Today, Explained - The four-day workweek

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

The pandemic has changed how we think about work. Vox’s Anna North says it might be time to change how much we work, too. Today’s show was produced by Will Reid, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Welcome back to Today Explained. Thanks for joining us again. This coming Monday is Labor Day, so we're going to take the day off and have a four-day work week.

But the company we work for, Vox Media, went ahead and gave us another day off this coming Friday, aka tomorrow. So we're feeling extra lucky to have two four-day work weeks in a row. Now, I usually don't question extra days off, but on the show today, we're going to talk about how our changing attitudes around work might actually change how we work. So I had to inquire about the extra Friday off this morning. I hit up my boss's boss's boss's boss, my great, great grand boss. You know, Sean, I think I just call us co-workers. Jim Bankoff, CEO, Vox Media. Why did you give us all another day off?

Well, it starts with the fact that we have all been working our tails off through a pandemic. And we wanted to enable and empower our managers to encourage people to take more time. But what we also found is that it's sometimes hard to do that because we have things to do. And the things that we have to do not only revolve around our own schedules, but revolve around our co-worker schedules and revolve around schedules of people outside of the company too. So we figured by having a day that everyone has off,

that would allow people to not feel the pressure of having to be there for their co-workers when they were collaborating on a project, you know. So for all those reasons, it all added up to like, yeah, let's do this. And we're happy that we did. Okay. As my colleague Jim mentioned, working through the pandemic has changed things. This isn't just a theory at this point. It's a game-changing reality. My other colleague, Anna North, wrote about it for Vox in an article provocatively titled, The Death of the Job.

Yeah, I mean, I was really inspired by this sort of idea of the, like, so-called great resignation. People are quitting their jobs in droves in what's been dubbed the great resignation, pushing job vacancies to all-time highs. And a new survey from productivity firm Lattice found that 54% of respondents are looking to change jobs and 43% say their career paths have stalled or quote, slowed to a crawl. For context, 4 million people quit their jobs in April alone. Dang. So to be clear, that's not like in a year, that's in a month. It's a huge, huge number. It's a record. And so really kind of wanting to look into why

and what the pandemic has done to jobs and, you know, work just got traumatic, difficult, and stressful in new ways. But I think the sort of flip side of that is that it has opened up this door to talk about what should the role of work be in people's lives. And I think that can actually be an interesting conversation that maybe can open the door to making our lives a little better. And I want to get to all the changes and what could come of them eventually.

But in your piece, you talk a lot about the history of the American job. What did you discover when you looked into the background? Right, so a lot of the things that we sort of think of as mainstays of jobs today, for better or for worse, they didn't come about by magic. They came about because labor activists fought for them. So, for example, people in factories used to work six-day weeks, seven-day weeks,

you know, incredibly long work weeks before labor organizers sort of started working on this issue, worked on it for a long time, and then during the 1930s with the New Deal, we start to see these labor reforms getting enshrined into law. After many requests on my part, the Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act, what we call the Fair Labor Standards Act, which means if you work over 40 hours in a week, you're supposed to get overtime. And labor organizers are kind of pushing for other things, too.

They don't always get them. A lot of folks wanted universal health care, for example. Back in the 1930s, we think of this as something that we're arguing about today, but this was an argument back then. Well, how about the theory that the community can afford what the individual can't? Oh, so you've been bitten by that bug, have you? Well, if the people of Parkersville would pay, say, 10 cents each a week,

I could give them a medical service. That's a very beautiful idea. And maybe in 1960, a practical one, but it just won't work. They wanted a kind of universal retirement system, you know, something to really take care of people when they're too old to work. They didn't really get either of those things, and so in some cases, what they kind of settled for

were some benefits that were tied to your job. So for example, health insurance tied to your job, or pensions that were tied to your job, where if you work a certain number of years at a certain company, then they'll kind of take care of your retirement. So instead of saying, we're going to have this social safety net that takes care of everybody, then we kind of get this conception where your job is sort of what takes care of you. What is like the ideal version of your job is supposed to take care of you? And when does that sort of peak? Yeah, so we kind of get to this idea in the, you know, the late 40s, the 1950s. In thousands of homes, vigorous workmen rise to meet a new day and a new opportunity. The morning

sun stirs the nation's workmen, prompting them to their posts of daily service. You know, there's a certain category of job. Often these are manufacturing jobs. These are jobs that are typically held by white men. Fred's a shop steward for the union, which has an agreement with the mill. He represents the workers on the plant's labor management committee. These days they're discussing production problems. You know, but these are jobs that, thanks to the Fair Labor Standards Act, they're supposed to be 40 hours a week or you get overtime.

