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Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
Inspiring and thought-provoking conversations with eminent thinkers and sustainability leaders about business in society. Hosted by Senthil Nathan, Chief Executive of Fairtrade Australia New Zealand.
Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
#26 The Four-Day Workweek: Revolution or Risk? with Juliet B. Schor
What if working less could actually mean achieving more? The four-day workweek has emerged from pandemic-era workplace experiments as perhaps the most promising innovation in how we structure our professional lives in decades. But misconceptions abound about what this shift really means and whether it's sustainable for businesses beyond a temporary feel-good measure.
Professor Juliet Schor, economist and sociologist at Boston College, joins us to share groundbreaking research from hundreds of companies that have implemented four-day workweeks without cutting pay. Her findings challenge everything we thought we knew about productivity, burnout, and work culture. Most companies aren't just compressing the same work into fewer days—they're fundamentally rethinking how work gets done.
The data tells a compelling story: 70% of employees report reduced burnout, while companies see dramatically lower turnover rates and maintained or improved productivity metrics. Perhaps most surprising is that 90% of organizations continue with four-day schedules a year after implementation. We explore the "100-80-100 model" (100% of pay for 80% of the time, delivering 100% of productivity) and how it creates what Professor Schor calls a "forcing function" that eliminates inefficient workplace practices many organizations have tolerated for decades.
From manufacturing floors to professional services, from startups to established institutions, the four-day workweek is proving viable across industries—though with important variations in implementation. We examine how companies make the transition, common pitfalls to avoid, and why Europe is leading this global movement. Professor Schor also addresses concerns about equity, sharing how shortened workweeks are actually improving gender equality at home and work.
As AI threatens to displace workers across industries, could reducing hours per job rather than eliminating positions be our best path forward? Join us for a fascinating exploration of how rethinking our relationship with work time might be the key to a more productive, sustainable, and humane future of work.
Link to Professor Schor's latest book: Four Days a Week. The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter.
Please visit our website, www.businessandsociety.net, for more inspiration.
Welcome to the Business and Society podcast. I'm your host, senthil. Today we are diving into one of the most talked about shifts in the modern workplace the four-day workweek. Is it just a post-pandemic trend or are we witnessing the beginning of a new norm? To help us make sense of it all, I'm joined by Professor Juliet Schor. She's an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College and one of the world's leading scholars on work time. Professor Schor is a recipient of numerous awards and is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, most recently, the 2024 Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics. In 2022, she became the lead researcher for path-breaking trials, studying hundreds of companies instituting four-day workweeks. Her book Four Days a Week from Harper Business details these findings. We will explore what the four-day workweek really means, whether it delivers on its promise and how companies and employees can make it work. Let's get into it. Julie, warm welcome.
Julie:Thank you, pleasure to be here.
Senthil:Let's start with the basics, because there is a lot of confusion out there. What does a four-day workweek actually mean? Is it compressing five days of work into four, or reduced work hours and productivity? Please help us understand.
Julie:Yeah, such an important question and a great place to begin. I can't tell you the number of people who have written to me saying oh, I was on a 4-10-hour day schedule and it's horrible, or how could I possibly afford to take a pay cut. So these are companies that are doing something unusual. They are giving full pay for people reducing their working hours by a full day and down to four, in the vast majority of cases, four eight-hour days. So the vast majority are going from a statutory 40-hour week to a 32-hour week.
Julie:No reduction in pay, and the productivity consequences of this vary. I would say the majority have no loss in productivity, or at least that's what they seem to be telling us. Quite a few are seeing improvements in productivity, or at least that's what they seem to be telling us. Quite a few are seeing improvements in productivity, and there's a small number of companies we can talk about them that are not really expecting full productivity and they're just giving people a day off. And that's, as I say, a small number, but they're an interesting case as well.
Senthil:Is it?
Senthil:something you call a 100-80 and 100 model.
Julie:Yes, so the person who started these trials is a man named Andrew Barnes.
Julie:He has a financial services company in New Zealand and he tried this model at his company in 2018 and then started an NGO called Four Day Week Global to spread the idea.
Julie:Barnes's idea was what he calls 100-80-100. 100% of the money 80% of the time, but you have to get 100% of the work done, and he thought of this to some extent as an individual thing, not only, but people actually had to sign contracts for his and most of the companies in these trials came through the four-day-a-week global organization and, for the most part, they were working on that 100-80-100 model, but not all of them. Some of them are what I call 100-80-80 companies and these are typically workplaces where people are really in danger of burning out and they're losing lots of people as a result, and they just give them a day off and they're not sort of so worried about whether they can make it up, and we can get into the details of how they're able to do that. They're actually doing it very profitably, but it's a little bit different than the majority who are trying to figure out ways to maintain organizational productivity in the face of this, you know, quite significant decline in hours worked.
