Juliet Schor Makes the Case for a Four-Day Work Week

Brigid Schulte: What led you to research the possibility of a four-day work week?

Juliet Schor: If you just look at the basic data on how workers are doing, levels of stress, burnout, and disengagement are quite high. Quiet quitting. Loud quitting. The U.S. is an outlier, but these issues are in fact worldwide. People are just not happy.

There’s a statistic in the book about the fraction of people who cried at work. A Microsoft survey found that 17 percent of the respondents reported they’d cried with a co-worker, with higher levels in the most stressed industries, like healthcare, travel and tourism and education. [One 2019 Monster.com survey reported eight out of 10 people admitted to crying at work, with 45 percent saying it was due to bosses or coworkers, and 15 percent because of their workloads.]

Schulte: Wow.

Schor: People are suffering on the job. Part of it is that the demands of jobs are really high. But it's also a combination of what's going on inside and outside of the workplace at the same time. It’s something that we heard from a number of people during our research: “Two days is not enough.”

People on a five-day standard work week feel exhausted at the end of the work week. They need recovery time. And they can't fit recovery time, life administration, and having a life into the two days. That was all happening pre-pandemic. The pandemic really ramped up the intensity, the stress, the burnout, the quitting, the Great Resignation.

In the United States. We also have high levels of women participating in the labor force and putting in long hours. That has really strained families, dual full-time working parents and single parents. They’re all so stressed.

Schulte: So what did you find in your four-day work week trials?

Schor: The idea of the four-day work week had been bumping along for a while but not really gaining much traction. In 2022, we began a series of trials with groups of companies who planned to reduce their work week to four days, 32 hours.

That’s a very important point. This is not a compressed work week. This is not four 10-hour days. This is eight hours lopped off the work week [at the same rate of pay.] These companies were going to try and figure out how to do as much in four days as five. Not every company, but many of them. And my team was asked to research it.

We found two really important things: The first is massive wellbeing improvements for the workers: reduced burnout, more positive emotions, better mental and physical health. People reported having better work-family and work-life balance. Some people called it “life-changing” or “transformational.”

And for the people who get to 32 hours a week, the benefits are twice as big.

For Americans, especially, we thought people were going to go out and take second jobs on their day off. But that didn’t happen.

And the second finding is that companies are loving it, too. We now have a growing evidence base with hundreds of companies showing that the four-day work week can work. So it has become a very realistic possibility, rather than before the pandemic, when it felt like it was a great idea, but we could never get it.

What really surprised me was that people feel so much more productive, and the companies are saying people are more productive, too: it was showing up in KPIs. [Key Performance Indicators.] We did an analysis of why shorter work time leads to such big improvements in well-being, i.e. what are the “mediators” of the relationship between worktime reduction and well-being. We found half of the impact is because people are sleeping more, exercising more, and are less fatigued. The other mediating effect is that people report big jumps in their productivity. They feel much more on top of their jobs and that contributes to their wellbeing.

Schulte: I can see people being happier. But companies loving it? How does a four-day work week benefit them?

Schor: One is the improved employee wellbeing. When companies are facing a workforce that's stressed and burned out, it doesn't make for great work. We hear from some of the companies that when their employees are healthier and less stressed, they get better quality of work.

The other big thing that's happening with shorter work hours is that people stop leaving. And when it’s time to hire, it's much, much easier to get people.

We have companies in our research who are in very high turnover industries—healthcare, with nurses and mental health professionals, or restaurants where people get burned out and quit rates are high. These turnovers are extremely costly. In some industries, turnover costs about 30 percent of a salary. Turnover also impedes product quality.

In healthcare, for example, when you go to that four-day week, you get better patient outcomes. Or in restaurants, we hear about better quality of service. In my book, I profile one company in advertising and marketing, where the standard turnover rate for the industry is 30 percent a year. This company had a 40 percent turnover rate on some of their teams. After the four-day work week pilot, it was zero turnover. That meant they could sell a lot more business to their existing clients because their quality went up so much. They didn’t have to spend so much time onboarding and training people.

Schulte: That sounds like a pretty compelling business case to make to leaders.

Schor: The four day week can also improve productivity and efficiency.

A great case is an internet service provider from our research. A lot of what they do is customer service for people having problems. At the beginning of their four-day week, they got a massive new contract. They were a small start-up, so they had to grow rapidly. We went back to interview them after their six-month trial, and my first thought was, ”It must have been really tough with the four-day work week when they had so much more demand.”

And they said, “No, actually we don't think we could have done it without the four-day week. People would've been too burned out.” I thought, “Okay, interesting. But how’d you manage to handle that big influx in demand?” And the answer was that it forced them to get serious about documentation. That’s huge, because then each time they see the same problem, the techs don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In many businesses, they don’t do the documentation because it’s time consuming and they’re not forced to do it.

Here, they realized if they didn't, they would crash and burn. I call it the “forcing mechanism” of the four-day work week. It makes companies do things that they should have done anyway, but they don't invest the time upfront in productivity.

Schulte: I’m going to quote from your book right now: “Hold on a minute.” You’re famous for writing about the Overworked American. In this book, you also write about how Americans, who once led the way for reducing work hours, now work longer hours than other wealthy countries, longer than Germany, and even the notoriously overworked Japan. People are already so overloaded with work hours and workload, so how is it possible to expect them to do the same amount of work in four days?

