Should We Rethink the 40-Hour Workweek?
The standard workweek is 40 hours - eight hours a day for five days a week. It’s been that way for a long time. Back in 1900, the typical factory worker spent 53 hours on the job, one-third more hours than we spend today. The Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938 and set maximum hours at 40 per week. Amazingly, more than three-quarters of a century after passage of the FLSA, there has been no further decline in the standard workweek. Not only has the legal standard remained unchanged, but also 40 hours has become the social and cultural norm .
What’s going on here? Economists predicted that as we became more prosperous we would choose to work fewer hours. That hasn’t happened. Instead, we have kept on working at about the same pace as we did earlier in our history, pouring all of the gains from productivity growth into ever-higher levels of consumption: bigger houses, more electronic gadgets and fancier cars. With increased prosperity, people are buying more and more stuff, but they don’t have any more time to enjoy it. A reduction in the standard workweek would improve the quality of life, especially for those in hourly jobs who have benefited hardly at all from economic growth in recent decades.