Senthil:Let's get into the data in a minute. But what's driving the growing interest in the four-day workweek today? So when I was reading your book and read a bit of history, it was a lot of labor activism in the 19th century or early 20th century. Then, of course, Henry Ford pioneered this. You know, five days a week, then a lot of regulatory shifts that took us to the five-day workweek. We don't see any big, massive shifts where people are standing up and asking we need four days a week. So what's driving this trend?
Julie:Yes, well, actually it's interesting because when I went back to look at the five-day week, it had the same, very similar origins, which is these are employer-driven innovations, although there are some cases, and an increasing number, where it's coming from employees. For example, the United Auto Workers Union in the United States put a 32-hour week demand into their last bargaining negotiations and that did come from the rank and file, but most of these companies it's something that management thinks this is something we could do. This could work. Now, why? The first thing to say is that, although this idea has been around for a while and Andrew Barnes did his work before the pandemic, I think the pandemic really had a big impact in shifting many employers from sort of not even thinking about this or, if they were thinking about it, being somewhat skeptical, to thinking maybe I should try this. Now, why is that? Two reasons One is so much employee burnout, stress, quitting quiet, quitting loud, quitting, disengagement, et cetera, just ill being among workers through the pandemic, and that's something that employers care about. Many employers care about that and, you know, eventually all employers have to care about that because if their workforces are struggling that much and we also have really strong data on the fraction of the global workforce that is struggling. So that's the first impetus for it. Our workers need something, because what we're doing isn't working. They're really stressed.
Julie:The second one piece of that is something that I heard from a number of people in management, including the very first company in our research, a company called HealthWise. A company called HealthWise and in 2021, actually the summer of 2021, beginning in June they were having tremendous resignations and the CEO just thought you know what? We've got to do something? We have to do something bold. Let's just give everybody a four-day week Now. And he just did it. And they started two months later on a four-day week. Now why did he think it was viable? What he said was, with work from home, we learned we could trust our employees about where they worked.
Julie:Other innovation, and I think it also just opened employers' minds about what might be possible, because, of course, the technology force in the US and Canada, for example, who worked what used to be called teleworking- so, that was really key in terms of opening employers' minds, employee stress and then, as the great resignation came along and more and more people were leaving, and also the flip side of that is the tremendous competitive advantage that four-day-a-week firms have in attracting talent at a time when it was very difficult to do that. So that combination of keeping the people you have and attracting more people. Also, as our trials went on, sort of anecdotally, I felt we're seeing more and more for whom that turnover and talent attraction issue became really paramount.
Senthil:Let's move to evidence and data. What does the evidence say about productivity in a four-day workweek?
Julie:So just one thing to say. I cut the data off for the book to the point at which I had to put the book in, but the research is ongoing. So we now have 373 companies, including some of our collaborators who have used our instruments in non-Anglophone countries Germany, Portugal, Brazil are giving us, putting their data into our database, and we're all finding the same thing, which is well. You asked about productivity. We can get to employee well-being because we have a lot of results on that. So there are a couple of different ways that we're sort of finding out about productivity. Many of our companies are small and most of them are white collar, so it's not such an easy thing to measure productivity. In fact, it's almost impossible in a lot of them. So we have a couple of different ways that we do it. One is we ask the companies to give us data on something we thought might be a decent alternative, which is revenue, and we have really strong revenue findings and then absenteeism and hiring and resignations and so forth, and all of those look very good.
Julie:We have a number of self-reports on productivity from our employee data. So we ask them about their current workability compared to their lifetime best. We ask them just an outright productivity question. We have a smart working scale that they fill out and a number of other things which relate to issues of workload and pace and intensity, all of which factor into productivity. And then many of the companies have various kinds of metrics that they follow, like KPIs and OKRs. So we ask the companies to tell us about their overall company performance, which will be from those metrics that they follow, and then some of them have given us detailed data on those KPIs or OKRs, depending on what they use. So all of those show either stable productivity or typically better outcomes, rising performance outcomes.
Julie:There's one case we didn't do this research but our collaborators did in the UK of a local government which has, I think, 128 KPIs and stellar results on all but two, which really don't have anything to do with the employees. They're really more about economic conditions among the citizens, but what they see is they're saving a lot of money and their performance indicators are doing really well. We have some other cases where we have similar. It's a really positive productivity and performance story and I suppose the biggest piece of evidence about that is how many of these companies stay on the four-day week over an extended period of time, so we're doing six-month trials, but we keep collecting data. After that we have 90% and, depending on how you measure it, even higher numbers. Fraction of these companies are on the four-day week a year after they begin, so it's a successful innovation for them.
