The five-day workweek is so entrenched in American life that everything, from vacation packages to wedding prices to novelty signs, is built around it. When you live it every Monday through Friday, year in and year out, it can be hard to imagine any other way.
But there’s nothing inevitable about working eight hours a day, five days a week (or more). This schedule only became a part of American labor law in the 1930s, after decades of striking by labor activists who were tired of working the 14-hour days demanded by some employers. Indeed, one of the biggest goals of the American labor movement beginning in the 19th century was “an attempt to gain time back,” Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island, told Vox.
And now, more than 15 months into the pandemic, there’s a growing conversation about how American workers can take back more of their time. The trauma and disruption of the last year and a half have a lot of Americans reevaluating their relationships to work, whether it’s restaurant servers tired of risking their safety for poverty-level wages or office workers quitting rather than giving up remote work. And part of that reevaluation is about the workweek, which many say is due for a reboot.
Over the past few decades, work for many salaried employees has ballooned far beyond 40 hours a week, thanks to a combination of weakened labor laws and technology that allows bosses to reach workers at any time of the day or night. At the same time, low-wage and hourly workers are frequently subject to unpredictable schedules that can change at a moment’s notice, and may not give them enough hours of paid work to live on. Today’s work schedules, with their combination of “overwork and then no work,” in many ways mirror the conditions that preceded the reforms of the 1930s, Loomis said.
Then as now, the country may be ripe for a change. Some employers are testing out four-day workweeks. A recent study of shorter workweeks in Iceland was a big success, boosting worker well-being and even productivity. And workers themselves are pushing back against schedules that crowd out everything that isn’t work. During the pandemic, there’s a growing feeling that “we have one life — and are we working to live, or are we living to work?” Rachel Deutsch, director of worker justice campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy, told Vox.