Shortened Work Weeks

Schor argues that AI-driven productivity gains create a real opportunity to reduce work time, but that hours don’t automatically fall without institutional choices (e.g., bargaining power, norms, and policy), drawing on historical cases where technology did not translate into more leisure by default. She points to the four-day (32-hour) week as a plausible anchor for channeling productivity gains into broad-based leisure rather than narrower rent capture.

The UK‑based think tank has produced detailed analyses of working‑time reduction scenarios, including modeling national‑level transitions to 32‑hour weeks and evaluating large‑scale pilots. Their work emphasizes that AI and digitalization can decouple output from hours worked, arguing that without deliberate policy, these gains will disproportionately accrue to capital owners rather than manifesting as shorter, healthier work lives for the majority of workers.

Sanders argues for a legislated shift to a 32‑hour workweek with no loss of pay as a distributional response to rising productivity and inequality, explicitly tying the case to AI and robotics as accelerants of economic transformation. His proposed Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act aims to reduce the standard workweek from 40 to 32 hours over four years by lowering overtime thresholds, mandating increased pay for long workdays, and protecting employees' existing wages and benefits from any reduction.