Senthil:It's encouraging. Would you talk about employee well-being, stress and burnout?
Julie:Yes, so we track 20 different employee well-being metrics. You mentioned stress and burnout. Those are two big ones. 70% of the people in these trials have reductions in their levels of burnout. We use a six-item burnout scale. Somewhat lower numbers have stress reduction, but there's significant improvement in every well-being measure. So burnout and stress, but also anxiety fatigue, more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, more sleep, fewer sleep problems, more exercise, less work-family conflict, less work-life conflict, more work-life and family-life balance. And we have, I think, six satisfaction measures, like job satisfaction, life satisfaction, satisfaction with time. All of those things go up and some of them vary significantly. Satisfaction with time, as you might expect, rises the most of all time, as you might expect, rises the most of all.
Senthil:Can you share one real-world example that a company saw measurable results after making the shift? I know you have listed so many companies, Just for our audience.
Senthil:One example
Julie:yeah, well, I'll take the company I started the book with because in a way to me it's perhaps the most fascinating company. So this is an advertising firm. They specialize in digital advertising. It's a 9,000-person global firm.
Julie:One unit, one team of 57 people in Canada made the switch to a four-day week. Now they sort of did it a little bit gradually. They had gotten an afternoon off during the pandemic because people were having so much trouble accessing groceries and Canada had very long lines. Anyway, the head of the team decided to give everybody the Fridays off, and this is an industry notorious for turnover. They have about a 30%. She had about a 30% annual turnover and some of the teams that they work with had 40% annual turnover. This is extremely expensive and it reduces productivity quite a lot. Once that team went to the four-day week, nobody quit, so they had pretty much zero turnover after that. Okay, so that's great, very interesting kind of what we had already learned to expect. The four-day week makes these jobs so valuable to people they don't want to leave them because they're not that easy to find yet.
Julie:But what was fascinating to me and this person became a real devotee and sort of had her accounting people figure out how much cost they were saving because they weren't having to replace people, and so they calculated many millions of dollars saved as a result of this. But the really fascinating part of her story was that she started to realize she could monetize this in the contracts that she wrote with clients. So she put in bonuses into the contracts. If no one on the team leaves, the company gets a bonus. I think it was about a $200,000 bonus, something like that. And the client the first client that she presented this to was kind of flabbergasted because they're so used to team members coming and going. Aghasted because they're so used to team members coming and going and it's a lot of effort to find new people, to hire them, to onboard them, to train them, to bring them up to speed, etc. And then you know the next one's gone. So there's just really not that much continuity on these teams and the idea that they would have a team without change was pretty amazing to the client.
Julie:And the thing that I heard in this case, but also in other cases, is that it allowed these teams not just to find new business, which they're always having to do, but to sell more business to their existing clients because they were servicing them so much better, because they would get better ideas as people were on the team longer and sort of understood the account, and so forth. So that's just one example of the variety of impacts that occur as a result of this. I think the simple-minded view and this you know, maybe like from the textbook economics model would be you're going to lose all that productivity because you know people are already working at some optimal level and if they're working fewer hours they're going to produce less, and it turns out to be a quite complicated story. The other thing that companies are doing is figuring out where they're wasting time and changing that. But even aside from that, what this example shows is that less turnover can really help you with quality, it can help you with sales, it can help you with productivity, even if you're working fewer hours.
Senthil:So it seems there is overwhelming evidence positive evidence rather on productivity, employee well-being and employee turnover reduction. This leads me to question. So 300 or so companies that signed up in a way are already aligned to this idea of four-day workweek, isn't it? Do you think that plays a role into the success? Or if we implement the model well, in any type of companies you will see the same results.
Julie:Okay. So this is a really great question. In social science research we call it selection bias. So the companies which opted into this are obviously different in some ways than companies that don't. How are they different?
