Free Republic

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has proposed a bill to reduce the 40-hour workweek to 32. Sanders on Thursday introduced the Thirty Two Hour Workweek Act to establish a standard 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay. He is supported in the Senate by Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., and in the House of Representatives by Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., who introduced the legislation. Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Thursday led the committee in a hearing introducing the act. "Today in America, 28.5 million Americans -- 18% of our workforce -- now work over 60...

The idea of a four-day workweek is catching attention. Young workers in particular see it as the wave of the future, while others worry it will undermine America prosperity. Economists have pondered the viability of a four-day workweek since research by Janice Hedges in 1971. Recently, though, a magical idea has come to the fore: Let employees work one fewer day per week at the same hours per day and same pay, and they will accomplish just as much as in a standard five-day workweek. All the fuss prompted us to ask several hundred American business executives and several thousand...

Even White House staffers admit that President Biden’s advanced age is affecting his workload. Days after the 80-year-old formally announced he would run for re-election in 2024, Axios reported Friday that aides say it’s tough to schedule “public or private events” with Biden at certain times of day — namely weekends, mornings, and evenings. In fact, the report adds, most of Biden’s public events happen between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. That works out to a 30-hour workweek — even less than the official 35-hour workweek in France. So far this year, Biden has held just four events before 10...

(NEXSTAR) – The “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act” was introduced in the House earlier this month, as progressives try for a second time to shorten the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32. The bill, introduced by Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), proposes amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to shorten the standard workweek by eight hours for non-exempt employees. (A non-exempt employee is someone who is currently entitled to overtime when they work more than 40 hours in a week.) It would effectively mean either shorter workweeks or more overtime pay for hourly workers. While the law, if passed, wouldn’t immediately...

(NEXSTAR) – One less day of work, not a dollar less in pay – for an employee, what’s not to love? But even employers like the idea, a recent trial of about 30 companies shows. Thirty-three companies employing about 1,000 people in the U.S., Ireland and Australia decided to test out a four-day, 32-hour workweek as part of a six-month pilot designed by the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global and professors at Boston College. The trial instructed “employees to work 80% of their regularly scheduled hours in return for 100% of their pay and a pledge to deliver 100% of...

A proposed bill winding its way through the state Legislature could make California the first state in the nation to reduce its workweek to four days for a large swath of workers. The bill, AB 2932, would change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for companies with more than 500 employees. A full workday would remain at eight hours, and employers would be required to provide overtime pay for employees working longer than four full days. The bill was authored by Assembly Members Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) and Evan Low (D-San Jose). At the federal...

The four-day workweek just became a reality for dozens of companies across the U.S. and Canada, at least for the next several months. The pilot program, being led by 4 Day Week Global, kicked off on Friday and is expected to last six months. Participating organizations include crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and a number of tech companies.

Former Democratic presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang used the Memorial Day weekend to advocate for a four-day workweek on Twitter. "3-Day weekends are better than 2-Day weekends. We should seriously look at 4-day workweeks. Studies show that we would be just as productive. It would create jobs at the margins and improve mental health," Yang tweeted Monday.

Finland has been at the forefront of flexible work schedules for years, starting with a 1996 law that gives most employees the right to adjust their hours up to three hours earlier or later than what their employer typically requires. The country’s newly installed political leader, Sanna Marin, just upped the ante, though, proposing to put the entire country on a four-day workweek consisting of six-hour workdays. Marin, the world’s youngest sitting prime minister and the leader of a five-party center-left coalition, said the policy would allow people to spend more time with their families and that this could be...

South Korea officially dropped its maximum workweek to 52 hours on Sunday (July 1), in an effort to improve the quality of life among its citizens by tackling the country's notoriously long work hours. The new law, which was a campaign promise by President Moon Jae-in, went into effect for businesses with more than 300 employees, state-run agencies and government offices starting Sunday. Under the law, which slashed the maximum weekly work hours to 52 from 68, workers in South Korea will be allowed to work 40 hours and an additional 12 hours of overtime.

