matter how much the media or employees would like it to.
For any customer-facing business, a four-day week would be a nightmare. If your company is open only four days a week, or if it has significantly reduced operations one day each week, then how do people reach your staff? The result is that companies have to hire more staff, which in turn raises costs.
We built this nation and got ahead working six or six-and-a-half days a week. The countries that are now competing against us have essentially seven-day work weeks, and they are rapidly catching up to us.
If American companies bow to pressure and embrace this new think-tank-driven fad, we are going to have a real challenge on our hands when it comes to competing with our adversaries.
Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.