Four Days a Week: The Life-altering Solution for Decreasing Worker Anxiety, Improving Wellness, and Working Smarter , by Juliet B. Schor. Harper Organization, 2025
by Trudy Goldberg
Financial Expert Juliet Schor and her colleagues carried out the biggest trial of the decreased work week ever to take place– 245 companies, eighty-seven hundred employees, in 8 countries on four continents. Their final thought: “The four-day week works for staff members and companies.”
Schor and her coworkers examined The 100 – 80 – 100 Design : 100 percent of pay/ 80 percent of prior job time/ 100 percent of prior efficiency.
What were the countries, industries, and the workers in this large sample that examined the 100 – 80 – 100 Version? Simply over half the industries (52 %) operated in the UK and the US; 14 % were in Australia and New Zealand; 13 % in South Africa; and the remainder, 10 %, in Ireland and the European Union.
The example on which the 100 – 80 – 100 Design was tested, nonetheless, included more privileged employees utilized in tiny to middle-sized facilities. Eighty percent of these firms utilized 50 or fewer workers. The modal-size firm had 11 – 25 employees. The largest number of business, 45 %, given professional services and advertising and marketing, with 18 %, civil and social solutions, and 9 %, administration and IT. Just 4 % were in production and building with 3 % in retail.
Reflecting the experiences of the covid epidemic, just 5 % of the sample firms ran completely in-person, with the crossbreed model at 69 % being one of the most frequent and 25 %, totally remote. The most usual time off was Friday– picked by over two-fifths (43 %) of the firms, with 17 % of on either Monday or Friday.
That were the employees who participated in the four-day week tests? “The function that stands out most clearly is that our example alters lady: 64 percent check that box, while 34 percent are males and 2 percent are other/binary.” Racially, the sample is mostly white, 72 percent, with 28 percent picking all other racial/ethnic choices. The sample includes people of any ages. They are a well-read group of workers: Nearly three-quarters have a bachelor’s degree, and concerning one-fourth have some or no college. Almost a 3rd (31 %) have a post-graduate level. More than half determine as professionals and managers. A 3rd of these workers have kids under eighteen living at home.
The results of the four-day week are overwhelmingly favorable for the employees in this big sample: Psychological wellness improves and anxiety decreases. Burnout falls for 69 percent of individuals. Stress and anxiety declines. So do stress and anxiety and unfavorable feelings. Positive feelings enhance.
Physical health and wellness also improves, sometimes because it’s closely tied to mental health and wellness. All these adjustments are statistically considerable at one of the most stringent chance degree. At twenty-four months the outcomes of lowered work time continued to be similar.
Women experienced extra reduction in fatigue than guys, possibly since they are most likely to experience the double day. White males were much less likely to experience decrease of exhaustion than everybody else. There were no divergences by parental standing, race, age and education levels. There is absolutely no evidence that people are more probable to have a second job.”
Although it had not been possible to carry out the gold-star arbitrary control experiment– of companies going to lower the work week but not permitted to do so, Schor and colleagues made use of a quasi-control group containing companies for the reduction but not executing it. The control companies did not experience the enhancements of the companies and employees that joined the experiment: … the productivity actions didn’t rise. Exhaustion didn’t drop. Psychological and physical wellness stayed the very same. As did work-life balance, contentment with work, life, and time. Fatigue and sleep were constant.
“Staff members,” creates Schor, “aren’t the just one who are thriving with the four-day week model. Among one of the most effective signs, she composes, is whether the companies stick with the four-day innovation or change to five. Less than 10 percent go back to 5. Why? Incomes rose; employee retention improved; sick and personal days declined. When firms were asked to rate the trial on a scale of 1 to 10, the ordinary ranking was 8 2 For performance and performance, the ranking is 7 3 The ability to bring in employees got the greatest rating: 8 2
Schor reports that U.S. workers get on the work numerous hours greater than their European equivalents and much more than the Japanese. She refutes the standard solution that this refers society by explaining that our longer hours are of recent vintage which for several decades the USA was a place where individuals worked much less. In 1950, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, and Spain had longer hours, and via the 1960 s, job routines in Europe went beyond those in the US. Afterwards Europeans continued to reduce work time, and U.S. hours stagnated.
One essential reason for longer hours for American workers is that U.S. companies provide healthcare which is spent for by the individual instead of prorated by hours worked. This provides employers a reward to work with fewer people for more hours. Government-provided healthcare in Europe prevents this reason United States employers like longer hours.
