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US-POLITICS-BIDEN

Bob Daugherty

A global crisis was in the rearview mirror, and the American economy was showing signs of strength. Unemployment had stooped to <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/images/data/haugen-figure1.stm" target=_blank>3.9 percent</a>. Talk abounded of technological advancement and its potential to revolutionize the workforce.

To one politician, the time was ripe for a bold idea: a four-day workweek.

While this could describe the present moment — down to the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf" target=_blank>unemployment rate </a>— the year was 1956. Long before artificial intelligence entered the chat and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) filed a 32-hour workweek bill, another leader — Vice President Richard M. Nixon (R) — made a similar proposal in a speech that campaign season, saying he envisioned a “not too distant” future where the “backbreaking toil and mind-wearying tension will be left to machines and electronic devices.”

“These are not dreams or idle boasts — they are simple projections of the gains we have made in the last four years,” Nixon said while campaigning for reelection, according to a <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1956/09/23/95810374.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0" target=_blank>New York Times report </a>from the time. “Our hope is to double everyone’s standard of living in ten years.”

Needless to say, Nixon’s vision did not materialize over the next decade — or in the 68 years that followed. But discussions surrounding<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/four-day-work-week/" target=_blank> a four-day workweek </a>have gathered steam in recent years following the rise of artificial intelligence and a pandemic that shattered workplace expectations for millions of Americans.

Studies and pilot programs across the globe have shown that four-day workweeks can boost workers’ productivity and happiness. Take the findings from the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/21/four-day-work-week-results-uk/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template" target=_blank>world’s largest four-day workweek trial</a> in the United Kingdom, where the companies that participated saw increased revenue and employee well-being, while their productivity remained steady.

Sanders cited the U.K. pilot program on Thursday when he unveiled the proposed legislation, which he said would “reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life.”

“Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea,” Sanders said in a <a href="https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-legislation-to-enact-a-32-hour-workweek-with-no-loss-in-pay/" target=_blank>news release</a>.

And, truly, it’s not. In 1956, while stumping inside a packed school auditorium in Colorado Springs, Nixon painted a picture of a future “with a fuller family life for every American.” A decade prior, economist John Maynard Keynes said that technological advancements would make a 15-hour workweek possible by 2030. Even American founding father Benjamin Franklin predicted that four hours of work a day would eventually suffice.

But the renewed push for reduced working hours is the latest turn in a fight that began over a century ago — and that is deeply enmeshed with the rise of technology and the ebbs and flows of the labor movement’s power, experts told The Washington Post.

The battle over working hours goes back to the 19th century, said Erik Loomis, a professor and labor historian at the University of Rhode Island. As the Industrial Revolution picked up speed, the expectation was that the increased mechanization would result in fewer working hours — but the opposite turned out to be true. According to the <a href="https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/11e27aff-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/11e27aff-en" target=_blank>Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development</a>, workers went from working 150-200 days per year, to over 300 after the Industrial Revolution. Often, workers in the late 19th century and early 20th century faced grueling 14- to 16-hour shifts, six days a week.

As a result, early union efforts centered on this issue. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will” became the rallying cry for the push for fewer working hours — one that would take decades to achieve.

In 1926, Henry Ford famously instituted an eight-hour-a-day, five-days-a-week work schedule for his Ford Motor Company employees, but the 40-hour workweek wasn’t widely implemented until 1938, when President <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/09/06/40-hour-work-week-fdr/" target=_blank>Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) signed the Fair Labor Standards Act</a> into law.

Here’s where a paradox lies, Loomis said: Reduced hours had been a major issue among voters and union members. But after a 40-hour workweek was established by law, the push for shorter shifts began losing some steam. Instead, he said, it became a divisive debate within the labor movement.

“The movement began to question ‘Is that the final answer or is there the potential to reduce work hours more?’” he said. “And as that debate went on, the issue started getting framed less around the rights of workers, and more around how with these massive technological innovations there will be less of a need to even work 40 hours a week.”

