// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Brian Mackey: Today on the 21st show, Juliette Schor has spent years documenting how Americans are overworked, but her latest research suggests a solution: shaving one day off the work week with no drop in pay or, in many cases, productivity. The results, she says, are striking.

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Juliet Schor: Stress falls, negative emotions fall, positive emotions rise, fatigue. Exercise goes up, uh, sleep goes up, sleep problems go down, all those work-family conflict, the work-life conflict variables, those get much better.

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Brian Mackey: [Schor] has documented these findings in a book, "4 Days a Week." I'm Brian Mackey. We'll talk with her about it today on the 21st show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media airing on WILL in Urbana, WUIS in Springfield, WNIJ in Rockford-DeKalb, WVIK in the Quad Cities, and WSIU in Carbondale. But first, news.

From Illinois Public Media, this is the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. Did you enjoy the three-day weekend over Memorial Day? Now I want you to imagine how it would be if every week had a three-day weekend, if you only had to work four days a week. What could you do with that time? What would it mean for your family? What would it mean for your ability to relax and truly unplug from your job?

Those were some of the questions animating a series of experiments my guest today conducted with collaborators around the world. Working with companies large and small, tens of thousands of employees have been able to scale back their work time with no loss of pay and usually with no drop in productivity.

Juliet Schor is a PhD economist and a professor of sociology at Boston College. She spent decades studying Americans as workers and as consumers. Her many books include "The Overworked American," "The Overspent American," and most recently, "Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter."

I wanted to talk with Julie in part because here at the 21st show, we are transitioning from five days a week to four. We'll actually still be working five days, but only on air Monday through Thursday. That's in part because the end of federal funding for public broadcasting has left us with a smaller staff. It's also because we want to use that extra time to connect with more Illinoisans, particularly with people who might not be listening to the radio on a weekday morning. To that end, we're beginning to put more of our conversations on video, including this one. You can see me and Julie Schor talking about four days a week on YouTube and on our website, twentyfirstshow.org. For now, we're taping these video conversations ahead of time, so no calls today, but you can always let us know what you thought. Our email address is talk@21stshow.org. That's talk at 21stshow.org.

Julie Schor joins me now. Welcome to the 21st show. Thanks for being

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Juliet Schor: with us. Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

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Brian Mackey: So you begin the book by saying that workers, um, were burned out. I'm gonna say we were burned out, we're demoralized. Overwork is at the center of our problems. Walk me through the evidence for that.

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Juliet Schor: So there has been a sort of long, gradual buildup of working hours and, of course, with devices that allow people to be contacted outside of the workplace, uh, encroaching on free time and non-work time. And, uh, a lot of what we call work-family conflict or work-life conflict — people just not having enough time for both, or work being so stressful that it sort of bleeds over into personal life. So that's been going on for quite a while, and then the pandemic hit and it just — all of those stresses, whether we're looking at actual stress levels, uh, burnout, uh, negative emotions, anxiety, fatigue, all the work-family and work-life conflicts — those things just skyrocketed during the pandemic. And if you look at where we are today, we're better. Things are better than they were at the pandemic time, but they're not back to what they were even before, which was already a problem.

So, um, on some of these measures, American workers are the most stressed in the world. Um, and we see it also in certain occupations where those levels of stress and burnout have led to kind of epidemic levels of turnover. I think about healthcare, nursing. We have nurses in our studies and just, you know, people leaving some of these professions in droves. Or in the restaurant industry, it's another one of the cases that I go into uh more deeply in the book, but just, you know, extremely high levels of turnover. Or social services — I have, you know, social services organizations coming to me on a regular basis, like, what can we do about this 100% turnover in this particular occupation, etc.

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Brian Mackey: Is that what you would have expected to happen during a pandemic-like situation where everybody has to go home and work — or not everybody, but a lot of people have to work from home all the time?

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Juliet Schor: I don't think we know what we would expect. I mean, certainly I would expect the people who are on the front lines and exposed to the disease would be stressed. I mean, because that's a very stressful thing. It might have gone very differently. I think, you know, one issue was that the children were also home and it was very hard to get childcare, and so you had parents — and mothers especially — having to take care of their children and do their jobs at the same time. And I talk about some of the studies that have been done, um, on the U.S., uh, um, about mothers. They called it a "she-cession" because so many mothers left their jobs, uh, during that time. So, I don't know. I mean, employers could have eased up a little. Instead, some of them just doubled down.

