A movement to reduce the amount of time employees spend at work each week has been building for years. Now the idea has a new proponent: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats, unveiled legislation Wednesday that would establish a four-day workweek in the US without a reduction in pay.
“Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea,” Sanders said in a press release. “Today, American workers are over 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago. That has got to change.”
The Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act would cut back the typical workweek from 40 to 32 hours over a four-year period by lowering the maximum hours threshold for overtime pay.
Sanders introduced the legislation in the Senate with Senator Laphonza Butler of California. In the House, Representative Mark Takano of California, who previously reintroduced the bill in Congress, brought forth companion legislation.
“While CEOs’ wages continue to increase, our workers are finding themselves doing more, yet earning less than they have in decades,” Butler said in the release. “The Thirty-Two-Hour Workweek Act would allow hardworking Americans to spend more time with their families while protecting their wages and making sure profits aren’t only going to a select few.”
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which Sanders chairs, held a hearing on the issue on Thursday.
Witnesses included United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and Boston College professor Juliet Schor, the lead researcher of a global four-day week pilot program.
The release referred to the legislation as an “important step toward ensuring that workers share in the massive increase in productivity driven by artificial intelligence, automation, and new technology.”
Similar measures have been considered in states including Massachusetts.
Sanders cited multiple studies and four-day pilot programs demonstrating that Americans are more productive than they were since the standard 40-hour workweek was set by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1940 and that employees globally reported greater productivity working a shorter week.
The findings of the pilot programs — one conducted in the United Kingdom and the other in the United States and Canada — pointed to employees being more productive because they were happier as a result of having “greater satisfaction with their time and feeling less burnt out,” according to the summary of the bill.
The Globe reported last year that the four-day-week push was aided by the success of the trial completed in the United Kingdom. The trial involved 61 companies with 2,900 employees and was conducted by the New Zealand nonprofit 4 Day Week Global. Schor and Wen Fan conducted the research, which found that more than 90 percent of employers planned to continue with reduced work weeks.
The FLSA was signed into law in 1938 and established a 44-hour workweek through overtime protections. It was the “first broadly applicable federal standard for working hours” in the country, according to the release. Two years later, it was phased into the modern 40-hour workweek.
At the hearing on Thursday, Sanders said the “sad reality is that Americans now work more hours than the people of any other wealthy nation,” and cited statistics from Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany. In 2022, he said, Americans logged at least 200 more hours than workers in any of those countries.
He pointed to countries where the 32-hour workweek movement with no loss of pay is gaining traction in the summary of the bill, including France, which has a 35-hour workweek and is considering reducing it. In Denmark and Norway, the workweek is about 37 hours.
According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that Sanders cited, the average full-time employee in America now works 42 hours per week. (Some may work multiple jobs, which the estimate does not account for.)
“The financial gains from the major advancements in artificial intelligence, automation, and new technology must benefit the working class, not just corporate CEOs and wealthy stockholders on Wall Street,” Sanders said. “It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life.”
Shannon Larson can be reached at shannon.larson@globe.com. Follow her @shannonlarson98.