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Why the American workweek is shrinking

Daniel Ackerman Jan 15, 2025
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As the labor market cools, employees are logging less time worked each week. Baona/Getty Images.

Why the American workweek is shrinking

Daniel Ackerman Jan 15, 2025
Heard on:
As the labor market cools, employees are logging less time worked each week. Baona/Getty Images.
HTML EMBED:
COPY

We learned from last week’s jobs report that the unemployment rate in this economy ended last year at 4.1%. But unemployment is a pretty coarse measure of the labor market. Workers are either employed, or they are not

For a closer look at the lives of American workers, economists can also measure employment intensity: how many hours workers are putting in each week. 

In December, that number was 34.3 hours. That’s down nearly 45 minutes from a peak in 2021.

Last year, Colin Bergmann chose to cut back on how much he worked as a water resources designer in Western Massachusetts. He went from 40 hours per week to 24.

“To travel and kind of do some different things for a year instead of business as usual working behind my computer screen,” he said.

Bergmann started making more art. He sold his colorful, custom maps at local craft markets. Plus he took a few long canoe trips.

“Down the Connecticut River and then I did another down the Erie Canal for a few days,” said Bergmann.

It sounded like a dream — a dream made possible because his company allowed him to cut back, when he asked to go part-time.

Celeste Carruthers, an economics professor at the University of Tennessee, said firms these days are not as desperate for workers as they were back in 2021.

“We were in the beginnings of a really exceptionally tight labor market,” said Carruthers. “There was talk of a labor shortage at the time.”

So companies asked the employees they had to put in longer hours: 35 a week, on average. That number “had been the highest average weekly hours worked that we had seen on record,” said Carruthers.

Now with a cooling job market, firms finally have enough workers but still want to hold onto them, says Martha Gimbel, director of the Budget Lab at Yale.

“Part of what’s happening in the labor market is employers just aren’t laying off a huge number of people,” said Gimbel. “And so workers cutting down on hours is another way for employers to adjust.”

Workers don’t seem upset about that adjustment, Gimbel said. Because if you look at the share of part-time workers who would rather be full-time, “those percentages are still quite low.”

“And what that suggests is that workers are likely still getting the number of hours that they want to get,” said Gimbel.

The overall reduction in hours worked is really just a return to how things used to be, said Ari Shwayder, an economist at the University of Michigan.

“So if you look at like the 2012 to 2020 timeframe, we’re a tiny bit below sort of the average there, but not dramatically,” he said.

Shwayder said we could finally be past the pandemic shock to the labor market. But maybe that’s just in time for the next shock for workers.

“If you start to think about things like automation or AI of course being the big buzzword, you don’t need your customer service people to work as much or as many hours because you can have an AI bot do a lot of the work for them,” said Shwayder.

We’re not there yet, he added, but AI could mean big changes for how, and how long, employees work in the future.

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