About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

94 Monthly Lab. Rev. 33 (1971)
A Look at the 4-Day Workweek

handle is hein.journals/month94 and id is 1115 raw text is: Do recent switches from the standard 5-day week presage a nationwide trend? JANICE NEIPERT HEDGES THE 4-DAY WORKWEEK has caught the imagination of the public. It has intrigued management and is winning guarded support 'from labor organizations. But the big question is unanswered: Is a break- through from a 5-day to a 4-day week imminent? The current standard is not immutable. But neither is a shift to some new standard inevitable. Today, the standard workweek is 5 days and 40 hours.' These figures are the historical result of (1) a long term trend in practice and in law toward an 8-hour day, and (2) the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which fixed the 40-hour weekly standard2 for workers in firms engaged in interstate commerce. This article examines the 4-day week at present and arrives at some tentative conclusions about its future. Prevalence of the 4-day week In mid-1971, about 600 firms offered some form of the 4-day week for at least part of their work force and for at least some weeks of the year.' The variations ranged from 10-hour days to 9 hours or less, and included 4 -day weeks. The firms were largely on the Eastern seaboard and in the Central States. They were predominantly engaged in manu- facturing, but also included a variety of service and other firms. Generally they were nonunion; a few had contracts with small unions or locals of large national unions. The number of workers on a 4-day week was estimated roughly at 75,000, or about one in every 1,000 workers in the United States. On the basis of numbers alone, the workers and firms involved in the 4-day week are thus too few to assert that a major change is in the making. Nor are the firms sufficiently representative to indicate whether a short week is feasible on a national scale. Janice Neipert Hedges is an economist in the Office of Eco- nomic and Social Research, Bureau of Labor Statistics. A look at the 4-day workweek Few are capital-intensive, few compete in world markets, few employ more than 500 workers. More- over, in numerous instances, the 4-day week is on trial with both workers and management, and in more than a dozen firms it has been tried and discontinued- At this time, prospects for the 4-day week may be better judged by its consistency with prevailing trends in work time than by its relatively small and tentative beginnings. Trends in work time Where the 4-day week is coupled with a 10-hour day, it reverses the almost unbroken trend of a cen- tury toward shorter workdays. The 8-hour day was won after a long struggle, with which the union movement is so closely identified that it has been said that the unions owe as much to the 8-hour fight, for their form and direction, as tie 8-hour fight owed to the unions for its success.' But the 4-day week is not necessarily a 40-hour week. Lim- ited data available to the Bureau of Labor Statistics on firms employing 50 workers or more indicate that in these firms the shorter workweek is 4 days as often as 4 days and ranges from over 40 hours a week to less than 30.1 The movement toward a 4-day week is in accord with two other trends that have dominated recent changes in work time. The first is the preference for blocks of leisure, extended vacations, for example, rather than small eductions in daily and weekly hours. The second is the increasing'diversity in work schedules. A growing preference for blocks of leisure is manifested in the rapid extension of paid vacations. During the 1960's the average number of vacation weeks per employed person increased from 1.3 to over 1.7 weeks, while for many long-service em- ployees the length of vacation grew to 4 weeks or more. Paid vacations and holidays together consti-

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most