Although Schor and her colleagues evaluated the 100 – 8 – 100 Design on a sample of fortunate employees, she favors the decrease in job time for all employees and indicated enthusiastically at a 2024 hearing of the Us senate Board on Wellness, Education, Labor, and Pension plans on behalf of Senator Bernie Sanders’ bill to decrease the common US workweek from forty to thirty-two hours without any decrease in pay. (The last time the federal government lowered the United States workweek– with the Fair Labor Requirement Act of 1938, it also established a minimum wage and higher wages for overtime.) This was the very first Senate hearing on the topic since 1955, and Sanders, Schor observes, really did not expect the bill to become regulation anytime quickly however was “planting a flag” Just how about planting one also for a higher minimum wage?
Schor acknowledges significant social dilemmas aside from “the crisis of overwork.” In a phase qualified, “Powering Down for People and Earth,” she takes into consideration the environment reduction results of the four-day week. Mentioning that conservationists promote the four-day week as a result of its potential for decreasing the quantity of traveling to and from work, Schor observes that remote and hybrid job had actually already considerably reduced this resource of reduced energy usage. There is a supposed rebound impact to consider regarding decreased work time– that there would certainly be some driving on the day or pauses and possibly some traveling and engagement in carbon-intensive activities. There were small commuting advantages in this work-time experiment, yet no substantial travel rebound and fairly reduced carbon use on the day of rest.
Schor recognizes that “A four-day week with no decrease in pay is no climate remedy.” (With pay decrease individuals have a tendency to invest less and contaminate less.) The environmental result is very little, she observes, if this is an one-time change that brings about one more age in which there is no further decline in work time. “Yet there’s another possibility, which is that the four-day week breaks the logjam and leads to a longer duration of steady declines in hours.” Is this “Powering down for individuals and world?” As compared with such reduction procedures as environment-friendly growth and substantial reduction in using nonrenewable fuel sources?
“Will AI Give Us a Four-Day Week?” This is the title of a chapter in which Schor discusses the effects of AI on work time. She mentions the optimists who hold that we need to not hesitate of technologies that increase productivity but straightens herself with those who are much more cynical.
“There will certainly be labor variation, a good deal of it.” A current memo (June 2025 of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to staff members specified that increased AI use and efficiency gains would certainly bring about a requirement for “fewer individuals doing several of the work that are being done today.” Nonetheless, he included that there would be “more individuals doing various other sorts of jobs.”
Schor notes some adverse AI effects apart from task loss: that “formulas are frequently destructive agents of racial and gender discriminations and predisposition.” And there are unfavorable ecological repercussions as well– as an example, that an AI-powered search makes use of 10 times the power of typical googling.”
What about the power to resist the negative impacts of AI? Schor started her chapter on AI and the four-day week by mentioning the ability of an effective union to withstand AI: the Writers Guild of America which mounted among the longest strikes in Hollywood history and safeguarded an arrangement that avoided AI-generated scripts and source material such as a novel or play for adjustment. She ends that the effect of AI on job is inevitably a concern of control at lots of levels.
A renewed labor movement, joined by effective movements for a sustainable setting and for economic and social justice are prospective countervailing forces. Not to mention a federal government dedicated to economic equity, employee power, and energetic activity to stop environmental catastrophe. Since Schor composed, the USA has moved in the contrary direction.
“4 days a week” is clearly a gain for the fairly privileged employees who participated in the experiment carried out by Schor and her colleagues. But what concerning the great deals of employees who suffer the situations of joblessness, underemployment, reduced pay, and bad working conditions? In July 2025, with a reasonably low authorities unemployment rate of 4 2 %, there were 18 1 million out of work employees in the United States. A Full Matter of joblessness, moreover, consists of an added 4 7 million who worked part-time however desired full time work and 6 2 million who were jobless but not counted in main joblessness statistics– a total of 18 1 million people. Moreover, 16 3 million employees were functioning inadequate– utilized permanent, year-round for less than the puny US poverty standard of $ 31, 200 for a family of four (most current numbers,2023 *
For these workers and their family members, the dilemma is not overwork yet destitution — absence of cost effective housing and healthcare, being homeless, food deficiency … The working poor, if used lowered job time, would certainly, unlike the workers who evaluated the 100 – 80 – 100 Model, probably look for a second job or keep the one they have. Surprisingly, a McDonald’s online personal budget overview to help workers spend their incomes in a sensible and economical manner thought that their staff members work 2 permanent tasks. Lowering these situations and finishing their deeply unsafe results on workers and their family members ought to be among our highest concerns.
* See the July 2025 Full Count and Frank Stricker’s labor market evaluation in this issue of the NJFAN E-newsletter.
Trudy Goldberg is Teacher Emerita of Social Work and Social Plan at Adelp [hi University and Chair of NJFAN. She is the author of countless popular and academic works on relative well-being states focusing on the hardship of women, the New Offer, and the battle for economic justice.