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Brian Mackey: I mean, that brings up this idea of the second shift because this is not, as you said, not unique to the pandemic, especially for women. Talk about the second shift and what that idea is in sociology.

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Juliet Schor: Oh, the second shift is wonderful. The author of it is Arlie Hochschild. She's a dear friend of mine, a sociologist, now emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. But she was looking at couples, uh, two-earner couples and looking at how housework was allocated — who did what and how the stresses and time constraints and so forth of housework went — and what she found was that, with some rare exceptions, women took on that second shift disproportionately. And a lot of the book is about the stresses that it put on the marital relations, and, you know, people who got divorced, or how they came to accommodations that really weren't working for — often for both of them, but sometimes even just for the woman. Um, so it was really, I mean, it's a classic book, it's been around for a long time. It was really the first, in some ways, the first, uh, account of how, in the era of, you know, women — full-time women mothers becoming full-time earners — how family life was changing and the problems that it was causing, um, because, you know, that was really a phenomenon that accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. Before that, women, especially with young children, were much less likely to be working full time and also in full-time demanding jobs, because women moved into those jobs in a big way.

So, second shift is absolutely very important, but you know what, one of the interesting things that I learned from the research we've been doing is, even for people who are single or people who were married without children, the five-day week has been really stressful. So it's not just parents who are benefiting by this. I mean, only about a third of our people in our studies have children living at home. Uh, it turns out that work has just become too stressful for everybody.

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Brian Mackey: I was gratified to see that it's not just me and my family that feels like we're never on top of laundry. You know, we have a hard time staying on top of dishes and stuff, uh, you know, little things like that around the house, the kind of labor that goes into it. This is a broad trend across the economy.

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Juliet Schor: Absolutely. I mean, people call it life admin or, you know, just like, can you have a life? I mean, do you have to spend your whole weekend catching up on all the things you couldn't do during the week because your job is so demanding? Um, and that's what — I mean, you'll know from having read the book, um, that people just describe it as life-changing, transformational. It's kind of hard to express how much difference, uh, it makes to people just to have that extra day.

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Brian Mackey: I can guess at it, and we'll come to some of those stories a little later in the conversation, just based on how much I relaxed this past weekend with Memorial Day compared to many other weeks in the year. Uh, before we get to that, though, I want to go back in time, because this future we're in now where everybody feels stressed and overworked was not what a lot of people expected. You reference, uh, Richard Nixon in the book, and I went and looked up a New York Times article. This is September 23, 1956. Dateline, Colorado Springs. Uh, Vice President Richard M. Nixon foresaw tonight, for the not-too-distant future, a four-day work week and a fuller family life for every American. He said this would come about through continuation of the administration's economic policies — that's the Eisenhower administration. Nixon says these are not dreams or idle boasts. They are simple projections of the gains we've made in the last four years. Uh, Nixon goes on to lay out some goals for a second Eisenhower administration, which, of course, they would win. Uh, and one of them was to promote a new way of life, better than we ever had before — the result of scientists and technicians making it so, quote, "backbreaking toil and mind-wearying tension will be left to machines and electronic devices," end quote.

So, Julie, talk to me about the mid-20th century predictions of what we would do with all this leisure time.

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Juliet Schor: Yeah. Well, it's funny because I subtitled my book "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure" because when I started looking into what was going on with working hours, I was surprised to find, first of all, those predictions — that the four-day week would be, uh, we would have gotten it by the '70s. The idea of what they called the crisis of leisure time — there were a whole group of people who were worried, what were we gonna do with all this free time? Of course you have Keynes 100 years ago predicting a 15-hour week because they're looking at the phenomenal productivity growth that was being generated through mechanization and, you know, the rise of the factory system and so forth. And that just — you know, the 1950s, when Nixon was talking about this, were a period of very rapid productivity growth, and that continues through the 1960s and it goes into the 1970s, at which point you start to get a little bit of a crisis of productivity.

And, uh, so the expectation was that the same thing that had been happening from 1870 — which is when the work time reduction began — through to the war, basically the Second World War, that that would just resume after the war, because you had a steady reduction in the number of hours that people worked. Beginning in 1870, you go from sort of 1870 to 1970, it's about — you go from about 3,000 hours a year, which is a 60-hour work week, down to roughly, you know, the 40-hour work week.

Now, um, what they didn't realize was a whole series of things had changed, that actually in the United States we're going to put us on a reverse course. So we've gotten to that sort of low point. Um, the analyses I've done — I usually time it by business cycles because hours move around the business cycle — so from 1969, that's when you start to see increases in working hours. Um, and by the time I wrote "The Overworked American," it came out in 1992, we were in another one of these moments of sort of excessive busyness and stress, and people feeling that everything was just speeding up and feeling a lot of stress about that.