Julie:So what I've come to think is that one thing I see across many of these companies, and particularly in the ones that I've done in-depth interviews with the people either who the owners of the companies, the founders, the CEOs, the people, hr heads, who implemented it is they actually care about their employees. So these tend to be somewhat humane workplaces to begin with. I mean, some of them are hard driving places. I don't want to say that these are places where there's you know it's a lot of slacking off. I don't think they are, but they're not. You know, the fast food restaurants or the, you know the places where you have employers are just trying to squeeze every last bit out and pay as low wage as possible, and so forth. I think in those, those companies actually would benefit on the turnover side. The turnover in fast food restaurants is extraordinary. I think it might be about 150% a year or something like that. I mean that's a bad statistic. So I think that's a little bit of what's different about them, and I think I'd say two things there. One is there are many more companies that are enough, like the companies in our studies, who could do this now. So I think it's not that it's only a sort of rarefied set of companies who it'll work for. It will not necessarily work for every company right now, and I think that there are companies either where the pace of work is not so high that they don't have a lot of burnout, but it's too high to find much wasted time. I think that the kind of company where I think it would be hardest to do it right now is internationally exposed manufacturing, because I think a lot of those companies have already sort of optimized their production processes and they don't have many of the things that a lot of companies are finding they can save time with.
Julie:So, for example, meetings, many of the companies in our studies change their meetings culture. They find out they have too many meetings, they go on too long, they're too inefficient, too many people go to them. That's, like you know, step one for a lot of these companies. Now, that said, there are companies in our studies who have no changes to their meetings, like the restaurant that I profile in the book. They had a once a week meeting that was run very efficiently. Only the people who needed to be there were there. They didn't change that and they didn't need to. But a lot of white-collar workplaces have too many meetings. So meetings, distractions, figuring out interruptions and distractions, that's a big problem for a lot of people in white-collar workplaces. So they deal with those and they create more what they call focus time or things like that.
Julie:Sometimes I think that the two groups of companies that are most sort of eligible for this at the moment are what I call the lower intensity companies. So those are places where there is wasted time, where they can do that what we call work reorganization before they start and kind of engineer out the wasted time and just get more efficient. And then the very high intensity, so the restaurant or the healthcare workers that we're seeing, nurses who are. They have very efficient work routines but they're just too stressed out. Their work intensity has gone beyond what is optimal and that's why you see so many people burning out and leaving the field.
Julie:We have the same thing going on in restaurants and I saw that also in some of the NGOs where the work is so heavy and kind of fraught emotionally. I mean, especially the pandemic brought out a lot of really difficult work for some of these NGOs. So those are often those 100-80-80 companies where they just need to give their workers a break and they can benefit by that. That first group, the low intensity, are suffering from that old adage of Parkinson's law, which is that they've had a lot of technological improvements but because there's no pressure to reduce work time, they just filled up the time with busy work.
Senthil:Interesting. So the key takeaway there is this model is not feasible across all industries. There are industries that are better suited than others. Is that correct?
Julie:Well, what I would say is at the moment there are excuse me, at the moment it's easier in some industries.
Julie:I would say the one place at the moment that it's hard is in manufacturing.
Julie:But if you think about how the process evolves, it will be viable for every industry because if it starts and grows, or if government puts in regulations or incentives, every industry will adapt as it grows. There'll be all that pressure on the long hours workplaces to try and compete for labor with other companies who are giving four-day weeks, and one of the things we see is the enormous value of a four-day week to the workers. We ask them a question that assesses what economists call their willingness to pay, so their willingness to pay for a four-day week, how much more extra salary they would have to get if they went to a five-day week. We've got about 13% across the sample who say no amount of money would ever induce me to go to a five-day week. But in general people are looking on the neighborhood of like a 25% to 50% raise to go to a five-day week and some even more to go to a five-day week and some even more
Senthil:so among the 300 companies or so you studied.
Senthil:did you see any systemic hurdles that organizations face?
Julie:Nothing systemic, I would say, because 90% of these companies have succeeded. What are a few of the? I would say? We've seen a few cautionary tales and I have a chapter in the book on the tweaks that some of them make a couple of failure cases, et cetera Companies. Some of them need to tweak the way their program works to make sure that, particularly if not everyone is off on the same day, that there's some availability to contact the people who are off if the people who are still working need input from them to be able to keep going.
Julie:I mean, this is really not that different than any weekend, because people are off on the weekends in these companies for the most part, but a few of them created a sort of a little bit of an on-call opportunity on that off day in order to solve that problem. We saw that maybe most prominently in an architecture context that I wrote about and actually architects. There's an increasing interest from architecture firms in this, but they are one of the harder professions to make it happen because they tend to be very long-hour firms with a kind of you know, maybe a macho work culture.
Julie:That's a little bit tough to address. The other thing is a sort of cases where only some people in the organization got this and it was very contingent. So the biggest failure case that I talk about in the book is an Australian company called who Gives a Crap. They make sustainable toilet paper and they started with just a small number of people in their company. They're a very rapidly growing company and the program started out really well. They got big employee benefits.
Julie:But I think for two reasons.
