- Imagine it's 1914.
Henry Ford just created the factory assembly line,
and his company's productivity has skyrocketed.
A car that took 12 1/2 hours to assemble now takes 1 1/2.
He decides to double the pay
and reduce the work day from nine hours to eight,
and he later reduces the work week from six days to five.
The nation is shocked, his workers are thrilled,
and his company thrives with increased productivity
and loyalty.
Manufacturers around the country follow his lead,
and it eventually becomes standard practice,
and becomes a law in 1938.
So how did Ford settle on 40 hours in a work week?
He adapted the idea from labor activists 100 years earlier,
who thought that the average 70 hours a week
in a factory were brutal and unsustainable.
They campaigned with the slogan, "Eight hours for labor,
eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will".
Eight hours also conveniently made three equal shifts
to keep Ford's factory open 24 hours a day.
But Ford also believed that leisure time
was indispensable to capitalism.
Working people need to have enough free time to find uses
for consumer products, including automobiles, he said.
As the work week shrank from 70 to 40 hours,
economists predicted that the trend would continue,
and Nixon suggested a four-day work week
was right around the corner.
Economist John Maynard Keynes thought that technology
would allow us to be working three-hour days by 2030.
Some experts say we are entrenched
in a culture of over-work,
and we were already in the midst of a burnout crisis
when COVID hit.
- This is something that was actually building up
for a long time before the pandemic.
- This is Karla Miller,
she's our columnist that writes about the workplace.
- People were already reaching high levels of burnout,
they were being asked to do more with less at their jobs
and put in longer hours.
So Americans in particular are not really good
about taking leisure time for ourselves.
We don't take the vacation or paid leave even when we have it,
and when we do, it's really hard for us to disconnect completely,
and that becomes sort of like a low-level app
running in the background and draining our batteries.
- The pandemic then inspired millions of people
to quit their jobs and reassess their priorities.
This Great Resignation is leaving companies
scrambling to figure out how to find workers.
Some are attracting new talent
by shrinking their work week to four days
while keeping pay and workload the same.
They achieve this by capping attendance at meetings
and cutting them down to 30 or even 15 minutes.
Some ban social media during work hours and urge workers
to check e-mails and chats only twice a day.
Microsoft Japan said it boosted productivity by 40 percent.
This hints at the theory that work expands
so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Other companies are trying a five-hour work day,
claiming that knowledge workers like programmers, writers
and scientists can only concentrate hard
for about that long every day.
- So not only are companies
electing to go to shorter work weeks,
but a lot of countries have been as well.
Iceland was the most famous example.
UK is expected to try this shorter work week
out later this summer.
And Belgium recently announced
that they are going to allow employees to ask their employers
to let them shorten their weeks into four days.
- And other companies are going a step beyond remote work
to being asynchronous,
where work does not have to be done
during the same hours as other workers.
To achieve this, companies get rid of meetings
and Slack chats entirely, and instead leave comments
to be checked within a 24-hour time frame.
This allows workers to take advantage
of their biological prime time,
when they feel most focused and energized to work.
Research claims that people who work more than 39 hours a week
are putting their health at risk.
Long hours leave people little time to eat well
and look after themselves.
- Studies have shown that working too much is bad
for your health, physical and mental.
High blood pressure, heart arrhythmia,
insulin resistance --
so, all those hours piling up tends
to have a cumulative effect on our bodies.
- The Industrial Age ended with establishment
of the 40-hour work week,
but also with the hope that technology and automation
would allow us to work less, and not more, in the future.
In our current era of over-work and burnout,
companies may have to change an outdated work structure
if they want to attract talent and grow.