What if every weekend could be a long weekend? That’s the question some people are asking after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced legislation this week to reduce the standard workweek to 32 hours — supposedly, with no loss in pay!
It might sound dreamy, but like so many of Sanders’s bold plans that promise to make everything better with no meaningful downsides, it’s actually a harebrained idea that would backfire tremendously.
The senator’s legislation would attempt to force through this change by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and requiring overtime pay after 32 hours per week instead of after 40 hours per week, as is current law. This wouldn’t apply to all jobs, as the Fair Labor Standards Act has a lengthy list of exemptions, but it would still be a drastic shift.
“Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea,” Sanders said in a press release. “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.”
Back in reality, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Any economic change has significant trade-offs, and you can’t get around them just by writing legislation that says everything has to work out great for everyone.
For one, this change would constitute an enormous increase in costs for many employers and businesses. And it’s just basic economics that when businesses’ costs go up, they have to raise their prices. Workers aren’t actually going to be better off if everything they consume gets more expensive.
Regardless, while the federal government could try to prohibit employers from reducing current workers’ wages in light of this legislation, that wouldn’t really work. After all, employers will still presumably be free to offer lower wages for all new hires.
More essentially, a worker’s real wage is not the number on his or her paycheck but what it can buy for the worker. And the government can mandate that the worker’s pay not be cut on paper, but it can’t stop prices from rising and his or her real wage from effectively falling.
What’s more, if there are no trade-offs to this kind of policy, why not just mandate a one-hour workweek for everyone and no pay cuts?
If you can see how that would backfire, well, the same logic applies to a 32-hour workweek, even if it’s less absurd at face value.
It’s telling that Sanders has to trot out misleading or factually inaccurate claims to promote his new proposal. First, he tries to claim that workers’ inflation-adjusted wages are lower today than 50 years ago. That’s simply false.
Sanders also cites misleading data suggesting that increases in productivity have rapidly outpaced increases in compensation. Yet when you account for nonwage benefits such as health insurance and other factors, that gap shrinks enormously or disappears entirely.
Finally, Sanders also cites a few niche pilot programs and tries to argue that the 32-hour workweek would actually be more productive and profitable for businesses, too.
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It seems far-fetched that this is true across the entire economy. But ironically, to whatever extent it is true, it’s actually an argument against Sanders’s legislative mandate — because if a four-day workweek really is more efficient and productive, companies will adopt it themselves over time without government intervention!
Still, Sanders’s legislative proposal has already achieved its primary goal: earning him yet more support from union leaders who’ve never cracked open an economics textbook and making him seem like he’s sympathetic to the working class. The fact that his plan wouldn’t actually work is just a pesky detail.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