Julie:One is it wasn't the whole organization, and this is really important because when the whole organization is doing it, it creates an overall incentive to save time and to make it work and you don't have those differences in the people who are on the five day and not.
Julie:And what happened was that the people on the four day work week they ended up getting very stressed out because the rest of the company was not doing the same thing they were. And it became and we've seen this in a couple other cases, although there's one case where they had a lot of this but it was still very successful. It's a 5,000-person organization. They started with 1,000 people and now they're rolling it out to everyone, but contingency like if you don't get your work done, you don't get your fifth day off and sort of putting too much on the individual employee. I think one of the lessons that we've learned is that when you do this as a team or when you do it as a group, it's easier to make it work than thinking of this as, like you know, almost a moral issue for every individual employee, because most of these people are working or in workplaces where they're collaborating and they're relying on other people. They're not so solitary.
Senthil:Who gives a crap? Let's take that example. Correct me if I'm wrong. It was also evident that the company was growing too fast. They couldn't manage with the four-day workweek. That's one of the takeaways when I was reading that case. What does that imply? If the company is in a hyper-growth mode, they can't do with four-day workweek, or what does it even mean?
Julie:No, I didn't say that in the book and if you took that away that's my bad, because that's not. It was a rapidly growing company, but we have plenty of other rapidly growing companies who are succeeding with it. So its problems had a lot more to do with the fact that it was just a small number of people. The CEO was not necessarily all that enthusiastic about that. They didn't have good metrics. They plan to try again, but they have to figure out what the metrics are. How will they know if they succeed or not? And this was one of the things that the CEO, I think very rightly, was kind of thinking about, like what would it mean to succeed with this? But let me tell you the story of another startup, also very rapidly growing, that thinks that it was only the four-day week that made their growth possible. So this is an internet service provider. They provide broadband or actually it's satellite linkages for remote villages in northern Canada. They're not in the book but they're part of our study.
Julie:They got a big, a huge new contract at the same time that they started the four-day week and we were doing interviews with this company before they started and then at six months, and so when we went back and we learned about the big new contract. My first thought was oh, I mean, it must have been hell. How could you manage with all these new clients? So they get all these, they sign up all these new homes and then they have to service these people. So it's really not that easy to skimp on this. So the first thing they said was no, if it weren't for the four-day week, we couldn't have done it. Why? Because our people would have been too burned out with that higher volume of customer service tickets or need problems. But the other thing that came out. So that was interesting and of course they're hiring along the way, as who gives a crap was and as all the startups tend to be doing Not all of them. We have one that had layoffs during the time, but it was still been very successful.
Julie:They said that what the four-day week forced them to do was invest time upfront in documentation, which is something they hadn't been doing earlier, which meant that their customer service people were kind of reinventing the wheel, and it's a really great example of what I call in the book the forcing function of the four-day week, because there are a lot of things that companies probably should do, but they don't invest the time upfront because it doesn't have an immediate return but that down the line will save them money. And whether it's something as obvious as a documentation or just things that I think everyday things that many of us have probably experienced. Like you get a new piece of software instead of spending a few days at the beginning learning about all its functionality and so forth, so that it will save you more time in the future, we turn it on and we just use it and then we learn as we go and so forth. Or we may never learn about a lot of the functionality that it has. That might have saved us a lot of time.
Julie:And when I talk to in my interviews, when I talk to people about this and ask them well, why don't you do that without the four-day week? Why do you need a four-day week? To teach you that you should be documenting or to teach you that you know you're doing things inefficiently? And they didn't really have a good answer to that. All they could really say was you know, we're just trying to keep our head above water. We don't have time for that. It's just the everyday. Press is too much for us to maximize. You know sort of optimize everything all the time, but the four-day week sort of forces more of that quote-unquote optimization.
Senthil:So it's not as straightforward as it seems. You tell employees okay, from this week we are going to work just four days, but there are certain underlying levers which needs to be managed carefully. So let's say, if a company wanted to try this four-day workweek model, what's the best way to pilot it without risking performance?
Julie:So a couple of things. So in our trials we gave companies two months of training, onboarding, peer mentoring, talking through issues and so forth. So we advise them to empower people throughout the organization through it, if they have a team's structure or divisions, or however it is their workplace is organized, to sit down and make a plan to figure out, first of all, what is the form that your four-day week is going to take, or is everyone going to be off on the same day? Do you need coverage for all five days? So do you maybe want to split half Mondays, half Fridays, or do you want to have rotating? All those kinds of questions. You have to figure out what your format is. But then also, how are you going to save time? Where are you wasting time? And companies do different things. The manufacturing companies go through every step of their process and see where they're wasting time.
