A four-day workweek pilot study in the U.K. was so successful recently that most companies in the experiment decided to keep the shortened week.Robert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal, a research-based initiative tasked with investigating labor policies in today’s economy. Bruno, the author of the forthcoming book “What Work Is,” spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the idea of shortening the workweek.
Is the five-day workweek a relic of the past? Should it be reduced to four days per week with no reduction in pay, as in the U.K. experiment?
The five-day workweek is long overdue for an overhaul. To be fair, the workweek has come down substantially from the Industrial Revolution era, when 12- and 16-hour days, 7 days a week, were common. Weekends weren’t really a thing until labor unions brought them and the 40-hour week to the working class.
But there hasn’t been much progress since then. The U.S. came close to a 30-hour workweek at the beginning of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. The U.S. Senate in 1933 passed bipartisan legislation reducing the workweek to six hours a day, five days a week, just before Roosevelt took office.
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