I Was a Four-Day Workweek Guinea Pig

For all its sophisticated econometrics the United States is still a warped land of social control through work. A four-day work week could fix this.

Note to readers: No podcast this weekend. We’ll be back next Sunday!

- Ben

Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash

by Rich Herschlag

In the spring of 1989, after four less than stellar years in the workforce, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations that left me reeling. The corporate plan in those days was typically two weeks vacation per year. At 26 I could expect to work perhaps 40 more years. Forty times two weeks was 80 weeks, or roughly a year and a half of vacation over the course of my remaining productive life. In the context of my relatively low paying civil engineering grind it seemed I had just 18 months left to live. By “live” I mean travel, enjoy experiences off the clock, wander to a beach, write a book, spend a month in the woods, or basically anything not contributing directly to the gross domestic product.

But spring 1989 was also when I spotted an ad in the help wanted section of the Sunday New York Times for a civil/structural engineering job in Manhattan that included a four-day workweek. My resume and cover letter earned me an interview. I shaved, put on a coat and tie, tucked my pony tail into the back of my shirt collar, and took the 4 train to the office on Union Square. During the interview I mentioned my affinity for roadway design, bridges, retaining walls, and traffic studies. I acknowledged recently passing the national Engineer in Training Exam with a relatively high score along with my intention to take the professional engineer’s state licensing exam within the coming year. Everything but the main reason I was there. When a company VP with 35 years under his belt finally brought up the four-day workweek I replied it was fine with me, as if I was willing and able to undergo some sort of hardship and take one for the team.

Early April that year began a golden era in a young life that had up to that point been filled with copper, tin, and wooden eras. It turned out the perils of toiling four straight 10-hour workdays was well worth the perk of a three-day weekend every weekend. Four brutal roundtrip rush hour subway rides was hands down better than five. A killer Monday was roughly the same as before with the exception that when it was over I was a quarter of the way through hell rather than a fifth. The new burnout early Thursday evenings was severe but not much more severe than the old burnout late afternoons Friday. In fact, knowing a three-day weekend lay ahead, I could often power through Thursdays on adrenaline.

Before long my depressing back-of-the-envelope calculations went out the window. Because a three-day weekend was enough time to take short to medium road trips with my band or young wife, or to take up entirely new endeavors like backyard construction projects or music classes, each weekend became a potential vacation, such that there was no longer much pressure to perform a series of Renaissance feats on my paltry two-week official vacation. Not to mention the strategic four-day weekend built on the back of an occasional Thursday or Monday sick day. Although frowned upon, there was an unwritten rule you could do that once a season. And once you did, you were effectively looking at a four-day vacation followed by a three-day workweek.

My four-day workweek went down in a blaze of glory about three years later in the midst of a recession that inspired management to “encourage” Fridays at work and then to start laying off employees who didn’t take the hint, ironically providing each of us with a life-affirming zero-day workweek.

Today, a full 30 years later in an age when technology and a pandemic have rendered it a slam dunk, the four-day workweek is finally being seriously tinkered with by relatively large pockets of corporate America and implemented enthusiastically by relatively enlightened countries with average life spans longer than ours and growing. These counties include Japan, Iceland, Belgium and South Africa. Companies floating the four-day trial balloon include Kickstarter, Primary.com, The Wanderlust Group, and Bolt Financial. Most of these entities report increases in productivity, morale, and teamwork.

Look for the four-day workweek not to catch on at General Motors, Nike, Microsoft, Disney, ExxonMobil, most of the Fortune 500 companies  or throughout the remainder of the American corporate world or privately held small to medium businesses, hospitals, law firms, universities, and government agencies dotting the fifty states. I can tell you why without doing a $25 million two-year study, though I will take the money anyway especially if I can perform the study Mondays through Thursdays.

The United States of America is largely stuck in another century. Whether that means the 20^th or 19^th century depends on the issue. On climate change it’s the 20^th century. On reproductive rights it’s the 19^th century in some states, the 20^th in others. Same for voting rights. On gun safety it’s the 19^th century but with 21^st century weapons. For healthcare it’s the second half of the 20^th century but with 21^st century diseases, diets, environmental factors, costs, and outcomes. For labor law and policy it’s mostly the 20^th century following the union push over 80 years ago for the five-day, 40-hour week.

But even that impressive list of social throwbacks doesn’t do justice to the obscene anachronisms of American work culture. While Europe largely shuts down in August, Americans pack commuter trains like sardines and pray the AC doesn’t fail. If you want a siesta in America, fall asleep on the job and hope you don’t operate a forklift. Relatively few actual lunch hours reach 60 minutes, and first-in-last-out culture is still a thing. Wage theft is the national pastime.

For all its sophisticated econometrics the United States is still a warped land of social control through work. Just ask Elon Musk. The unspoken truth that homelife and for that matter real life is fundamentally more important than work life is a notion that historically must be snuffed out like nonbinary relationships, mifepristone, and textbooks about slavery. The four-day workweek is culturally subversive because it undermines the premise that we live to serve the economy. The four-day workweek tips the balance between subsistence and sustenance and disrupts the power structure that allows an intellectually mediocre midlevel manager to ruin your life. Most socially threatening of all is the work ethic slippery slope greased by the instinctive personal search for the good life—ironically feared not only in others but also in oneself. Next thing you know those snowflakes will be demanding a three-day workweek.

As a nation with the world’s top domestic product but an average life span ranking around 46^th and falling fast, the question is not why there is a labor shortage or why the average tradesman is now around 55 years old or why there was a real but ultimately faltering resistance to surrendering remote working arrangements. The question is just how culturally, physically, and psychologically suicidal we are and will continue to be as we near the middle third of the briskly transpiring yet agonizing 21^st century. Collectively, it seems, we like to do things the old fashioned way even if it kills us. And so far it has.

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