They pay you a certain amount. You know, Sometimes they pay you enough that it doesn't just take care of your needs. It takes care of your kids and it takes care of, you have a partner who maybe is able to stay home and take care of those kids. It's the sort of what they call the quote unquote family wage. And then you get benefits out of that job, right? You get healthcare and you get a pension at some point. So when you no longer are able to work or you no longer want to work, you actually get paid and you can take time and you can rest and play with your grandchildren.

This is the sort of, you know, quote unquote, American dream ideal. And we're talking ideals, but this ideal was only ideal for a segment of the population. Right. I think we have this ideal of how jobs used to be. And the reality is that these kinds of jobs were only ever for certain people. For starters, there were lots of people who were left out of the Fair Labor Standards Act. So that includes domestic workers and agricultural workers who were disproportionately likely to be Black or Latinx or other people of color. And then it's also the case that there were big sectors of the economy that never had these kind of quote-unquote good jobs.

So if you worked in a customer service job, you worked in retail, other service sector type jobs, they didn't really experience the same kind of 1950s peak. So one labor historian I talked to pointed out a lot of retail jobs were just considered women's jobs. So the idea is if you became a salesperson, like a sales girl, quote-unquote, for example, that people, your employer, would assume you don't actually need enough money to support a family because you're only a woman. You just need, quote-unquote, pin money, which is like money to buy pins, literally, or like jewelry. And they're paying you. Yes. In money.

Yes. By check. Every two weeks. You'll need a bank account. I have a bank account. Checking in savings? Yep. Okay. So it's like there's this sort of idea of like, you know, maybe the man in the suit going off to the office or maybe the man in the jumpsuit going off to the factory.

But that was never every worker. There's always been lots and lots of workers who weren't going to the office and they weren't going to the factory. And those folks never really had access to the kind of quote unquote good job that we think of as kind of formulating the American dream. And what happens between then and now? Then we get the situation where there's fewer and fewer of the good jobs and more and more of the bad jobs. Manufacturing, for example, they've really eroded in the U.S. Service has really exploded. There's lots more service jobs.

This was an industry that never had the same kind of norms, right? These weren't good jobs. They didn't have good wages. They didn't have good hours. All this kind of stuff. Then we have the erosion of unions. So workers have less power to bargain for their conditions. And things just kind of like get

crappier and crappier for lack of a better word. Pensions become less common in favor of sort of 401ks and retirement accounts that rely way more on the worker to be putting away money versus somebody kind of putting away money for you. The rate of people who have health insurance through their job goes down. Wage growth stagnates. There's lots of factors we can point to, but basically over time, your 1950s job that's kind of providing all your needs, it just becomes less and less common. Fewer and fewer people have that kind of job. And even the people who do have jobs that are providing for all their needs,

it feels like those people might be working more now than ever before. Right. So the other thing we've seen is that, you know, white collar work, sort of professional work, you know, those work weeks and those work days have just gotten really long. And I think something that we've seen, I've written about this elsewhere, is just a general worsening of people's schedules over time. So there's been sort of a weakening of the overtime rules in the Fair Labor Standards Act. So more and more people are exempt. More and more people are in this category where you actually can be asked to work more than 40 hours a week and you don't have to be paid overtime. So then your hours can balloon to whatever your boss feels like. There's also been a rise in what Derek Thompson at The Atlantic

calls workism, which is this idea that work should really be the centerpiece of your life and your identity. It should be really important. You should really be giving all of yourself to work. It sounds unhealthy. Sure. And it is. But at the same time, that attitude is incredibly common. It's super common in our industry. I've felt that way from time to time. You probably have too. I think a lot of quote unquote knowledge workers are kind of encouraged to embrace this workism. And it's also great for our bosses, right? Not to be subversive or whatever, but it's good for capitalism the

more that we feel like work is our religion. So all this stuff contributes to folks who maybe their job does provide them health insurance. Maybe they have a 401, their job might still be making their life kind of bad because they're at work all the time. Then you have service workers who have a rise in what's called just-in-time scheduling, which means their schedules can be super unpredictable. Locke, who's been at Starbucks eight years, says she's seen the advent of optimal scheduling.

When I was hired, managers would be fired if they weren't putting schedules out three weeks in advance. But now it's every week, and I believe it's the new automatic system only allows them to do a week in advance. But we're required to give six months in advance of availability of when we're available to work. So, like, even if they're not working really, really long hours, maybe they have no idea what their hours are going to be week to week.

