Many people hate their jobs. Some don’t. But almost everyone would like to work less. And over the past several decades, American workers have worked longer hours overall as their wages have stagnated. As if that weren’t enough, they have also seen their declining amount of free time disrupted by increasingly erratic schedules. It’s a dismal situation. Strange, then, that politicians almost never speak to this widespread desire.

But yesterday, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders announced that he would introduce Senate legislation to establish a standard thirty-two-hour workweek, with no loss in pay, across the United States. Sanders’s Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act is being cosponsored by Democratic California senator Laphonza Butler in the Senate, and Representative Mark Takano, also a California Democrat, has introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives.

Experiments with a shorter week are now being pursued in several European countries. In Germany last month, forty-five companies began a six-month pilot of a four-day workweek; Germany currently has an average workweek of 34.2 hours. (One of the organizations supporting the pilot, 4 Day Week Global, has also endorsed Sanders’s bill.) A similar test run is currently underway in Portugal, and one concluded in the UK at the end of 2022.

France legally mandated a thirty-five hour workweek in 2000. But some companies there are now experimenting with a thirty-two-hour week as well. (Others are simply allowing workers to squeeze a thirty-five-hour week into four weekdays.) Senator Sanders’s bill raises the obvious question: Why can’t the United States, the wealthiest nation in human history, do the same?

Even setting recent shorter-week experiments aside, the United States is an outlier among rich countries in terms of how many hours we spend working. According to the press release from Sanders’s office announcing the bill, full-time US workers now spend an average of forty-two hours on the clock per week (though that figure may not account for people working multiple jobs). Looking at annual average hours per work, the United States comes in well above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. At 1,815 hours, the average US worker is clocking almost five hundred hours more per year than the average German worker and about three hundred more than the average worker in France or the UK.