The 4 Day Work Week

05 Feb 2020

The shortening of the work week has long been common goal between labor activists and socialists. In the beginnings of industrial capitalism workers often worked 10 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. Most people in the early 1800’s were working 80 to 100 hours a week. Later on in 1886 the struggles for an 8 hour workday led to the Haymarket Riot where 12 people were killed by a bomb during the strike. It wasn’t until 1938 when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act which set full time employment to 44 hours a week requiring overtime pay for all hours worked beyond that. Two years later in 1940 this was reduced to 40 hours leading to the situation we are in now, 80 years later.

With the decline of the labor movement beginning in the latter half of the 20th century and the cold war period pushing socialist parties to the fringes, the struggle for a shorter work week has been put on the back burner. With the revival of these movements growing stronger today, I will argue that the four day work week should be an immediate demand of a socialist party in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Since this is the first post on this site, I will direct you read A Small Note on the Methods That Will Be Used where I lay out a general purpose of the blog and explain some of the terms and methods that will be used going further.

A 32 hour work week would increase the time workers have to engage in their communities and to be politically active. Many workers today can barely find time to take care of themselves and their children, let alone be active in a political movement. The shortening of the work week is certainly one major part of enabling increased political activity of the working class, and certainly “in its entirety facilitates the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands later on” by increasing time available to workers to organize politically which is the basis of a participatory democracy essential to building socialism.

This struggle is necessarily a working class struggle and binds the working class together, entangled by their common interests against the propertied classes. Also, the reduction of the working week will bring the need for more employees, lowering the rate of unemployment and strengthening the workers position relative to capital. Demanding a shift in the distribution of income produced by the increased productivity of the working class clearly “enables the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view””.

We should fully understand this demand as a ‘32 hour work week with no loss of pay’. This should mean a mandatory increase in hourly pay at a ratio of 40:32. Whatever an employee would be paid at their current rate for 40 hours, they must be paid the same for 32 hours. Any time worked over 32 hours must be paid at overtime rate, currently 1.5 times normal hourly rate. Included in this demand should be the abolition of forced overtime, only allowing an employee to be scheduled over 32 hours if they have agreed, and the raising of overtime pay to 2 times normal hourly rate. This first of all would equate to a raise for all employees across the board. An employees hourly rate would automatically increase by 25%. An employee that chose to continue working 40 hours a week would see their weekly income increase by 35% at an overtime rate of 1.5. At an overtime rate of double time, that same employee would see their weekly income increase by 50%. Along with shortening hours, this functions as a massive pay raise for all employees.

In order to make sure this policy directs revenue primarily towards labor, it may be necessary to set an income cap at which this legislation is no longer applies. To figure out what this cutoff should be it seems that those whose hourly pay is expected to exceed the money value of goods produced by one hours labor on average should be excluded. A small multiplier to this number may be added so as not to burden highly paid workers either as a result of industry or level of class struggle. A national labor board drawn by lot from the citizenry could be assigned to release statistics for determining a cutoff for the year.

Recent experiments with shorter work weeks have also shown other benefits. For one, increased productivity is seen across the board in these experiments. In Microsoft Japan’s trial of a 4 day work week they saw a 40% increase in productivity. With less time spent at work, employees were cutting out unproductive activities during the day found a Melbourne company who experimented with this idea. Recent analysis also suggests a 4 day workweek could create a massive decline in our carbon footprint.

The 4 day work week is one part of a collection of policies that can shift power towards the producers, increase the political consciousness and activities of the working class, and facilitate further demands in the course of the class struggle.