So, um, the expectations were by no means met. People just, I think, failed to realize that productivity growth doesn't automatically translate to shorter hours. It's a really important lesson as we look down the barrel of AI at this point, right? Because with the industrial revolution, the standard story was, oh look, 1870, people were working 60 hours a week, long hours in the factories and so forth. And look at what industrialization brought us — it was a reduction in hours. You have to go back another century to see that the first thing industrialization did was yield a huge increase in hours. So from 1750, you start to see more and more days worked per year and the workday getting longer and longer. And so what starts in 1870, which is that we finally are reclaiming leisure time, is a reversal. And so what it shows you is technology can actually, uh, increase working hours, or it can be used to decrease them, and what matters is sort of the context of the workplace. Are workers organized to push for shorter hours? Do bosses have the upper hand, etc.

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Brian Mackey: Who did reap the benefits of these, uh, productivity gains, then, if not the workers?

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Juliet Schor: Well, the workers reaped them in terms of income. So, you know, a big theme of "The Overworked American" was that we took all that productivity growth and put it into producing more. And at the time I wrote it, you know, we'd come out of a period in which a good portion of that productivity growth actually went to working people. So wages, coming out of the Second World War, were pretty much tied to productivity. So if there was a 3% increase in productivity, workers were getting a 3% real wage increase — that was in some contracts, for example. But that starts to change, and, um, we've had a couple of decades now, even a little bit more, in which the average working people are not getting the benefits of their increased productivity. Those are all going to the people at the top, and we know that's, you know, the growth of extreme inequality and the 1% and the [top 10%] and [top 100%], uh, you know, reaping, uh, just really disproportionate benefits.

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Brian Mackey: All right, let me reintroduce our conversation. My guest is Juliet Schor, author of "Four Days a Week." We tape this ahead of time, so no calls, but we did ask members of our texting group about it. And incidentally, you can join by texting the word "talk" to 217-803-0730.

Aaron in Murfreesboro says it doesn't feel like there's enough time with the five-day work week to do my day job and household chores. Three-day weekends are perfect — one day for fun, social plans, one day for resting, one day for cleaning and household chores. I think most desk jobs can be done in a 32-hour work week, and with many amenities available online, it's not necessary to fully staff offices 40 hours a week anymore. Thanks for that, Erin. We'll have more with Juliette Schor on four days a week after a short break. This is the 21st show.

It's the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. Let's get back to my conversation with Juliet Schor. She's a PhD economist and professor of sociology at Boston College who has spent decades studying Americans as workers and consumers. Her most recent book is ["Four] Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter."

The basic argument of the book is, get rid of Fridays, or some other day of the work week — make the standard a three-day weekend. We tape this conversation ahead of time so we could put it on YouTube, and you can find it there by searching for the 21st show.

Before the break, we were talking about the history of some of these ideas — that we would all have more leisure time in the future, and that significant revolutions in how we work have not always led to more leisure time. That said, Julie did want to make one more point on that.

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Juliet Schor: If you look at how those working hours came down, the first thing I said was fewer days worked per year, and some of it was, you know, feast days and holidays that got pushed out of the calendar. But the other thing is that for the more privileged workers, many of them took a three-day weekend. They had something that was called Saint Monday, because they would finish maybe half day on Saturday or maybe Friday, and then they'd start to revel — i.e., drink and carouse and relax and whatever they did in those days. It wasn't — they weren't going to Disneyland, right? They were just kind of hanging about, and they weren't ready to go back on Mondays, and they'd have a hangover and they would just be starting to put themselves in a position to maybe show up on Tuesday. There was also a Saint Tuesday thing, but, um, it — and I talk about it a little bit in the book — but it really, when I sort of remembered this kind of late in the process of studying the four-day week, I said, oh yeah, Saint Monday, and it made me think that, well, you know, maybe there's just that — and this is a refrain we got from people in the studies — two days is not enough. Two days is just not enough, and people have taken that third day when they can. And I think that's a really important thing to hold on to as we think about work time.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, and I actually want to stay with one other point on the history before we move off of it. Uh, and this is from a text message we got from a listener. We told members of our texting group we were having this conversation, taping it ahead of time. Uh, John in Urbana said, with both me and my wife working full time, it's not easy. We would spend more time doing what we love — this is if they had a four-day week, right — we'd spend more time doing what we love: gardening, hiking, weekend trips. But as long as healthcare is tied to full-time employment, employers will keep part-timers just below the line and extract as much value as possible from full-timers. It's an awful distortion in the entire labor market. Conservatives might see single-payer healthcare in a different light if they considered the immense burden it would remove from all employers. You talk about healthcare's role in our work structure in the five-day week.