They have to be on call constantly. You know, sometimes they're doing clopening, quote unquote, which is like where you close the store and then you open the store, you know, six hours later. Welcome back to my channel. Today, I'm going to give you tips on how to survive the dreaded cloping. I do a cloping once a week, which is I close on one day and then open the very next day. And these are my tips to help you survive a late night followed by an early morning. So it can be almost like, you know, having a 50-hour, 80-hour work week

just because you never know when someone's going to call you. So just generally, scheduling has become this huge problem. And we're all sort of, you know, at the mercy of our work, I think, in a way that labor reformers in the middle of the last century never, never intended us to be. Not to mention a lot of the people in the service industry and the people who may have been clopening lost their jobs during the pandemic. Right. So, you know, I think that the pandemic just made all this worse in so many different ways that we can talk about. But one big thing it did is wipe away people's jobs. You know, millions of people lost their jobs last year,

disproportionately people in the service industry, disproportionately low wage jobs where people didn't have a lot of savings, they couldn't afford to lose a job. And, you know, if your job was just providing you the minimum level of security before, now there's nothing. So I think that was like the first step of being really disillusioned with jobs and employment in America. Okay, so to recap just some of what you said, we're losing a lot of our worker protections. Other people are choosing to work more than ever. Then there's people who are being abused in their work situations. A lot of those people have lost their jobs. And then there's millions of people who are quitting their jobs. Where do we go from

here? That all sounds really dark, Sean. But I think that we're seeing some interesting cultural changes right now. And like the biggest thing that we've seen is that I think the pandemic has kind of I think there's been the sense that work provided a sense of purpose for people. It provided the sense of camaraderie, you know, you're together with your coworkers. The pandemic really wiped a lot of that away. You know, suddenly office workers, right, we're working out of our houses, we're on Zoom. And I think that sense of purpose, like people are reevaluating their sense of purpose right now. They're questioning, you know, this is a time of trauma. This is a time when people lost their lives. Like, what's really important? And I think all that reevaluation, part of what it's leading to is people leaving their jobs. Switching jobs is now easier than ever for a lot of people. There are more companies going remote. Maybe these are people who have saved some money over the past year. And so they're looking at their lives and saying, why am I living like this?

Why am I not doing something I'm passionate about? And, you know, we're seeing it not just in people who you might think financially they have a lot of choices, you know, lawyers quitting to have a better work life balance. But we see it in service workers who aren't making a ton of money. Maybe they don't have a ton of money saved up, but they don't want to be in danger for a minimum wage anymore. So I think across the economy, we're kind of seeing something really change. In a minute, we humor a very un-American idea. Maybe we should all be working a little less. It's Today Explained.

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Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Anna, you've been hinting that there are some big changes that could make working better in this country. Tell me about them.

Yeah, so a lot of the things are things that I know you've talked about on the show before. Things like just paying people more, raising the minimum wage. Things like universal health care. Things like a universal basic income or guaranteed income so people aren't starving even if they can't work for a period of time. All this stuff, I think, is the subject of a lot of important conversations right now. But then there's also something that would be sort of maybe a bigger social and cultural change. And that's just the idea of what if we all just worked a lot less? Like, how much less? Well, for instance, a lot of people talk about a four-day work week.

Like a permanent three-day weekend. Right, except, like, there's nothing magic about the idea of the weekend, right? Like, labor organizers fought for a five-day work week. A lot of them were actually fighting for a shorter work week or a shorter day, but they kind of, you know, we got five and we kind of settled on that. But, like, the weekend is made up, right? It's not real. Like, yes, it'd be great to have a three-day weekend, but what if we thought of that as normal?

I don't think that's necessarily so pie in the sky. So what you're saying is we should just like take a day off every week. Yeah, we should leave now. Like just walk out of the studio, literally. Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend. Is there any way we could actually standardize this in the country? Is there anyone seriously talking about a permanent three-day weekend or something like that?

Yeah, so for starters, I mean, this has already become a little bit of a bigger thing just within companies in the last couple years. Like, there's a ton of other companies that are just like giving their workers a little bit more time off these days. And I don't think that's an accident, but it's also not the law. So there is a proposal. There's legislation in the house proposed by Representative Mark DeCano from California

that would basically change the Fair Labor Standards Act. That has been the law since the 1930s in the New Deal. My bill would simply amend that act and say that 32 hours now constitutes straight time. And you start earning overtime pay after 32 hours. Basically, we're saying a full work week is 32 hours long. And I mean, again, like there's nothing magical about 40 hours. That's just where we landed in the middle of the last century. That was a long time ago. I'm sure an idea like this would have some opposition. Are people afraid that this will make every American worker, you know, one fifth less productive for our capitalism? Sure. So that's a worry that is