Julie:I have a deep dive into a brewery. A brewery has many different tasks, but some of them have dead time while they're in the middle of cleaning of the equipment, for example. So they figured out how they could slot tasks into the dead time of some of the longer tasks or how they could move things across different days and so forth to save time. So that's the first thing. You do as much of that as you can. Sometimes it involves training. Some of the companies used taught people how to run more efficient meetings and so forth. Some of them buy some new software that helps them with focus time or not, scheduling meetings at certain times or calendar alignment or other ways. Some go to more asynchronous communications. So you know those kinds of things.
Julie:I think a big principle is to empower your employees to figure out how to do it, because there's a lot of knowledge that resides at the bottom or throughout all different levels of the organization and they did different things. You know the senior leadership had a different task than the customer service people or so forth. Another important thing, I think, is every company in a way has to figure it out for themselves. There is a lot of common strategies that they can take from others, but they've got to have their own ways of doing things. They have their own cultures. They have to make sure that what they're doing is kind of fitting their needs.
Julie:If you're risk-averse and you have a little extra money in your pocket, you can hire a consultant. There are people now who have had a lot of experience with this. A number of them are working now after being part of our trials and being the people who taught those onboarding sessions and who have worked extensively with individual companies and doing more bespoke consulting. So that's another way to do it. I mean they're not terribly expensive. If you're a company that can afford to hire consultants for things, this is probably not a bad idea, at least to get some help. They typically now conduct what are called sort of readiness surveys to figure out are there things you need to do, problems you need to fix? Like do you lack accountability? So do you have a lot of slackers in your organization who you know? If you do, lot of slackers in your organization who you know? If you do, you need to deal with that problem, because this may not work if people are not going to, all you know, pull together, and so it's pretty much just common sense, honestly.
Senthil:Gotcha, Julie, there is also a broader conversation around fairness and equity. Who really gets to benefit from this model? Does the four-day workweek benefit all workers equally, including frontline and low-wage staff? Given that your research, as you said, is mostly white-collar workers, do you have any perspectives on this?
Julie:Well, I think it can, and I think we're starting to see in some cases, and especially some of these cases where governments are getting involved and we've been involved in government sample they're not like super high earners I mean, these are mostly middle class in the US that the income levels are pretty much aligned with median income and so forth. But you're not seeing this in those really low wage, highly exploitative kinds of jobs that we have plenty of in the US. So I think that to make sure that this is something that everybody gets to benefit from, I think that's where you're eventually going to need government intervention. I think, first, what we're starting to see is governments sponsoring these trials and we have bills in the US for them. The government of Poland just announced, or government just giving it to public sector workers, and we're also seeing that happen in certain cases. But if the government's involved with sort of tax incentives and so forth, I think that's what makes it more viable to sort of spread across the labor force.
Senthil:Interesting, and when I was reading your book I couldn't help to relate some of the ideas with the work of Bridget Schulte, which I'm sure you know her. I'm keen to understand how does the four-day workweek interact with efforts to improve gender equality and inclusion at work?
Julie:Yeah. So that's something we were definitely worried about. We are working coming to the final drafts of a paper where we're looking at that because, like many other interventions in the workforce, people worried about women could work fewer hours Turned out it has a big negative impact on their careers. So it was something meant to be good for women, but it has a blowback. So we were curious.
Julie:Now our studies are really different because most of those workplace interventions have been at the individual level, so we're not going to see that problem of stigma and sort of career sabotaging your career if you want to spend less time at work, because it's happening across the whole organization. But we were wondering well, is it just going to mean that because, say, the woman in a heterosexual couple has an extra day off, she's going to have to do a lot more childcare and housework, for example. And what we found is that in fact, you see, women are not taking on a bigger share of housework and childcare, but men are. So women are typically using that day off to get a little bit of time for themselves, because they tend to be so time starved and have to spend so much of their time off on housework, domestic labor, child care, elder care, so they're getting some time for themselves so-called me time really really important on that day off, and so the gender dimensions of this look to be very positive from the point of view of enhanced gender equity.
Senthil:That's very encouraging, Julie. Let's zoom out a bit what's happening globally and where this four-day workweek might be heading. Are there any countries or companies are leading the way on the four-day workweek? What can others learn from them?
Julie:So I think where we are seeing the biggest movement is in Europe. So, for example, our first trial was Irish trial had some American and global countries. The third one was the UK, which was the biggest. It had about 70 companies in it. But we're also seeing government trials, government-sponsored trials Scotland, portugal, poland has just announced the Spaniards. They were the first to announce a government trial. They also had a regional trial in Valencia. The national trial is an interesting one. It's a three-year trial where the government is subsidizing wages for that fifth day. So there's less of a risk for the companies in terms of productivity because they're not going to have to pay those fifth day wages. But it's a declining share over the three years and the Spanish are most likely about to reduce their statutory work week down to 37.5.
