Lawmakers in California are talking about make a four-day work week a reality. Here's why the idea isn't as far-fetched as it seems.
More and more companies worldwide are making the switch to a 32-hour work week. And in California, there’s even talk of making it the law. Today, we discuss what the State Legislature is discussing. And we hear from people at companies that already have done that. And guess what? Worker productivity, at least according to them, is as great as ever.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times breaking news reporter Hayley Smith, and Andrew Barnes, 4 Day Week Global co-founder
More reading:
Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours. Here’s what you need to know
Editorial: What if every week was a four-day workweek?
Austin Schofield: Ok just pulled up at the spot. Looks like the tide’s coming in, current’s moving [car door shuts, gulls]
Gustavo: That was Austin Schofield (SKO-field). And one recent Monday, while most of us were at work, Austin ... went fishing.
Austin Schofield: Feels like a fishy spot—Oh, a fish just jumped!
Gustavo: Like he's been doing basically every Monday for the last two years. Ever since his employer — a company called the Wanderlust Group — switched from a five-day workweek down to four.
Austin Schofield: It’s been really nice from a fishing perspective, because everyone else is busy so I can go to all the spots and there’s not boaters or anglers everywhere. And it just allows you to decompress, and not have that dread of the upcoming work day. Even though I have work tomorrow, I'm not stressed out about it at all, really.
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Austin Schofield: I am absolutely in love with the four-day workweek. I don't think I could go back to a five-day workweek.
Gustavo: More and more companies are making the switch. And in California, there's even talk of making a 32 hour workweek — the law.
Vox pop 1, Verenice (Target): Oh, I would think that would be amazing, uh, three-day weekends, I think a lot of people would appreciate having that break.
Gustavo: But some people aren’t so sure:
Voxpop2 (Marissa Franco): I don't foresee that being a possibility in my line of work. I just don't see it being something that's feasible for my lifestyle and the amount of work that I usually have to do.
Gustavo: One of the biggest skeptics of the idea? Me.
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Gustavo Arellano: I'm Gustavo Arellano, you're listening to the Times. Daily news from the LA Times.
It's Monday, May 9th, 2022.
Today, my colleague Hayley Smith talks about a new bill in the California legislature that might one day legally shorten the workweek from 40 hours to 32. And we talk to people at companies that already have done that. And guess what? Worker productivity, at least according to them, is as great as ever.
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Gustavo Hayley. Welcome to the Times.
Hayley Smith: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: So what'd you do this past weekend?
Hayley Smith: I took some time off of work and just enjoyed relaxing, how about you?
Gustavo Arellano: I worked. Work, work, work, work. I'm one of those workaholics. So this episode is going to be interesting.
Hayley Smith: Yes. A sickness all of us journalists, I think have.
Gustavo Arellano: But there’s this new bill in California, AB 2932, and it would change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for some workers. Not all. We'll get to that in a bit, but where did the basic idea for the bill come from?
Hayley Smith: I actually spoke to both of the assembly members who co-authored this bill, Christina Garcia and Evan Low, to ask them that, where did this come from? And they both said that it was largely a response to the great resignation, which as you may know, has been this sort of…
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Hayley Smith: moment of mass exodus of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021, which apparently is the highest quit rate the bureau of labor statistics has seen since they started tracking that number in the year 2000. So there are a lot of reasons for this great resignation, but namely I think that the pandemic // really accelerated this desire among workers for more flexibility. // People realize this idea of working 40 hours a week, being tied to a specific chair at a specific desk in a specific room wasn't really necessary to get their work done. And a lot of people have said they weren't just as productive if not more working from home. So I think when companies started asking people to come back to the office, a lot of people pushed back.
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Gustavo Arellano: Right, it’s not just in California that we’re talking about this either, a similar bill was introduced in Congress last year by Riverside rep Mark Takano (tah-KAH-no). But the 40-hour work week, it seems so ingrained… like an eight-hour day, five days a week. All of that, How did we even land on those numbers in the first place?
Hayley Smith: We've been following this 40-hour, five-day work week schedule for like 80 years at this point.
Gustavo Arellano: That little?
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Hayley Smith: Ha. Well, yeah, employees often used to work six days a week…
Hayley Smith: Until the late 1930s, when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the work week at 44 hours and then was amended to 40 hours in 1940. And it hasn't budged since then, despite so many changes to the ways that people live and work. There was one report a few years back that found that the average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant.