natural for people to have. And actually, this was studied. There was a big study in Iceland where a whole swath of workers had their hours cut by a few hours each week. I think they did. They did a 36 hour work week. And the studies found that, by and large, productivity either stayed the same or it actually went up. So people were getting more done, in fact. And then, of course, there were all these other benefits, right? People were happier. They were spending more time with their families. They had better social lives. You know, in the study, there was like a dad being quoted saying, my kids are so excited when it's my half day because they know that we're going to get to hang out. It's just like, really sweet. That's nice. And actually, since the studies came out, Iceland decided to,

in large part, make this permanent. So now 86% of the population is either already working a shorter work week or they have a contract that guarantees them that shorter work week in the future. So this dream is going to be a reality there. Why do they think that people become more productive when they work less? I think there's a couple things here. One is, I mean, and if you work in an office, I think this will resonate with you. Or if you used to work in an office before the pandemic, I think this will resonate, which is that some of our time at work is just wasted.

We have a lot of meetings to go to. Some of those meetings could probably be an email. Some of those meetings go on too long. There's also research showing that like after a certain amount of work, we just lose our ability to do work, like not completely, but we get worse at working. So anyone who's just worked a super long week has felt this. You get burned out. You get tired.

You're not as efficient. You make more mistakes. So a shorter work week, you know, avoids some of those problems. Is this just another way for white collar workers to end up with another benefit though? And they'd have one more day off where potentially service industry workers in restaurants or movie theaters or big box stores would wind up with even more work to do tending to all these people. I think that's a real worry. And one thing that was really interesting to me about the Iceland research is that it wasn't just office workers who were part of the research. It was also, like, I think law enforcement officers and folks who worked in child care or also elder

care. So especially some of these care work jobs, it's not like you're spending that much time in meetings when you're caring for toddlers. I know because I have a toddler. Those are labor-intensive jobs, and when you're on, you're on. But they still found ways, whether it was maybe the daycare center hires more people,

you know, maybe it adjusts its hours slightly. They still found ways to make these shorter work weeks work. So I think really the key, if we were going to do something like this, would be making sure that exactly what you're talking about, it's not just a benefit for white collar workers. This is like a real shift across the economy. And that it's coupled with making sure that people who have really unpredictable schedules or not enough hours have enough, that they actually have enough work or enough benefits they can live on them. And for all the people who think this is just like a pie in the sky idea, it's worth remembering, right, that so was UBI until during the pandemic, the former president and the current one just decided to give people fair sums of money, right? Do you think because of that, we're a little bit closer to ideas like this than we were, say, before the pandemic?

Yeah, I mean, we've seen so many things policy-wise that I thought we'd never see, you know, whether that's the child tax credit, whether it's the stimulus, whether it's some of the stuff in the American Rescue Plan. I think there's been this acknowledgement of people's basic needs in a way that there really wasn't before. And I've just started to see a kind of cultural change. Maybe this is too optimistic, but it used to be that whenever you talked about work and people work too much, like people would kind of roll their eyes. And especially, you know, in media, if you talk to like white collar professionals, everyone would be like, of course we work too

much, but no, we're never going to do anything about it. That'd be ridiculous. And I just feel like it's different now. I feel like, frankly, America's traumatized from the pandemic, even those who are kind of relatively insulated. I think there's this serious sense that something needs to change. There's a serious sense that work is broken. And for the first time, when you say people work too much,

everyone kind of perks up and listens. And I'm hoping that that means maybe there's appetite for changing this and not just going back to the way it was before. Anna North, enjoy your weekend. Thanks so much. You too. Anna North. She's a full-time senior correspondent at Vox who also somehow managed to write a very good book while working here. It's called Outlawed.

It's a Western. You can find it wherever you find your books. Today's show was produced by Will Reed. I don't believe he's written a book yet, but his future is bright. The rest of the team includes Victoria Chamberlain, Heidi Mawadby, Miles Bryan,

and Halima Shah. Afim Shapiro's our engineer. Matthew Collette's our editor. Amina Alsadi's our MVP. Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's veep of audio. Jillian Weinberger is the deputy. Music from Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hasenfeld. Facts are checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Sean Ramosverm, and I'm looking for a co-host.

Seriously. This episode has inspired me to work less, maybe write a Western one day. If you or someone you know is interested in partnering up with me, you can find a job posting for co-host of Today Explained at the Vox Media Careers page. It's also pinned to the top of my Twitter. I'm at RasFirm. Just a reminder before we go, we're off for the next few days for Labor Day back Tuesday,

September 7th. Take care. Once again, the weekend.