Julie:There's some companies in Italy some of the bigger well-known names Lamborghini and some others in Italy that have gone to a four-day week. Germany there's a very large company I can't tell you the name of it at the moment that is pretty far along in the process and I'm actually working with a colleague who's working with a global manufacturing company. I've been approached by global manufacturing companies because the Belgians have a trial and they also put in a four-day week that anyone in Belgium is allowed to get a four-day week. That's a compressed four days, so four tens, but they're also interested in moving that to a 32-hour. So I'd say Europe is the place where we're seeing the most movement and we're seeing it from unions and governments as well as just individual companies.
Julie:And this is what some of the big companies are saying that they expect legislation in Europe and so they're going to need to harmonize across many different sites. So they want to try and get ahead of that process. The city government of Tokyo put all of its employees on a four-day week and part of the reason for that is very different than what's happening elsewhere, but they're worried about low fertility and they have a lot of female employees and they think maybe if they have some more time off the job they might be more likely to have children. The UAE has gone to a four-and-a-half day and they may be moving down to a four-day, and that has to do with their Sabbath.
Senthil:Very interesting. Do you think the four-day work week will become standard in the next decade or so? What would it take to get us?
Julie:there. I do think about a decade-long time frame. So I think that a decade from now it could be norm, the norm, and I think you will see standard workweek of four days in quite a few countries I don't know about my own. I mean, to some extent it's going to depend on. We have a lot of political change happening in the United States right now and the current administration, I think it would be pretty hostile to this idea. They tend to be a very old-fashioned conservative, that's a nice way of putting it, but I do think we'll see it.
Julie:I think we'll see legislative activity at the state level in the United States, at the country level, throughout Europe and then some random other countries. I think you'll see action, a few in the East Asia. I think we'll see a little bit of action. There's also interest in Korea, in South Korea, and I think we're going to get a lot more pressure from unions in the next five years. My understanding is the UAW is planning to make this one of their top three demands in their next contract negotiations. That's something I've heard it through the grapevine. It's maybe more on the anecdotal, but I think we'll see it.
Senthil:Before we move to the final section, a more personal question. What originally drew you into this topic? you have been working in this space for about four decades now and what gives you hope or excitement about where it's heading?
Julie:Well, I have cents or or two about this in the book, so I got into this in a sort of not very usual way for me. Normally I see something important and I want to work on it. But I was reading a book by a very distinguished philosopher, oxford philosopher, about Marx and Marxist theory of history, and he's part of what was known as the analytical Marxist tradition, so a very like a logician, everything very, very logical. And then there was a page and a half on what has come to be called the output bias of capitalism, this idea that capitalist economies take productivity growth in the form of more production rather than more free time. I mean, that's, if you get more productive, you have the choice of either producing more or producing the same amount and working less. And he had a very not logical explanation for it and I was kind of like aha, I've figured, you know, like this brilliant man has made a massive mistake here. So I was just a brand new assistant professor. I'm like I'm going to write a paper and show how not smart he was.
Julie:So I wrote a paper explaining what he missed was what we in economics call the micro foundations. So he was talking about how it works at the system level as a whole, but what about the individual firms? I mean, why are they not giving their workers the choice of either working less or making more money? And that just set me off on what became a lifelong interest in working hours. Because then I started to think well, what's happened to working hours? And aha, look, in the United States working hours are going up, they're not going down like they had been for the last 50 years. And look how different the US and Europe are. And why is that? And that led to the Overworked American, which was the book that I published in 1992. And that book got a lot of attention. It was a national bestseller.
Julie:I heard from you know. I spoke to a lot of CEOs and company people and so forth, and I ended up being approached by a company that wanted to try a reduced work day, and I went to some companies to talk to them about it. But in the end none of that panned out and I didn't have the opportunity to try and put those ideas into practice. So I was just left with looking at data, just data, that was there, not data that I was able to collect through experiments or interventions of that type?
Julie:And then I continued to do some work on this topic, but I got into other things. I studied gig work and I studied consumerism. In 2021, I was approached by the person who was organizing that first Irish trial because he knew about my research and not too many people study working hours, especially among economists. And he said would you like to do the research for these trials? And I was really excited because here was a chance to actually put some of these ideas into practice with a much more well-developed model than I had figured out myself at the firm, kind of more at the managerial level and the kind of from Andrew Barnes' experience at what he had learned at his company. So there we are.
