“This is not a radical idea,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) told Congress this morning. The chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is calling for the legislative branch to pick up an issue dropped nearly 70 years ago:  changing the workweek to 32 hours without docking employee pay, or in other words, a four-day week.

Sanders spoke of successes in his opening statement that other countries have had in implementing shortened work weeks, like, of course, France, but also in specific companies across the nation. 

United Auto Workers head Shawn Fain, the union leader who won historic concessions from the Big Three Detroit automakers, was a witness to the hearing who spoke of diving into the union archives and finding that the fight for a 30-hour workweek had traction in the 1930s, “but today, deep in the 21st century, we find these ideas unimaginable.”

As Sanders points out, the battle to implement a compressed workweek was already won decades prior. In 1933, the Senate had “overwhelmingly passed legislation to establish a 30-hour week,” explains Sanders, adding that intense opposition from corporate America led to that bill’s untimely demise. Soon after, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek as a standard instead as part of his “New Deal” of pro-labor reforms. Captains of capital were still outraged and launched a war to roll back New Deal reforms, arguably up until the present day. 

“This is not, needless to say, a new issue,” said Sanders, who despite his branding as a Democratic Socialist, is really at heart a social democrat in the Rooseveltian tradition, noting that this issue is “very rarely discussed” in politics, with the last hearing on it held back in 1955. Ever since then, corporate power has only solidified and despite a productivity boom as aided by AI, the shortened workweek has not gained traction in Congress. These days, 18% of Americans work more than 60-hour weeks and 40% work at least 50 hours weekly, adds Sanders. “Despite these long hours, the average worker in America makes almost 50 dollars a week less than he or she did 50 years ago after adjusting for inflation.”