Following the end of World War II, the United States would rise as an economic and innovation powerhouse. Productivity soared. Numerical control technology — computers’ precursors — began taking the country by storm. The rise of automation sparked slogans that may seem all too familiar today: “You won’t get tomorrow’s jobs with yesterday’s skills!” which were splashed across <a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1774&dat=19650228&id=T9geAAAAIBAJ&sjid=xmUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4506,6608375" target=_blank>newspapers</a> and <a href="https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED037523.pdf" target=_blank>bus stops</a> throughout the ’60s. Concerns over <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-press-conferences/news-conference-24" target=_blank>machines taking over jobs</a> soon followed.

And while others — like Nixon — pinned their hopes of more leisure time on new technology, “the larger socio-economic reality, the rise of globalization and other factors end up leading to the reduction in the size of the labor movement and its power,” Loomis said.

“And with unions losing power, politicians who might have taken on the question about reducing hours early on, immediately begin backing off,” he added.

Case in point: Nixon. By 1960 — just four years after he envisioned machines taking off a weight from workers’ backs — the then-presidential candidate abandoned the idea during a <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-vice-president-richard-m-nixon-national-telethon-abc-network-southfield-mi" target=_blank>national telethon campaign event</a>. Asked by a caller from Warren, Mich., about his stance on the 32-hour workweek, Nixon said it “just isn’t a possibility at the present time.”

“We can’t have it now for the reason that we find, that as far as automation is concerned, both because of the practices of business and labor, we do not have the efficiency yet developed to the point that reducing the workweek would not result in a reduction of production,” Nixon said. “The workweek can only be reduced at a time when reduction of the workweek will not reduce efficiency and will not reduce production.”

And indeed, new tech doesn’t translate to immediate changes in the workplace, said Aaron Benanav, a sociology professor at Syracuse University.

“There are periodic waves of excitement over new technologies every 20 to 30 years, but the implementation of it new unfolds over a much longer stretch of time,” he said. “Productivity increased a lot in the ’50s and ’60s, but it didn’t happen overnight.”

Over the next decades, progress in reducing hours came in the form of vacation and other paid time off, Benanav said. But with the labor movement losing power, discussions about a 32-hour workweek mostly fizzled out, he said.

“Most of the reductions in the workweek had come through collective bargaining and not through legislation. Also, unemployment rose in the ’70s, and competition with other countries was heating up,” he said. “There were all these things that made bargaining conditions a lot harder for workers, and that’s basically why it stopped.”

The labor movement has not rebounded to its onetime strength since then, though <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/14/uaw-strike-labor-movement/" target=_blank>this summer it made some gains</a> through strikes and an increase in support. But, in contrast to the middle of the last century, the driving force behind today’s four-day workweek push is not coming from the blue-collar and union workers, but from white-collar and corporate employees, Benanav said.

“It’s because blue-collar jobs are regulated,” he said. “There’s a 40-hour workweek, and if you work more than that, you’re required to be paid overtime. But those rules don’t apply to salaried workers in America. And there’s just been this real pressure on salaried workers to work a lot more and there’s no law that prevents companies from doing that.”

Some of what Americans want today — better work/life balance and stronger community — can be found in what Nixon proposed long ago, Benanav said. And, he added, while the disgraced former president may seem like an unlikely champion of the four-day workweek, he was fairly progressive on economic issues by today’s standards.

On that, he said, “you shouldn’t sell Nixon short.”

FSNE Journalism Contest, second place for news reporting (Spanish language), Florida Society of News Editors, 2020

ICPA Contest, second place for best podcast, Indiana Collegiate Press Association, 2021

R.V. Ley Journalism Award, for outstanding achievement and exceptional promise, John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics and Democracy, 2021

University of Notre Dame, BA in political science and economics

María Luisa Paúl is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. She joined The Post as an intern on the General Assignment desk and has previously reported at the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald. 


María Luisa Paúl

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Before Sanders, Nixon pitched four-day workweek

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