Bernie Sanders Pushes for a Four-Day Work Week

Like a true socialist, Bernie Sanders is in favor of paying people people more to do less. In this case, he’s introducing a new bill that would move the United States to a 32-hour workweek but without cutting anyone’s salary in the process.

The bill, titled the “Thirty-Two Hour Work Week Act,” would reduce the standard workweek from 40 to 32 hours over the span of four years, including lowering the maximum hours required for overtime compensation for nonexempt employees. It would also require overtime pay at time and a half for workdays that last more than eight hours and overtime pay that would pay workers double their regular pay if their workday is longer than 12 hours.

A press release on the bill described it as an “important step toward ensuring workers share in increasing productivity and economic growth driven by technological advancements.”

In a press release, Sanders stressed that this is definitely not a radical idea.

“Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea,” said Sen. Sanders. “Today, American workers are over 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago. That has got to change. The financial gains from the major advancements in artificial intelligence, automation, and new technology must benefit the working class, not just corporate CEOs and wealthy stockholders on Wall Street. It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life. It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.”

I’m curious about that 400% statistic. My guess is that it’s measuring the increasing productivity which is associated with increases in technology, everything from automated robots to computers and Zoom meetings. If that’s so then aren’t those workers already benefitting from major advancements in new technology?

Rolling Stone points out that there is no country in the world that currently has a 32-hour workweek.

Though no country has a standard 32-hour work week codified into law, many have shorter work weeks on average than the United States. France has had a 35-hour federal work week since 2000, and several Scandinavian nations, such as Denmark and Norway, also have work weeks under 40 hours.

So what happens if we move to a 32-hour work week with no change in salaries? That would be the equivalent of giving a huge raise to every employee. You work only four days but you get paid for five. What would this do to small businesses like restaurants? It would force them to hire a lot more employees at the same inflated wages. And that would mean raising prices substantially to offset those additional costs. We’ve already seen people complaining about a $16 meal at McDonalds This bill would turn that into a $20 meal at McDonalds.

And if it suddenly costs substantially more to go out for dinner, people will have to cut back on the number of meals out. If the price of every manufactured product goes up, people will buy that product less often if at all possible. All of that to say, higher wages means higher prices and higher prices mean many businesses will fail as they are unable to find enough customers willing to pay those higher prices.

After the hearing about his proposed bill, Sanders was asked about it in the hallway by a Fox Business reporter. As you’ll see in this clip, he sidesteps the core of her question and instead talks about the effective tax rate of billionaires is too low. It’s hard to know exactly what Sanders is saying but it’s probably a lot like the false and misleading claims that Joe Biden has been making about this same topic for the past several years. In fact, billionaires pay a much higher percentage in taxes than working people on their actual income (around 23% while the bottom 40% pay nothing). The top 400 earners in the US (the billionaires Bernie is always talking about) pay more in taxes than the bottom 70% of all earners combined. Anyway, here’s Bernie.