Dolly
Parton’s signature song “9 to 5,” and the 1980s
sitcom of
the same name reflect a quintessentially
American hustle culture of working 40 hours a
week in thankless jobs. Even though many people
work even more than that—earning the U.S. the
title of “the
Most Overworked Developed Nation in the
World”—our expectations of the ideal
work scenario are built on a hard-fought labor
victory, one that was still not nearly enough
to curb worker exploitation.
In
1926, Henry
Ford instituted
a 40-hour workweek for his auto factory
employees, perhaps because he truly believed
workers needed more time for rest and leisure,
but also because he expected they would be more
productive if they worked less. The move paid
off for Ford’s bottom line and also helped shift
national culture toward working fewer hours.
A
decade later, auto workers at General Motors in
Flint, Michigan, went
on strike protesting
terrible working conditions. The 1936 labor
action came to be known as “the strike heard
around the world,” and in February 1937, General
Motors conceded to worker demands, sending a
powerful message across the nation that
worker-led strikes can win. In 1937, about 1.9
million Americans participated
in nearly 5,000 strikes—considered the most
seminal year in U.S. labor history.
It’s
no wonder then that a year later, President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair
Labor Standards Act of
1938 imposing a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour
and a 44-hour workweek, as well as overtime pay.
Two years later, in 1940, that act was amended
to further reduce work hours to 40 per week.
That should have been the beginning, not the end
of improved labor conditions. The biggest failure of
the Fair Labor Standards Act was that it did not
link the minimum wage to inflation.
Now,
more than 80 years later, Congress is
considering a 32-hour workweek. Representative
Mark Takano (D-CA),
with the support of major labor unions like
SEIU, introduced a bill in the House of
Representatives to reduce the workweek to four
days.
While
on the surface a welcome move for labor rights,
the problem is that unless corporate employers
are forced to give people the same (or greater)
annual take-home pay and preserve benefits,
moving to a four-day workweek may not amount to
much. According to a 2018 Economic
Policy Institute report,
because wage growth remained stagnant, “For most
workers… annual earnings growth has been driven
by their ability to work more hours.” Why would
workers desire a reduction in work hours if it
meant taking home less pay?
A
recent Washington
Post-Ipsos survey found
that three-quarters of those polled preferred
working 40 hours over four days—that is 10-hour
days—to working 40 hours over five days. And,
nearly as many said they would prefer working 40
hours over five days rather than lose a fifth of
their salary. This is hardly surprising.
Strangely
the poll did not ask whether workers would
prefer working 32 hours over four days with no
reduction in pay. Is it because the pollsters
knew that reducing work hours without reducing
pay would be so popular that it wasn’t worth
asking? Or was it that corporate employers would
consider such a question to be the height of
worker hubris? By leaving out the question the
pollsters tacitly embraced corporate
profit-driven values.
Casting
the idea of reducing work for the same pay as a
novel notion, the Washington
Post said,
“[S]ome advocacy groups are pushing through
pilots for a 32-hour, four-day workweek without
decreasing pay.” The paper immediately followed
that with corporate talking points: “Hurdles
including concerns about staffing, lower
productivity, increased costs, and complex
changes to operations are keeping the shortened
workweek from being widely adopted.” There was
no mention of who views increased costs as
“hurdles.”
The
U.S. economy, valuing worker productivity in
service of corporate profits over all else, has
continued to push cultural attitudes
toward more work,
not less, with papers like the Washington Post
doing their part. While 40 hours a week may be
part of the cultural fabric, an unwritten rule
of corporate America is that in exchange for job
security, one is expected to work 60 or more
hours a week.
Indeed.com’s
pros-and-cons list of
a 60-hour workweek opens with the sentence,
“Working 60 hours a week can be one way to earn
a higher salary, while also proving your
dedication to your job and the company.”
Further, with the rise of the gig economy, a
significant number of workers in low-wage jobs
have had to rely on unreliable work hours, low
pay, and no benefits. They might work 9 to 5,
or 5
to 9.
