The Four Hour Workday Is Misguided
The four hour work week benefits people like me, because I get an exact consistent schedule. The idea of the four hour work week excludes Americans whose challenges stem from issues far beyond going to a four hour work day.
I was scrolling through TikTok the other day, and a video came on talking about the premise of the four hour work day. The TikTok video was in reference to an article that spoke about the positives of employers switching their employees to a four hour work day in order to increase productivity. This certainly sounded great to me. I would have so much extra time if my work day was cut in half. Being able to release myself from my screen as much as I can is always a plus, but would this really make such a great impact for people beyond myself? Honestly, I feel like I am already in a tremendous position of privilege by having the comfort of a nine to five work day. While there are certainly times when I have to put in more than my standard forty hours, I feel like I do get the opportunity to have the time for work life balance, mostly because I get an exact consistent schedule. I think this article leaves out the majority of Americans whose challenges stem from issues far beyond going to a four hour work day.
The Four Hour Work Day:
Jonas Altman’s article “The 4-hour workday is not a crazy idea” revolves mainly around the premise that even “for the most accomplished experts, deliberate practice of any kind is best capped at four hours a day.” That we should step away from the ideology of the daily grind because we have “made busyness a bragging right.” To Jonas Altman, “the four-hour work day is about giving control to workers to do the work they need to do in their own time and in their own way.” While I do not think that there is anything inherently wrong with this premise, I do think that it is important to step back and consider exactly what workers are we trying to give back control to
Who is this for?:
As Jonas Altman says himself, the four hour workday is for “knowledge workers”. This is for the subset of workers that already tend to have cushier jobs than the average worker in the United States. I think that people will find that there is always room for improvement regardless of position or status, but given the circumstances for many right now this feels like it is written in poor taste. Perhaps it is just the news cycle that is targeting me each day, but the office worker going from an eight to a four hour workday seems like the least of our troubles.
The American Worker’s Reality:
The majority of Americans work on an hourly basis. Every single day over “78 million Americans – or nearly 59 percent of the U.S. workforce – are now paid on an hourly basis” (Anna Robaton). This means that the average worker is incentivised to work as many hours as possible in order to bring home a higher wage. There is a bias towards believing that hourly work is transitionary work until a person gets some kind of higher education or certification, but the reality is that “Nearly half of hourly workers over the age of 30 have some post-secondary education”(Anna Robaton).
This system of mostly hourly work causes people to work into the night, work weekends, and have one of the longest work weeks of any industrialized nation. “27 percent of American workers report working nights”, and this is defined “strictly as any work performed between 10 PM and 6 AM” (Christopher Ingraham). This means that more than one in four workers loses their nights to work, and the numbers would certainly be higher had this included the evening. While the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not require extra pay for night work, “the FLSA does require that covered, nonexempt workers be paid not less than time and one-half the employee’s regular rate for time worked over 40 hours in a workweek” (U.S. Department of Labor). This means that people are incentivised to work into the night to pursue higher pay. As we continue we will see that this is an ongoing pressure for workers to take unconventional hours. Another case of unconventional hours is the fact that the “U.S. has the highest incidence of people reporting any paid weekend work,” and it is reported that nearly “a third of Americans work on the weekend”(Christopher Ingraham). Regardless of when people are working, in general “Americans have the longest average work week” with a study finding that “that the average full-time work week in the U.S. is 47 hours” (Christopher Ingraham). That means that the middle ground for an American to work almost a full workday more than what we consider a full work week.
Jonas Altman says, “Working more, in other words, is rarely the answer to increasing your productivity”, but for the average American it is about making ends meet. In a system where most people are paid based on time spent at work, how can we begin to ask for people to spend a fraction of that time at work with the way things are. A much greater reform is needed to begin to give people the conditions required for a comfortable life. While quantity of hours is certainly an issue, merely saying everyone should only work four fails to tackle many of the problems at hand. We should consider when people have to work, and that the incentive now lies in how many hours we work. Until we can create a shift in the culture of the hourly American workplace we cannot help the people at large.
**Subscribe:
**If you enjoyed this post hit that subscribe button up top to sign up to our email list. No spam, no ads, just a reminder of when a new post is published! Thank you all for your support!
Sources:
Title: The 4-hour workday is not a crazy idea
Author: Jonas Altman
https://qz.com/work/1463545/the-4-hour-workday-is-not-a-crazy-idea/
Title: Nearly one third of the American labor force works on the weekend
Authors: Christopher Ingraham
Title: Most Americans are hourly workers
Author: Anna Robaton
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-are-hourly-workers/
Title: Night Work and Shift Work
Author: U.S. Department of Labor