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Juliet Schor: Absolutely foundational. It's such a great point that John makes. The history of it is, um, it, it was an accident that we have healthcare tied to employment. And the accident came about because during the Second World War there were wage and price controls, which meant, um, employers could not increase wages to get more workers, and they had a really hard time getting workers. They were trying — you know, so many people were in the armed services, right, and overseas and so forth — really trying to induce people out of their homes and into the labor force, and so they started offering health insurance because it wasn't covered by the wage and price controls, and it just kind of stuck. And I love the word that, um, John used, which is "distortion," because it distorted the labor market. And I talk about this a fair amount in "The Overworked American" — it basically, um, took away a, quote unquote, market in hours. So workers in this country pretty much can't choose hours of work. They take a job, they can negotiate over salary, but the hours tend to be attached to the jobs. And if you want what I call a short-hours job — John refers [to it] as part time — you have to pay a huge penalty. So you don't get health insurance, you don't get other benefits, you no longer get career advancement and so forth in many jobs, in most. But I mean, it's changed a little bit. It's a massive penalty, and, um, it has to do with — I mean, there are a number of reasons for it, but one has to do with the fact that people who work long hours and are heavily dependent on those salaries or wages are more compliant workers, and employers kind of like it that way. And of course they want as small a number of people, or a headcount as possible, working as many hours as possible, because they don't want to give benefits to more people.

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Brian Mackey: Well, tell me, how did you first start to get involved with the concept of a four-day work week?

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Juliet Schor: So, I had written "The Overworked American." At that point I wasn't so specific about the form that work time reduction could take. It was really more just about, you know, reversing this upward trend in hours and giving people, uh, their productivity growth in the form of more leisure time. I did a little bit of surveying back in the 2000s. Four-day work week was the most popular form of work time reduction, and I did some surveying showing very large numbers of people would be willing to give up one day's pay. At that point, no one was really thinking that it would be possible to do this without a reduction in pay, which is, as you mentioned, the way the employers in our studies did it. So the surveying, you know, pretty much always had that tradeoff.

Um, during the pandemic, I was giving a lot of talks on Zoom to Europeans because, you know, now they could get Americans to speak without having to bring us over, and I noticed a big uptick in interest in work time reduction. And after a talk that I gave, um, someone who had been at the talk, uh, pinged me and said, can we talk? And he was actually employed by a trade union in Ireland, one of the biggest trade unions. It was a public sector trade union named [FÓRSA], and they were really interested in the four-day week, but they had the view that it wouldn't be possible for public service sector employees until the private sector was already kind of doing it. And so the union, um, gave him time to organize a trial of private sector employers who were interested in trying out a four-day week.

And I should say it's a 32-hour week — it's not a compressed work week — a 32-hour week with no reduction in pay. And, you know, he knew that I was someone who had spent a lot of time studying work time and asked if I would lead the research for this trial. And that trial suddenly morphed into an American trial and a British and, you know, and it turned out that after the first Irish trial, he joined forces with a man from New Zealand, an entrepreneur who had tried this at his own company and started an NGO called Four Day Week Global. His name is Andrew Barnes, and he and his wife, Charlotte Lockhart, um, founded this NGO and were organizing these trials of companies.

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Brian Mackey: And this is the 100-80-100 model, right? You're talking about. What does that mean?

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Juliet Schor: So Barnes is — he sort of coined this model: 100-80-100. 100% of the pay for 80% of the time. But you have to perform 100% of your productivity. And when he, uh, founded a financial services company called Perpetual Guardian — so like estates and finance and stuff — he made his employees sign a contract saying that they would maintain 100% of their productivity. Now, that's, I guess, possible in a workplace in which people have lots of time that is wasted, um, and they can figure it out on their own, but actually — the knowledge workers, yeah, or other kinds of, um, you know, there can be other kinds of workers who are not necessarily sort of highly skilled in knowledge, but who are white-collar pretty much. But, you know, there can also be blue-collar workplaces where this is the case. We have a brewery I talk a lot about, and they had a very leisurely pace and kind of some people who just really weren't into working that hard. So it can happen in any kind of workplace.