Gustavo Arellano: Ha. Well, you know, what did those medieval peasants have to do anyways?
Hayley Smith: Yeah. Apparently in England, in the 1300s, peasants worked like 150 days a year. And meanwhile, the average American gets something like 10 days of vacation time a year.
Gustavo Arellano: Damn.
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Hayley Smith: And actually even Richard Nixon predicted that U.S. workers would soon have a four day work week back when he was vice-president. And that was in the late 1950s. So we really haven't come a long way at all. And I actually know that Nixon tidbit, because the LA Times editorial board mentioned it when they endorsed the idea of trying a four-day workweek last year. So, who knows maybe you and I can benefit from this as well.
Gustavo Arellano: If it happens, if California does pass a four-day work week, it would be the first state in the nation to do it. Are there other places that have tried this before?
Hayley Smith: One sort of widely cited case study came out of Iceland and it had promising results. What they found when they tested the concept twice between 2015 and 2019, was that worker productivity and service remained essentially the same, even with reduced hours. And then on top of that, worker wellbeing improved dramatically. People reported less stress and burnout, better health, better work-life balance.
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Hayley Smith: And as a result of that study something like 86% of workers in Iceland are now working less hours or // gaining the right to do that.
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah. But like Iceland's Iceland. It’s heaven on earth.
Hayley Smith: Iceland is Iceland and America is America. And I think that's why there's already a lot of pushback against this particular bill. Probably surprising no one.
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Gustavo Arellano: Coming up after the break, which workers could one day be clocking out early each week — and which won't.
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voxpops: I would appreciate a four-day week. Productivity might increase because people who are happy, work happy, therefore do more work.
Liliana Rodriguez: I commute daily one way about an hour and a half, on the way back two hours. So that would definitely help out with, especially with the gas prices right now, as well as getting chores done and making appointments like dentist appointments, doctor's appointments, just so I don't have to use all of my sick time.
Marissa Franco: Do I think the legislature is going to pass it? I don't think so. I think it's going to be really tough for them to get it passed.
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Gustavo Arellano: So Hayley, the four-day work week bill has stalled…it’s not advancing to the next step toward becoming a law this year…but it’s not totally dead yet. So…if it does eventually move forward and become law….how would it actually work?
Hayley Smith: So this is where I introduce a big fat caveat, which is that this bill is still very much in its early stages.
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Hayley Smith: And there are a lot of details about how it would work and what it would look like that have yet to be determined. The assembly members even told me that at this point, what they're really hoping to do is start a conversation, bring business and labor and workers together to talk this out. And so obviously it's working because here we are talking about it. But to answer your question, here is what we do know: the bill would amend the California labor code and change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for companies with more than 500 employees. And that number is important because it means it wouldn't apply to small businesses. A full work day would remain at eight hours. So it's not like they're saying, okay, you can work four days, but you have to do 10 hour days. And in fact it would require overtime pay for employees working longer than the 32 hours. Crucially the bill would also prohibit employers from reducing an employee's regular rate as a result of this change. So they can't say, okay, we'll cut you down to 32 hours, but pay you less each hour. That's also where a lot of the questions start to come in, such as what kind of worker would this apply to in practice? For example, they said, they're still hammering out the details of how this would work for salaried employees, but I also don't think that a lot of hourly workers, restaurant workers, people who work in grocery stores for example, are necessarily pulling 40 hour weeks. So I think what we're talking about is probably white collar workers who are putting in 40 hours, but at an hourly level, and then potentially salary-level workers once they figure that out.
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Hayley Smith: The other thing that is noteworthy is that workforces with collective bargaining agreements or unionized workforces would also be exempt from the bill as it's currently written. The authors said that this is because those agreements are often better than what they're proposing here, but that exemption does eliminate a huge swath of workers. I'm thinking like teachers, potentially a lot of government workers. So again, so a lot of it is TBD.
Gustavo Arellano: You mentioned pushback. What's the pushback?
Hayley Smith: That's right. So even with all of this yet to be determined, this really hasn't stopped opponents of this concept from pushing back. And in fact, the California Chamber of Commerce has added this bill to their quote-unquote “job killer list,” saying that it would significantly increase labor costs, expose employers to lawsuits and basically impose impossible requirements. One policy advocate at the Chamber of Commerce actually estimated that it would add up to a minimum 10% increase in wages per employee per week, which she said is just not sustainable for many businesses, particularly those that operate with very thin profit margins. The Society for Human Resource Management actually emailed me after the story came out to say that they also opposed it because it's got a sort of one-size-fits-all approach and other experts have shared similar concerns saying, this would reduce employment lead to hiring freezes, layoffs, things like that.
