Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday called for a 32-hour workweek with no pay cut for U.S. employees, pointing to the overwhelmingly positive results in nations that have recently experimented with or enacted shorter workweeks.
"Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea," Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian. "In fact, movement in that direction is already taking place in other developed countries. France, the seventh-largest economy in the world, has a 35-hour workweek and is considering reducing it to 32. The workweek in Norway and Denmark is about 37 hours."
The senator also pointed to a recent four-day workweek pilot program in the United Kingdom, where more than 90% of participating companies said the trial was so successful that they have no plans to return to a five-day workweek.
"Not surprisingly, it showed that happy workers were more productive," Sanders wrote. "Another pilot of nearly 1,000 workers at 33 companies in seven countries found that revenue increased by more than 37% in the companies that participated and 97% of workers were happy with the four-day workweek."
Sanders also noted that "an explosion in technology" in recent decades, and associated increases in worker productivity, have not prompted any changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the 1938 law that established the 40-hour workweek.
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