But, um, what the model actually got more sophisticated than that in the sense that the idea was that the employees themselves would figure out — as in groups, you know, if it was a team organized by teams in that workplace, it would be by teams; if it was a small workplace, maybe they would all do it together — figure out, OK, how can we get everything done in four days. And so the, the way the trials were organized, there were two months of coaching and preparation and what we call work reorganization, where the, uh, companies figure out what they're doing that's time-wasting. So it's not all just on the individual. I mean, the individual, depending on the work, can get more efficient to some extent, and certainly our people report being much more efficient. But a lot of it is also in changing how the workplace functions.

And big things like, um, if you are a white-collar worker, the statistics show that you spend a huge amount of time in meetings, and a lot of that meeting time is not productive. So they figure out how to drastically curtail that unproductive meeting time. They create what's called focus time, when people aren't being distracted. So there are a lot of — they get new software to help with more efficient communication or project management or, you know, there are a lot of different ways that companies do it, and we can talk more about that. Um, but that's the idea. And actually the coaching that we gave to people is: don't focus so much on the individual; focus on changing the workplace culture to just make it more efficient. So some of the companies will go through, like, intensive — the brewery, they did time-and-motion studies on every step of brewing. It's a complicated process with multiple steps, um, a lot of equipment cleaning and so forth, and they figured out how they could reorganize the timing and scheduling and stuff and get everything done in the four days.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, and that's one of the things I like so much about this entire concept — I mean, you go to a bookstore and you look at the business productivity section, it's 99% of it is, you can do this, you can do that, how to make yourself more efficient, how to — and this really does put the onus on the employer, not the individual, which is a pretty big shift in thinking here.

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Juliet Schor: Right, and the thing about if you become a more productive individual in a workaholic or kind of inhumane workplace, it just means you'll have more to do — and you'll be doing it at, you know, a more intense speed. So absolutely. I think the other thing is that it changes the culture in a way that makes it OK for people to not be at work, because in a traditional context where we're, you know, operating with the sort of face-time system, or what people call productivity theater — or, you know, all of those things where what matters for how you get seen is how many days you're sitting in front of your machine or at your desk, you know, who comes in earliest, who leaves latest — if an individual tries to become more efficient and not be there as much, they're going to be really punished. Whereas this flips the script and it says, oh, you have to spend late nights? Why are you inefficient?

[00:31:05]
Brian Mackey: So what are some of the results, top-line results for people, you know, for most people, I guess, in the study?

[00:31:12]
Juliet Schor: So for employees, we have 20 different well-being metrics and they all go up a lot, um. Burnout — almost 68% of people in the [study] score lower on burnout. Stress falls, negative emotions fall, positive emotions rise, fatigue. Exercise goes up, uh, sleep goes up, sleep problems go down, all those work-family conflict and work-life conflict variables I talked about earlier, those get much better. Uh, life satisfaction, time satisfaction, relationship satisfaction — one of my favorite ones is for the, uh, chefs in — we have a nice restaurant chain in the American study — um, and they gave their chefs a four-day week, and their relationships got so much better because they have some actual time to see their partners.

Um, what am I missing? Uh, so those are the — all the well-being goes up. The self-reported productivity stats all increase, uh, which is interesting. We asked them to, uh, rate their, uh, ability of their workability compared to their lifetime best. And I should, I should tell you what the methodology of the study is, which is, uh, we survey people before the four-day week starts, we survey them at three months, six months, 12 months, and in some cases we've gone to 24. And so it's the same — we're looking at the same person and how they're answering this question about workability before they start the survey, or the new schedule, and then at those intervals of time. And we also have control companies that we look to, to see, well, are their metrics moving in the same way? And the answer is no. So these are kind of companies that are a lot like the ones in the study, but they're on a regular five-day schedule.

So those well-being improvements happen, the productivity improvements happen. So workability goes up, we ask people just directly: rate your productivity. We have what's called a smart working scale with some items about, you know, how do you find more efficient ways of doing things, and so forth. Um, and then we have some work intensity variables because we want to see, is this just a speed-up — you know, were people just working at a low pace and now they're working at a high pace? And the answer is pretty much no. Not much increase in work intensity and workload and work pace — a little bit for one of them, um — but it really, it, that work reorganization seems to really be happening. So that was the purpose of looking at, is it just a speed-up or are they really finding more efficient ways to do things.

So those are all the employee findings, and then we have also stuff about what's happening outside of the home and how they're spending their time and so forth. But, um, the other side of it is the employers and what are they experiencing.