Gustavo Arellano: On the other hand, there's also a lot of excitement just that the bill’s even talked about in California.
Hayley Smith: The response that I got to this story was huge. I think people are really hungry for this conversation.I think that psychologically the pandemic // refocused a lot of people's thinking onto the things that matter in their lives, you know, time with their loved ones and their health and the health of their families. And people also have just been really stressed and burned out by everything that's gone on in the last two years. So I think that what has sort of sparked with this bill…
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Hayley Smith: is just this idea that if we don't at least try to acknowledge and address that people are really unhappy and we have the data to back that up with the great resignation, then we're basically just sticking our heads in the sand because obviously something is not working anymore.
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Gustavo Arellano: Haley. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Hayley Smith: Thanks so much for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: After the break -- we talk to an entrepreneur who’s allll about the 4-day workweek. And not only for himself…he’s actively recruiting hundreds of companies across the world to do the same.
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Gustavo: A few years ago, my next guest, Andrew Barnes, told his employees he wanted to try something -- radical.
YouTube/Andrew Barnes: And the radical thing is we're going to do a trial — that's six weeks — where you will be working four days a week and you will be paid for five. This is not a [employees laughing] Told you you’d like it! [more laughter]
Gustavo: He said the company was going to switch from a 5-day workweek down to four. That was back in 2018. Since then, he’s founded a nonprofit, 4-Day Week Global, that coaches companies all around the world on how to make the switch themselves.
Andrew, you've said in the past that your attitude about working hours changed while you were on a long flight from Auckland to London, reading The Economist. And anytime I read the magazine, it seems to be all about capitalism, capitalism, capitalism. So what did you read?
Andrew Barnes: Hi Gustavo! Well, I read a thing about bad productivity in the UK and the article said that the Brits were only productive for two and a half hours a day and the Canadians one and a half hours a day. And I thought, what's going on, is that happening in my business? And if it is, What can I do differently to improve productivity? // I just literally got off the plane thinking, what is it that stops you being productive? It's the calls from home. It's trying to track down that elusive tradesman. It's dealing with the kids, it's interruptions at work. And I thought, well, look, if I give people the gift of more time, will they actually then change how they behave in each of the hours at work? And if I could get that change of behavior, could I get better productivity?
Gustavo Arellano: So you get this idea of shortening the week from 5 days to four, how did this go over at your company?
Andrew Barnes: Every single member of my leadership team hated this. Every single one said it wasn't going to work. Every single one said, w —how could I do this, possibly, i’m so busy! I would have expected, you know, cheers, but actually people said, well, what's the catch? There has to be a catch. We commenced the trial in February of 2018 and we made it permanent as a policy in November of 2018.
Gustavo: And you saw results.
Andrew Barnes: We saw incredible results. I mean, on average companies who introduced this, see productivity go up between 25 and 40%, which is quite extraordinary when you think you're asking people to work 80% of the hours. We call it the 100-80-100 rule, 100% pay, 80% time, provided we get a minimum of a 100% of normal five-day productivity. When we announced the results of the trial in New Zealand, we got inundated. Companies all over the world kept calling us up. // Can you help us? We want to introduce this. And so we decided that what we would do is create this concept of Four-Day Week Global, where we run trials on a national basis. So the first of these pilots was in Ireland where we have about 35 companies going through the process. We've got a similar number in the United States. There are 66 companies operating in the UK pilot. Uh, we've got Australia, New Zealand in the recruitment phase. We've got one in Israel. We are working now with the Spanish government on that pilot. We're about hopefully to work with the Scottish government on theirs. And there is some talk of the European union bringing one in.
Gustavo: The biggest haters of the four-day work week seem to be business leaders or workaholics like myself. So what's your pitch to us?
Andrew Barnes: You’re absolutely right. Look, I was a business leader. I am a business leader. I was conditioned that working longer was working harder. Working longer is not actually about working smarter. It's just spending more time away from home. And often if you think about it, the time that you waste being in meetings that you shouldn't be. There's lots and lots of things that impact you. If you actually give the challenge to your team and you say, you know what, we're going to do some reorganization here, but it's not going to result in a job loss. It's going to result in you having more time off. Now, what you do is you liberate your staff to find those hacks in your business to make their job better and make the company more productive. You will find that you are not just more productive, you're healthier, you're more rested. You're more creative.