Jack Ma Jack Ma: In the next 30 years people will work 4 hours a day 1 Hour Ago | 05:42 Alibaba founder Jack Ma spent 800 hours traveling around the world last year and plans to increase that to 1,000 in 2017, evangelizing his burgeoning e-commerce platform, globalization and artificial intelligence. The billionaire Chinese businessman sat down with CNBC this week at the Gateway '17 conference in Detroit for a wide-ranging interview on those topics and others. Here are the highlights:

Congressional Republicans will return to Capitol Hill next week with Obamacare in their crosshairs. They’ll take aim at a provision in the law that defines “full- time employees” as those working 30 hours or more. Under Obamacare’s employer mandate, companies with 50 or more “full-time” employees will be required to offer health insurance to their workers or pay a penalty if at least one of their employees purchases a plan through the healthcare marketplace with a federal subsidy. In an Op-Ed published in the National Review Online, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said the House will be focusing on changing...

The largest movie theater chain in the country has cut the workweek of thousands of its employees, blaming Obama's health care law in a company memo. Regal Entertainment Group scaled back shifts for non-salaried workers to part time, putting them under the threshold at which employers are required to provide health insurance, Fox News reports.

Americans should work less, play more -- and in doing so, save the planet. That’s the basic formula a Washington think tank is shopping around as a way to cut down on global warming. The shift from a U.S. work model to a more "European" one – which includes shorter work weeks and more vacation time -- could cut as much as half of the expected global temperature rise by 2100, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The study claims that scaling back on work hours could bring down greenhouse gases. “The calculation...

The 40-hour work week is an outdated model, according to Science Nordic's James W Vaupel, head of the new Danish Max Planck research center. Instead, he argues, we should only work 25 hours a week--but keep working until we’re octogenarians. “We’re getting older and older here in Denmark. Kids who are ten years old today should be able to work until the age of 80. In return, they won’t need to work more than 25 hours per week when they become adults,” Vaupel told Science Nordic. “In the 20th century we had a redistribution of wealth. I believe that in...

With ObamaCare in the wings, the traditional forty- or fifty-hour work week will soon be replaced with a less than thirty-hour week for many American workers. To wit: many businesses, including ones that previously received ObamaCare waivers, are trying to avoid paying onerous fines for not providing employees with health coverage as mandated by the new law. President Obama recently said that he won't allow the budget to be "balanced on the backs of the middle class." He sure did give the appearance of truly caring about these "folks," but he failed to disclose the fact that, even if taxed...

WASHINGTON - The five-day workweek, an idea alien to congressional culture in recent years, is about to make a comeback. "We are going to work longer hours, we are going to work full weeks, we are going to have votes on Mondays and Fridays," new Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., advised his colleagues at the opening of the new session on Jan. 4. Other Americans, from teachers to police officers to factory workers, put in five days a week on the job, Reid said. "Shouldn't we here in Washington, where we do our business in...

PARIS (AP) - French lawmakers voted Wednesday to let workers stay on the job as many as 13 hours longer each week, a preliminary move that critics say will dismantle the nation's legally mandated 35-hour work week. In a first reading, the lower house of parliament voted 370-180 to approve a proposal allowing private sector employees to work up to 48 hours each week - the European Union limit. The measure now goes to the Senate for debate next month. President Jacques Chirac's conservatives, which are pushing for the changes, control both houses of parliament. Supporters say the reform would...

France's centre-right government stood defiantly by plans to make the 35-hour work week more flexible with the controversial prospect of longer hours, despite mass weekend protests. More than half a million people marched through 100 towns and cities on Saturday, according to the organisers -- an alliance of trade unions backed by the opposition Socialist Party. Police put the overall figure at 285,000. A bill that would enable private sector employees to opt for longer hours was expected to pass its first reading when it goes before the National Assembly Monday. In an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien, government...

PARIS, July 1 (AFP) - The co-president of the European Aeronautic Space and Defence Group (EADS), Philippe Camus, weighed into a debate Thursday over France's 35-hour working week, calling for greater flexibility in the policy. "The regulations on the 35-hour work week have widened the gulf between France and the United States, its main competitor, in terms of hours worked. "This law must be softened because it has amputated recent productivity gains and immobilises young cadres and engineers," Camus said during a meeting of an association for the French aeronautics and space industries. He also threatened to move EADS operations...