[00:34:23]
Brian Mackey: All right, I'm going to interrupt and ask us to put a pin in the employer's experience of the four-day week because we need to take a break. Let me remind listeners this is the 21st show. We're speaking with Juliette Schor, author of "Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter." We tape this conversation ahead of time, in part, so we could put it on YouTube, and you can find it by searching for the 21st show, or we'll have a link at our website, twentyfirstshow.org. More to come after a break. Stay with us.

It's the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. Let's get back to my conversation with Juliet Schor, a PhD economist and professor of sociology at Boston College. She has spent years studying the working lives of Americans, and most recently, that has been leading a series of global studies looking at what happens when you give workers a three-day weekend as a default in their employment. She has published the results of that work in a book, ["Four] Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter."

Before the break, we were talking about benefits to workers of a four-day week. Let's pick up with her talking about the employer perspective on the four-day work week.

[00:35:46]
Juliet Schor: It's very hard to get true productivity statistics for white-collar workers or for many of the kinds of workers that are in these studies. I mean, the idea — the productivity fantasy of, of economists, I think, is the assembly line, right, where it's really easy to measure how many things are —

[00:36:05]
Brian Mackey: — [like a] UPS driver where the machine actually tracks whether they click their seatbelt or not, things like that.

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Juliet Schor: I mean, uh, we don't have productivity stats from the company, so what do we have? We ask them to rate the productivity performance. On a 1 to 10, they rate it 7.5. Um, some of them give us the statistics, the metrics that they do use — so their so-called key performance indicators, their OKRs, these different business, uh, things. Um, and they just tell us that in many of the cases, productivity stayed the same or productivity went up. So very few of them reported, oh, we lost productivity, but we're sticking with it because of X, Y, Z.

So why do I say we're sticking with it? Well, we went back to them, um, after about — maybe about two years into the study. So the first trial was February 2022, it started. So we went back about two years later, and we contacted all the companies who had been on it — it's been at least a year since they had started their schedule — to ask, are you still on the schedule? 90% of them were, and actually it's a little bit higher because a few of those never really did it to begin with, so they sort of dropped out early. Um, so it's a super high success — to me that's the biggest metric of success: do they keep it?

We have other things like their revenue, their absenteeism, um, new hiring, uh, ability to attract new employees, you know, things like that, and those are all, you know, quite positive. Except new hires didn't go up because people don't leave, and the turnover just really goes down. And I like to say nobody quits a four-day week job because they're —

[00:38:00]
Brian Mackey: — I was just thinking that exact line in my head when you said that, right. Even if there are other things about the job you don't like. Yeah, because maybe if this was economy-wide, people would be a little more —

[00:38:11]
Juliet Schor: Yeah, but it's really hard to get another one with full pay, so. So both the employees and the employers are just really, really happy about the change, and you know, it just, it's been very, very successful.

[00:38:27]
Brian Mackey: I'm sure you've heard a lot of naysaying, uh, to this idea from various corners. I was actually talking with my mom about this — who's a retired teacher and school administrator and education professor — and, uh, you know, she said, well, teachers are going to want a four-day week too, and, you know, we could do e-learning Fridays, but I'll say for myself as a parent, I found those to be worthless, uh, when we have them for snow days, for example. Um, but she said one of the foundations of a good educational program is consistency. It might surprise people who haven't taught, but some young students lose learning after just a two-day weekend. Uh, a four-day school week for our agrarian school calendar would be a disaster. A four-day school week for year-round school is a possibility, but that's another conversation.

What do you think about teaching, nursing, uh, policing — jobs where maybe people would say it's a little harder to do a four-day week, uh, given the, you know, constraints and demands that are out there?

[00:39:26]
Juliet Schor: All right, let me start with nursing and policing since we have those in our study, and I think they're somewhat different than teaching. Um, so the town of Golden, Colorado, um, put their entire police force on a four-day week, and they had fantastic results. So — and they had a lot of metrics that they looked at. The productivity metrics all went up, the resignations went down, the ability to attract people. They were very happy and they decided to roll it out to the whole town. So it's totally viable for police.

We also have nurses, um, and I have a whole discussion in my book about the nurses. Now, the nurses, uh, where we've done the research, um, tend — they're not going to be the nurses on the [3-12s] because that's a different kind of schedule, but they're nurses who are on five-day-week schedules. It's super successful. Um, those nurses tend to be a little bit higher up in the hierarchy, um, and they're very stressed, and there's a huge crisis of resignations among nurses.