Andrew Barnes: I've done many things in business. But this is the best thing I have ever done. And my only regret is that I didn't do it earlier, but what I would also say to business leaders, that your biggest risk isn't implementing a four-day week. Your biggest risk is your biggest competitor does it first.
Gustavo: Reduce the amount of interruptions, higher productivity. Then you basically get the results of a 40-hour work week with 32 hours, and then these people have more free time. So they're more refreshed once they actually get into the workplace.
Andrew Barnes: I have a grandfather, he takes two afternoons off a week and he walks home. So he's getting himself a little bit fitter and then his granddaughter comes around and they have tea together. And when he tells the story he cries, because what we’re doing it we’re giving him something you can’t put a price on. Another one that always struck me; my head of IT told the story of picking up his child from school for the first time. And the child ran across the playground, flung her arms around him and said, “What are you doing here, Daddy?” Now [voice trembles] cracks me up every time that one. That's what this is about. This is giving people time to do the things they really want to do. We're giving people back a bit of their lives. But in return, we're getting better productivity. What's not to like?
Gustavo: Well when you speak like that you almost turn a skeptic like me into a believer. // Has there been any like mega-corporations that would be familiar to American audiences that have tried a four day-work week, even just as a pilot program?
Andrew Barnes: Well, yes. I mean, Microsoft has tried it, a very famous trial in Japan // they found simply by eliminating, no more than five people in a meeting, no meeting longer than half an hour, and please use Microsoft teams. They got a 39.9% improvement in productivity. Now, other companies that are doing this Unilever is running a major trial, Kickstarter are on a four day week. There are more and more companies all over around the world, but in the United States that are now trying this out because it makes sense.
Gustavo: Has it not worked for any company that you've heard of that tried it? Like, what, what are the other challenges maybe if you do go to a four-day week.
Andrew Barnes: You've got to recognize that what works for me may not work for you. In my company, we can't close. We are a retail business. We have call centers. So we have a program whereby some people will take a day off. Some people take a couple of half days. Some people, especially working parents, will work five days, but compressed hours. But our organization has to stay open for five days. The emphasis here is about giving people more time off, but against the model that makes the company work best, you can't just say it looks like that, or it looks like that; takes a little bit of trial and error.
Gustavo: You've coached companies in this all over the world. // What do you think of us Americans and the work-life balance?
Andrew Barnes: Well, I mean, you're appalling, frankly. But you're not much worse than, the Kiwis Australians or Brits, the, we as the Anglo sphere in a way is really poor at work-life balance and critically poor about productivity. You will see that the Germans, for example. So the Metall union in Germany, that's Volkswagen, they manufacture cars on a four-day week. Now, highly productive leading company in the world, but yet, you know, we struggled to manage to get the same productivity out of five days. So what this is about is about, you know, unleashing the creativity within your organization in return for giving them something they can't put a value on, which is more time.
Gustavo: Finally Andrew, California could be the first state in the United States to pass a law that would require a four-day workweek for a lot of different types of businesses. What's your take, is legislation the way to go about this?
Andrew Barnes: Look, I think government has a role to play at some point in the process. // At the very least having the law debated is raising the question of how we work today in the 21st century. Even if it doesn't pass, that is helpful. Our own model is opt-in.
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Andrew Barnes: Our own model says to companies, shape it, do it the way you want to, you will get fantastic productivity out of it. So, there is a role for both. It will be interesting to see how it goes. If you can move the United States, frankly, you can move anyone.
Gustavo: Andrew, thank you so much for this conversation.
Andrew Barnes: Thank you, Gustavo.
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OUTRO MUSIC
Gustavo Arellano: Gustavo: And that’s it for this episode of THE TIMES, daily news from the LA Times.
Maya Kroth was the jefa on this episode, with help from Angel Carreras.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Brousalian, Ashlea Brown, Angel Carreras and David Toledo. Our engineer is Mario Diaz. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera and Shani Hilton. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
And hey, The Times and KCRW are co-hosting a debate with some of the top LA mayoral candidates later this month. It’s focused on homelessness. What questions do you want me to ask them? Call or text (619) 800-0717 with your questions.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.
OUTTAKES
I'm almost convinced I do. I do like the productivity, see that speaks to the workaholic in me, like work smarter. I would also say work harder.
So yeah. Yeah, one day. Thursday could actually be, the new…. I thought I was gonna sing Rebecca Black's Friday, but that's too much.
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