The five-day workweek was made up. What if we changed it?

imagine it's 1914. henry ford just created the factory assembly line and his company's productivity has skyrocketed a car that took 12 and a half hours to assemble now takes one and a half he decides to double the pay and reduce the workday from nine hours to eight and he later reduces the work week from six days to five the nation is shocked his workers are thrilled and his company thrives with increased productivity and loyalty manufacturers around the country follow his lead and it eventually becomes standard practice and becomes a law in 1938 so how did ford settle on 40 hours in a work week he adopted the idea from labor activists a hundred years earlier who thought that the average 70 hours a week in a factory were brutal and unsustainable they campaigned with the slogan eight hours for labor eight hours for rest eight hours for what we will eight hours also conveniently made three equal shifts to keep ford's factory open 24 hours a day but ford also believed that leisure time was indispensable to capitalism working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products including automobiles he said as the work week shrank from 70 to 40 hours economists predicted that the trend would continue and nixon suggested a four-day work week was right around the corner economist john maynard keynes thought that technology would allow us to be working three hour days by 2030. some experts say we are entrenched in a culture of overwork and we were already in the midst of a burnout crisis when covet hit this is something that was actually building up for a long time before the pandemic this is carla miller she's our columnist that writes about the workplace people were already reaching high levels of burnout they were being asked to do more with less of their jobs and put in longer hours so americans in particular are not really good about taking leisure time for ourselves we don't take the vacation or paid leave even when we have it and when we do it's really hard for us to disconnect completely and that becomes sort of like a low-level app running in the background and draining our batteries the pandemic then inspired millions of people to quit their jobs and reassess their priorities this great resignation is leaving companies scrambling to figure out how to find workers some are attracting new talent by shrinking their work week to four days while keeping pay and workload the same they achieve this by capping attendance at meetings and cutting them down to 30 or even 15 minutes some ban social media during work hours and urge workers to check emails and chats only twice a day microsoft japan said it boosted their productivity by 40 this hints at the theory that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion other companies are trying a five-hour workday claiming that knowledge workers like programmers writers and scientists can only concentrate hard for about that long every day so not only are companies electing to go to shorter work weeks but a lot of countries have been as well iceland was the most famous example the uk is expected to try this shorter work week out later this summer and belgium recently announced that they are going to allow employees to ask their employers to let them shorten their weeks into four days and other companies are going a step beyond remote work to being a synchronous where work does not have to be done during the same hours as other workers to achieve this companies get rid of meetings and slack chats entirely and instead leave comments to be checked within a 24-hour time frame this allows workers to take advantage of their biological prime time when they feel most focused and energized to work research claims that people who work more than 39 hours a week are putting their health at risk long hours leave people little time to eat well and look after themselves studies have shown that working too much is bad for your health physical and mental high blood pressure heart rhythmia insulin resistance so all those hours piling up tends to have a cumulative effect on our bodies the industrial age ended with the establishment of the 40-hour workweek but also with the hope that technology and automation would allow us to work less and not more in the future in our current era of overwork and burnout companies may have to change an outdated work structure if they want to attract talent and grow [Music]