Senthil:What a story. and do you also think yourself advancing what Keynes has predicted about 100 years back, that in future there will be reduced work time, people will have a lot of time for leisure?
Julie:Yeah, well, we could have had it, and you know, I think the big question now is AI, and are we going to? Is AI going to lead to lots of people losing their jobs, or is it going to lead to fewer hours per job, which is, I think, what we desperately need to do to avoid the tremendous social upheaval, pain, distress, uncertainty and destabilization that comes from mass unemployment.
Senthil:And you have a chapter on that as well right, how AI is going to impact workers. Would you want to quickly share some of your thoughts?
Julie:Well, in that chapter, you know, I go back to the first industrial revolution and you know, explain to people how actually what happened at first was. It led to a big increase in working hours and it wasn't until later that you start to get that decline, not till 1870. So you're already 100 years into factory life, and the lesson that we should learn from that is that maintaining employment in the face of a technology that has tremendous labor displacement possibilities, as AI does, you absolutely need to reduce hours per job, and that's what we eventually did with the Industrial Revolution, and that was key to maintaining high levels of employment through the 20th century and into the 20th century. Honestly, except, you know, not in the US, but elsewhere, except you know not in the US, but elsewhere.
Senthil:Actually, let's move to the final section. These are the same set of questions we ask all our guests. How do you handle differences of opinion and setbacks?
Julie:In my team or online
Senthil:At your workplace, I'm sure people come to you and say no, four-day work week won't work. They may disagree with some of your central ideas.
Senthil:How do you handle such differences?
Julie:I got some very hostile emails from men who were saying you don't know what you're talking about or you're a laughingstock, or this is why nobody takes social scientists seriously, and so forth. And one of them I wrote back and I said I don't know. I said something. I said why don't you read the book? And then we can talk. And I said a little bit. And then he wrote back an even more hostile email saying I said take a risk, read the book. Meaning like, take the risk of reading something that you think you're going to hate, but you know, it's not that big a risk to read a book. He was, I think, offended at the idea of me saying take a risk. And he said why don't you take a risk? Why don't you put half of your retirement savings tomorrow into this startup fund? And there's a good chance you might lose it all and whatever. And that you know because these young people in these startups are working 60 hours a week, and I used to work 60 hours a week. He said. So I wrote back and I said look, you know, I'm 69 years old, I'm on the verge of retirement, putting half of my retirement into a fund that has a high likelihood of failing. There's no way I'm going to do that.
Julie:And I said something to him about you know, why are you sending me these hostile emails? And he wrote back and said no, my emails aren't hostile. And I said well, here's what you wrote. And I wrote back. And then he writes me back a very apologetic letter and says can I take you out to dinner? And you know, and I also explained to him, you might have worked 60 hours a week, but you had a wife who was taking care of your family and home and people don't have that today and they're really burning out. And when I told my son about this interaction at the beginning, he said why are you even responding to this guy? And he sent you a hostile email. Just ignore him. But it turned out to be a very gratifying experience because I was fairly civil back to him but I told him what I thought about the way he was talking to me and you know. And he apologized and you know now I feel like I could talk to him about all kinds of things. So that's how I like to handle it.
Senthil:Interesting. So, in summary, it's more about respectfully engaging, even with someone who has like very strong views or come to you as not so civic.
Julie:Of course, there was an economist who was criticizing us in the press, that he didn't really know too much about what we were doing. And I reached out to him. I sent him our papers and you know we had a productive conversation.
Senthil:Great and in your experience, what are one or two essential skills required for business leaders?
Julie:It seems for the last 40 years or so you've worked with many leaders in the sector and understand that this is a time where we're going to be seeing a lot of change and it's going to be important.
Julie:And, within that change, stay true to having and maintaining a humane workplace.
Senthil:Finally, Julie, can you recommend a book or two to our listeners?
Julie:A book or two to your listeners,
Senthil:I think, a book that is connected to my book. The topic of my book, which is a book by Cal Newport called Slow Productivity, where he's talking about some of the same things I think is a pretty interesting book. Work by Adam Grant is always interesting. You know, probably the best advocate for humane leadership and workplaces that we have in the United States.
Senthil:Excellent, Julie, we are coming to the end. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing some of the valuable perspectives from your very important research. It's such an honor talking to you today.
Julie:Thank you, it's been a pleasure .
Senthil:That was Professor Juliet Schor helping us rethink the future of work one day at a time. If you found this episode useful, please rate and share it with a friend or colleague who's dreaming of a three-day weekend. Until next time. Thanks for listening to Business and Society Podcast.