This
economic status quo also fuels a stubborn gender
pay gap. This year Equal
Pay Day fell
on March 14, which means that women would have
had to work an extra three and a half months to
make as much money as men did in 2022. For Black
women,
it falls far later, on September 21, 2023. A
new study published
by the American Sociological Association
concluded that men’s overwork is contributing
significantly to this gap. “The overwork effect
on trends in the gender gap in wages was most
pronounced in professional and managerial
occupations,” said the study’s authors, “where
long work hours are especially common and the
norm of overwork is deeply embedded in
organizational practices and occupational
cultures.”
Merely
reducing work hours will not close the gender
wage gap. It might even increase if women take
on extra housework on their day off while men
work extra jobs. In her new book The
Good Enough Job,
author Simone Stolzoff pointed out that,
“Despite gains in wealth and productivity, many
college-educated Americans—and especially
college-educated men—have worked more than ever.
Instead of trading wealth for leisure, American
professionals began to trade leisure for more
work.”
There’s
a move to change U.S. culture to relinquish our
attachment to work. Stolzoff’s book is one of
several urging Americans to work less. In her
new book Saving
Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the
Clock,
best-selling author Jenny Odell views the
current economic structures that we operate in
as having arisen from European colonial culture.
She urges people to reimagine our relationship
with our time.
But
is it that we are all trained to want to work,
or that we don’t have the luxury to choose
leisure? The problem is that overall pay is
still so low compared to the cost of living that
those who can work
more—perhaps because they have partners
willing to do more child care and
housework—do so, earning overtime pay to
ensure that their household’s needs are met. A
four-day workweek is likely to do the same,
freeing up an extra day merely to work more in
a second job or take on more childcare or
housework.
Trials
of a four-day workweek by
some companies have shown this is precisely what
is happening. Some corporate heads love the idea
of reducing work hours and salaries and are
happy to have their workers take on side jobs to
make up for the loss in salary on their day off.
“[W]e believe that we’re providing value through
flexibility,” said one startup CEO to Business
Insider as justification for lower salaries.
Another CEO touted how one of her employees now
has the free time to work side jobs like Spanish
translation and bartending.
If
a four-day workweek comes with pay that’s still
not enough to live well, then it is merely
offering workers the freedom to work less in
order for them to work more elsewhere. What is
the point? The federal
minimum wage remains
stuck at an appallingly low $7.25 an hour, with
tipped workers surviving in serfdom at $2.13 an
hour.
I
am writing this weekly column on my day off from
a four-day job that pays a decent wage but is
still not enough to provide for all my household
expenses, and it is certainly not as much as my
male spouse earns. To be fair, my main employer
reduced work hours without reducing my salary—a
wonderful step in the right direction. But the
problem, again and again, is low pay. While I
love writing a weekly column, I do it for the
meaningful joy it brings and for
the compensation. It’s a side hustle.
When Representative
Takano was asked about
the barriers to realizing his bill for a 32-hour
workweek, he addressed the potential loss of pay
by saying that, “We also have to pay attention
to the ability of workers to unionize to bargain
for higher wages.” In other words, workers and
their unions (that is, if they are lucky enough
to be among the minority of Americans
represented by labor unions) have to fend for
themselves in ensuring a living wage.
Senator
Bernie Sanders has
joined the call for a 32-hour workweek,
emphasizing that such a move should come with
“no loss of pay.” But even if that happened,
wages still remain too low to live on and most
workers might spend their free time on side
hustles, like I do.
If
workers were paid a minimum of $100 an hour (not
unlike what most
corporate executives get paid)
and had the choice to work a 32-hour week versus
a 40-hour week, I believe most would choose the
former.
“It’s a rich man’s game no
matter what they call it,” sang Dolly
Parton. The real problem of overwork is
underpay.
This
article commentary
was produced
by Economy
for All,
a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
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