Sometimes he says, “If you work 40 hours a week, you should not be living in poverty,” and sometimes it’s, “People who work 40 hours a week should not be living in poverty,” but Bernie Sanders’s basic point is always the same: A full-time job should be enough to afford a person a decent standard of living in the wealthiest country on earth. The line, which he’s repeated through much of his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, came to mind on Monday while reading the New York Times Editorial Board’s lengthy and largely ridiculous interview with Sanders.

A few questions in, he was asked to name “some of the other things that you’ll focus on as president to improve the nation’s health,” aside from Medicare for All. It’s a good question. Among the items on Sanders’s list were “disease prevention,” the need to “improve dietary habits,” and increased exercise. Later in the interview, he also addressed the environment as a health issue, like the unsafe drinking water that plagues communities across the country.

There are all kinds of structural things that can and must be done to address health beyond just universal health care, like ending food deserts, guaranteeing access to safe and affordable housing, and developing neighborhood infrastructure that allows people to spend more time outside. But also: Why not just work less, too? Even if a future of higher wages and more robust social programs gives more people more access to preventative measures, the problem of time remains. If people don’t have the hours in the day to get to that doctor’s appointment or spend an evening cooking at home with their kids—or blissfully doing nothing at all—then we’re not really addressing the problem. And so a decades-old question gets revived: Why are we still working 40 hours a week at all?



Sanders, as the presidential candidate expressly trying to build a working-class movement, may be uniquely suited to take up the question. (It also doesn’t hurt that he’s entertained the issue in the past.)

Each statistic is as galling as the next: The average American reported working 47 hours per week, per a 2014 Gallup poll. Twelve-hour shifts for factory workers are no longer unheard of but often expected from management. In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found the average American put in 1,786 hours at their job by the end of the year—78 hours more than Canadian workers and 248 more hours than workers in the United Kingdom. And none of those figures include desk lunches or commutes, which average 26 minutes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, or close to an extra four hours a week.