Schor: When we think about how to make work better for people, what many employers have done for decades is try individual solutions, whether it’s flex time, or yoga and wellness. None of that really works. And all this labor-saving technology that has come in over the last few decades, hasn’t reduced work time. The work just multiplies, and a lot of it is wasted time.

What really worked in these trials was work reorganization: the whole organization got together and figured out how they were wasting time. They asked themselves: “What are we doing that isn't very productive and what, what can we get rid of? What can we do differently?” For the white collar organizations, the first focus is on meetings. They do a lot to make their meeting cultures much more efficient and effective. They have fewer meetings. Fewer people go to them. They prepare for them more. They save a lot of time that way.

And then the flip side of meetings culture is focus time. They try to figure out how much people are being distracted in the workplace and fix that. Communication becomes more transparent. Everything becomes more efficient.

In other sectors, like manufacturing, healthcare, blue collar jobs, the companies went through their process step by step. At each step, they asked, “Do we really need this form?” or “Is there an approval process getting held up?” These companies examined where they were wasting time and not being efficient, and then they redesigned those processes. In one brewery that was part of the trials, they did time and motion studies for everything and then totally re-engineered their process and saved a lot of time.

We wondered if it would lead to work speed-up, too. But with reorganizing work, we found almost no increase in work intensity when we asked about pace of work and workload.

Schulte: In the United States, there’s a lot of research about how we take pride in hard work, in overwork, that that’s the key to the American Dream. I know Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a four-day work week bill in Congress in 2024. But can a four-day work week really take hold here?

Schor: This is not a culture problem. I think it is really important to say that, because the dominant view is that we are driven by the Protestant work ethic, that Americans are workaholics. People think, “We've always been like this. There's really nothing we can do about it.” That’s not true.

People are surprised to learn that the United States was the leader in work-time reduction for many decades until the second World War. We were the first to go to the eight-hour day, the five-day work week. There was a proposal for a 30-hour work week in the 1930s. It had already passed one house of Congress. At the last minute, [President] Roosevelt changed his stance on it.

Then a couple things of changed: First, labor unions were weakened. That very conservative Cold War period after the second World War led society away from supporting unions and away from the shorter work time trajectory. Payments by fringe benefits grew and intensified with growing healthcare costs—that was an accident, you know, that we pay for healthcare through employment. The growth of salaried workers meant companies no longer had to pay for more time. [Only certain hourly workers, not salaried workers, are entitled to overtime benefits.] So losing those jobs became more costly.

The four-day work week allows employers to create a big increase in the value of the job for workers without a wage increase. And if they can get productivity, it's cost neutral or even positive for the firm, which is what a lot of our companies are saying. And at a moment where you had The Great Resignation, a lot of quitting and a difficulty attracting workers, this has proven to be like a real game changer for many companies.

Schulte: Did you find any gender differences? I’m thinking of the research that’s found that women are more likely to quit, by a three-to-one margin one study found, when they lose access to flexible work or with a return-to-office mandate. Or research that’s found women are more likely to do more unpaid labor than men when both have more time and flexible work.

Schor: We were concerned about blowback issues. Would women just do more housework and care work on that day off? But we didn’t find that. Most people do a bit of housework on that day off. But we're also seeing men doing more housework and especially doing more childcare on that day off. The division of unpaid labor in the household, that women tend to do so much more of, gets better. That’s a good thing.

We also asked people, at the start of the trial, at the six-month and one-year point, about time adequacy: do you have enough time to work, do housework, childcare, elder care, have hobbies, and so on. And the responses shifted dramatically from not enough to enough.

And what are the things that move the most? Hobbies. Leisure activities. Time for self. The four-day week gives that to women in a very big way. It also gives more of it to men. It transforms the whole character of their weekend.

Schulte: So what’s next? Where does the shorter work hours movement go from here?

Schor: The number of companies saying they’re considering a four-day work week has gone up. One study makes the point that four-day work week companies are much more likely to be adopting Artificial Intelligence. A GOP legislator in Maine just put in a bill for a pilot study for a four-day work week, similar to what we’ve been doing, saying Mainers work hard and should be able to do more than survive, they should be able to thrive. New York state just put two bills in for pilot studies. Sen. Sanders is going to reintroduce his 32-hour-week bill shortly. And it's happening around the world. Poland just announced they're doing a big pilot study. Spain is reducing their working week down to 37.5 hours. A number of European countries have sponsored national pilots. I think it’s going to keep on rolling. I think it’s going to eventually happen for everyone.

*Full Disclosure: I had a chance to preview Schor's book and wrote an early review:

"In her important and hopeful new book, Four Days a Week, Schor shares her new research, case studies and practical steps to show how shorter work hours can be life changing, improving human wellbeing as well as organizational productivity. More, drawing deep from history, she argues that long work hours are not inevitable, necessary, nor a cultural phenomenon, but the result of choices. And, it's time we made wiser ones. The future of work, our health, and that of our democracies, societies, economies, and planet may well depend on it." — Brigid Schulte, award-winning journalist and author of Over Work and the New York Times bestseller Overwhelmed