And, uh, in the, uh, so there are two nurses studies I go into in detail, but we have other nursing companies — you know, other nursing sites that we have also looked at. Um, and when the program was announced in the one we did our own research on, uh, people rescinded their resignations, and it's been extremely successful. And they did a lot of different — they use different, um, well-being metrics than we do, uh, because they have their own metrics that they needed to, you know, follow through with. There's a Mayo Clinic metric they use, um, but their patient quality results went up too. So, very successful.

Um, now, teachers — I think there are two parts to the teacher's story. One is, speaking of the agrarian calendar, a lot of school districts have been offering four-day weeks to teachers. It started during the pandemic. It's actually quite widespread, and it has to do with the fact that they didn't want to pay more and they couldn't get teachers. So this was a way of attracting people without expending more funds. For the teachers, it's great. I can't speak to the, to the, uh, impacts on kids — I haven't studied that. There's a little bit of research on that, um, I think it's a little bit mixed.

[00:42:12]
Brian Mackey: I also think, as a parent, a three-day weekend sounds more appealing to me if I know I can go do errands and not have to worry about, you know, being a caregiver or having, you know, the YMCA or soccer games on Fridays — no, that sort of thing.

[00:42:26]
Juliet Schor: Absolutely. And I think that there it's been a mix. There are some, some where they might provide some kind of care on the fifth day or not. For some, it's a huge burden on parents. For some, they kept five days for the students, but the teachers go to four. I mean, there's just a lot of different ways to do it. My own view — and some went to longer days for the students, which I hate — um, so, I mean, I personally — I mean, this isn't from research, just, you know, as a parent and just a person — I think that, um, kind of lengthening school for kids is probably not the greatest thing. I think they need a lot of play time and they learn a lot through play and so forth. But I know there are, you know, different views about that, um, but on the labor side of it, it's happening in school districts already.

[00:43:23]
Brian Mackey: Well, so what would you say are the biggest obstacles? I mean, one of the things I read about this is, you know, some say this is a self-selected group of employers who are willing to participate in studies like this. It's not a blind — you're not forcing companies to participate. Um, what are some of the obstacles you see to, you know, making this an economy-wide reality?

[00:43:47]
Juliet Schor: So it absolutely is a self-selected group, and I think that — and I have a whole discussion of this in the book — there's not really another way to do it. You can't force — you can't, you can't advertise — even if you advertised, um, an experiment, and then they would be self-selecting into those. The government can't — even the government couldn't say, all right, now half of you have to go on a four-day week. I mean, it's just, because all of those — what we call RCTs, randomized controlled trials — those are done with individuals. And so, um, you can randomize within a big company, which is what most researchers do, but then you've got one company and they were self-selected too. So it's a little bit disingenuous, the economists and the social scientists who are like, oh, this is just self-selection. I think — and I mean, it's true. I mean, and I'm not — yeah,

[00:44:46]
Brian Mackey: I'm sorry to interrupt, but I — you just think of people like, uh, Elon Musk, or, you know, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase, who talks about he wants, you know, butts in seats and people, you know, working, working extreme hours. That's sort of the — the zeitgeist, I guess, is the word I'm looking for.

[00:45:03]
Juliet Schor: Well, I — they're trying the 996, Elon Musk and the 996. I think they're failing, actually. Jamie Dimon is predicting a 3.5-day week. He's referenced in the book at the end. But, um, I think more people feel the four-day week is the coming common sense than 996. But there are those people, and, you know, one of the things we know is that when you work those long hours, your hourly productivity falls. We know that if you have really long hours and you dial them back, your per-hour productivity tends to go up, and long hours means lots of mistakes. Um, so if you want to focus on quality and productivity, better off — shorter, better, smarter.

Um, so, yeah, it is true, it's a self-selected group, and I think the question is not, can every company do it right now, because the answer to that is no. But can many, many companies do it now, and could everyone do it over time? And the answer to that, I believe, is yes. There are many companies like the ones in our studies because we have all kinds of industries and types of companies, um.

And there are some that are already super optimized, and actually — we talked about the [180-80s]. I have a chapter in my book on what I call the [180-80s], and those are the restaurants, the healthcare, some of the, uh, other organizations where people are being worked too hard, and the idea of asking them to do all that work in four days makes no sense. You just need to keep them from leaving. And some of the most important successes that companies have had is by keeping their people from leaving, because a lot of companies have turnover problems. Or attracting good people, because a lot of companies have been having trouble attracting people. So there are just different ways to do it, and there are many more companies that can do it, and the ones that have trouble figuring that out — I think once you get a majority and you get some legislation enshrining it, the other ones, they'll figure it out, because otherwise they'll go out of business.

