Is a four-day workweek possible for blue-collar workers?
Is a four-day workweek possible for blue-collar workers?
It’s Day 5 of the United Auto Workers strike. And among the workers’ demands is a shorter workweek — 32 hours, over four days, at full-time pay. The four-day workweek is a debate that’s coming up more and more in the U.S. But the conversation has mostly been centered around white-collar, office-based industries. Could it be viable for restaurants, trucking and manufacturing too?
You know that meme, “This meeting could have been an email”? Well, that old office joke is part of the reason chatter about the four-day workweek has mostly stayed in the white-collar world.
“I mean, essentially people believe in an office we waste so much time that if we went down from five days to four days, we could do it without seriously affecting the amount of output,” said Matthew Bidwell, a professor of management at Wharton.
Meanwhile, for work outside the office, “there’s a sense that blue-collar work is kind of less stretchy,” he said.
Physical work has physical limitations. You can only assemble so many cars in a day. So there’s a perception that blue-collar work is not as flexible, as if there’s less fat to trim.
But Bidwell said of course blue-collar work can have inefficiencies too.
“We all waste time all the time,” he said.
A four-day workweek could force companies to be more efficient. But Ben Friedrich, a professor of strategy at Northwestern, worries that it could instead lead to burnout, especially for people doing jobs that are physical and repetitive.
“And so if it just means a faster assembly line and people getting really stressed and being put under a lot of pressure, I don’t think that they would like that,” he said.
Boston College economist Juliet Schor is writing a book about the four-day workweek. She said companies that are implementing it right see boosts in productivity, revenue and employee recruitment and retention.
“Results are absolutely consistent across every type of industry,” Schor said. “So the four-day week is absolutely as relevant for blue-collar workers as it is for office workers.”
And historically, she said, unions have led the fight for fewer hours.
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