[00:47:32]
Brian Mackey: You talked about earlier about the technological changes often leading to increased work time, and obviously, artificial intelligence, uh, these large language models are being talked about as, you know, potentially revolutionary for the way we work. So how has that affected, you know, how you think about these topics?

[00:47:55]
Juliet Schor: So there's a chapter in the book about AI, and the way I think about it is, if AI in the workplace is going to give big productivity improvements, rather than having those leading to large-scale layoffs and unemployment, companies should reduce working hours. Um, it's — you know, far better socially — it's a far better way to go than throwing large numbers of people out of work. Now, we don't know if they will, uh, lead to massive layoffs — it's a highly contested point at the moment — um, but I think that AI is kind of, uh, what do we call it, a tailwind for work time reduction, because it makes it possible, which is why people like Jamie Dimon and, you know, Bill Gates and plenty of others are predicting a 3.5- or four-day work week is coming as a result of this. Um, so I think that's really key.

I should tell you that I heard something on the radio the other day about entire radio stations which are being run by AI, uh, they do the talking, they choose the music, they choose the news items, everything. And, um, and then in this story, they played a clip from an AI radio station, which was a total disaster. I mean, it was so horrible. But yeah. You know, automation has been a big part of the world. I mean,

[00:49:41]
Brian Mackey: Automation has been a big part of radio for a long time, but, um, I don't know — hopefully people appreciate the human touch, at least here on public radio.

Uh, the book is called "Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter." It's by Juliette Schor. Thank you so much for talking with me today on the 21st show. I really appreciate your time. It's been

[00:50:06]
Juliet Schor: a great pleasure. Thank you.

[00:50:08]
Brian Mackey: And that is it for us today. Once again, you can find our program on YouTube, including select conversations like this one on video. Just search for the 21st show. Our program is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm Brian Mackey. Thanks for listening.

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**Flagged for human review:**

- **[00:00:18] / [00:31:12]** — The transcript reads "fatigue" followed immediately by "Exercise goes up" with no grammatical connector. The sentence appears incomplete (e.g., "fatigue goes down" or similar). Please verify the original audio.
- **[00:00:34]** — The transcript has "hore" at the end of the previous speaker segment, appearing to be a partial word fragment from a cut. Inferred as "[Schor]" beginning the new sentence, but please verify.
- **[00:11:24]** — Juliet Schor's book subtitle given here as "The Unexpected Decline of Leisure." Earlier in the transcript, the book is introduced as "The Overworked American" without a subtitle — please verify the full title.
- **[00:15:26]** — The phrase "the 1% and the 11% and 100%" appears to be a transcription error. The passage likely references income percentile groupings (e.g., the 1%, the 10%, the top 20%), but the exact figures could not be confidently inferred. Flagged as [top 10%] and [top 100%] — please verify against original audio.
- **[00:16:35]** — The text message sender is referred to as both "Aaron" and "Erin" in the same passage. Please verify the correct spelling of the listener's name.
- **[00:18:29]** — The host introduces this segment as Julie wanting to "make one more point," but the segment that follows appears to begin mid-thought. Please verify whether any audio was cut before this timestamp.
- **[00:23:15]** — The trade union named in the transcript was rendered as "FSA." This appears to be FÓRSA, a large Irish public sector trade union. Flagged as [FÓRSA] — please verify against original audio.
- **[00:26:03]** — The host refers to the model as "the 180 100 model" and later "1, 80, 100." The standard name for this framework is the 100-80-100 model (100% pay, 80% time, 100% productivity). The transcript appears to have the digits transposed. Please verify against original audio.
- **[00:34:23] / [00:35:46]** — The book title is rendered as "our Days a Week" in the second break segment, which appears to be a transcription error for "Four Days a Week." Flagged as ["Four] Days a Week" — please verify.
- **[00:39:26]** — The transcript reads "the nurses on the 312s," likely referring to 12-hour, three-day-per-week nursing schedules (commonly called "three-twelves" or "3-12s"). Flagged as [3-12s] — please verify against original audio.
- **[00:45:03]** — Schor refers to "the 18,000" and "the 18080s" as a category in her book. The meaning is unclear from context — possibly "the 80-80s" or another model name. Flagged as [180-80s] — please verify against original audio.
- **[00:47:55]** — The phrase "work weekk" in the original transcript appears to be a transcription artifact (double "k") and has been corrected to "work week."