Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter, by Juliet B. Schor. Harper Business, 2025
by Trudy Goldberg
Economist Juliet Schor and her colleagues conducted the largest trial of the reduced work week ever to take place—245 organizations, eighty-seven hundred employees, in eight countries on four continents. Their conclusion: “The four-day week works for employees and employers.”
Schor and her colleagues tested The 100-80-100 Model: 100 percent of pay / 80 percent of prior work time / 100 percent of prior productivity.
What were the countries, industries, and the workers in this large sample that tested the100-80-100 Model? Just over half the industries (52%) operated in the UK and the US; 14% were in Australia and New Zealand; 13% in South Africa; and the remainder, 10%, in Ireland and the European Union.
The sample on which the 100-80-100 Model was tested, however, consisted of more privileged workers employed in small to middle-sized establishments. Eighty percent of these companies employed 50 or fewer workers. The modal-size company had 11-25 workers. The largest number of companies, 45%, provided professional services and marketing, with 18%, civil and social services, and 9%, administration and IT. Only 4% were in manufacturing and construction with 3% in retail.
Reflecting the experiences of the covid epidemic, only 5% of the sample companies operated fully in-person, with the hybrid model at 69% being the most frequent and 25%, fully remote. The most common day off was Friday–chosen by over two-fifths (43%) of the companies, with 17% off on either Monday or Friday.
Who were the workers who participated in the four-day week trials? “The feature that stands out most obviously is that our sample skews female: 64 percent check that box, while 34 percent are males and 2 percent are other/binary.” Racially, the sample is predominantly white, 72 percent, with 28 percent choosing all other racial/ethnic options. The sample includes people of all ages. They are a well-educated group of workers: Almost three-quarters have a bachelor’s degree, and about one-fourth have some or no college. Nearly a third (31%) have a post-graduate degree. More than half identify as professionals and managers. A third of these workers have children under eighteen living at home.
The outcomes of the four-day week are overwhelmingly positive for the workers in this large sample: Mental health improves and anxiety declines. Burnout falls for 69 percent of participants. Stress declines. So do anxiety and negative emotions. Positive emotions increase.
Physical health also improves, in some cases because it’s closely tied to mental health. All these changes are statistically significant at the most stringent probability level. At twenty-four months the results of reduced work time remained similar.
Women experienced more reduction in burnout than men, perhaps because they are more likely to experience the double day. White men were less likely to experience reduction of burnout than everyone else. There were no divergences by parental status, race, age and education levels. There is zero evidence that people are more likely to have a second job.”
Although it wasn’t possible to conduct the gold-star random control experiment—of companies willing to reduce the work week but not allowed to do so, Schor and colleagues used a quasi-control group consisting of companies in favor of the reduction but not implementing it. The control companies did not experience the improvements of the companies and workers that participated in the experiment: …the productivity measures didn’t rise. Burnout didn’t fall. Mental and physical health stayed the same. As did work-life balance, satisfaction with job, life, and time. Fatigue and sleep were constant.
“Employees,” writes Schor, “aren’t the only ones who are thriving with the four-day week model. One of the most powerful indicators, she writes, is whether the organizations stay with the four-day innovation or revert to five. Less than 10 percent go back to five. Why? Revenues rose; employee retention improved; sick and personal days declined. When companies were asked to rate the trial on a scale of 1 to 10, the average rating was 8.2. For productivity and performance, the rating is 7.3. The ability to attract employees got the highest rating: 8.2.
Schor reports that U.S. workers are on the job hundreds of hours more than their European counterparts and even more than the Japanese. She refutes the conventional answer that this is a matter of culture by pointing out that our longer hours are of recent vintage and that for many decades the United States was a place where people worked less. In 1950, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, and Spain had longer hours, and through the 1960s, work schedules in Europe exceeded those in the US. After that Europeans continued to reduce work time, and U.S. hours stagnated.
One important reason for longer hours for American workers is that U.S. employers offer health care which is paid for by the person rather than prorated by hours worked. This gives employers an incentive to hire fewer people for more hours. Government-provided health care in Europe obviates this reason why US employers prefer longer hours.
Although Schor and her colleagues tested the 100-8-100 Model on a sample of privileged workers, she favors the reduction in work time for all workers and testified enthusiastically at a 2024 hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in support of Senator Bernie Sanders’ bill to reduce the standard US workweek from forty to thirty-two hours with no reduction in pay. (The last time the government reduced the US workweek—with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, it also established a minimum wage and higher wages for overtime.) This was the first Senate hearing on the topic since 1955, and Sanders, Schor observes, didn’t expect the bill to become law anytime soon but was “planting a flag.” How about planting one as well for a higher minimum wage?
Schor recognizes serious societal crises other than “the crisis of overwork.” In a chapter entitled, “Powering Down for People and Planet,” she considers the climate mitigation effects of the four-day week. Pointing out that environmentalists advocate the four-day week because of its potential for reducing the amount of travel to and from work, Schor observes that remote and hybrid work had already considerably reduced this source of reduced energy use. There is a so-called rebound effect to consider regarding reduced work time– that there would be some driving on the day or times off and possibly some travel and engagement in carbon-intensive activities. There were small commuting benefits in this work-time experiment, but no significant travel rebound and fairly low carbon use on the day off.
Schor acknowledges that “A four-day week with no reduction in pay is no climate panacea.” (With pay reduction people tend to spend less and pollute less.) The environmental effect is minimal, she observes, if this is a one-time change that leads to another era in which there is no further decline in work time. “But there’s another possibility, which is that the four-day week breaks the logjam and leads to a longer period of gradual declines in hours.” Is this “Powering down for people and planet?” As compared with such mitigation measures as green growth and significant reduction in the use of fossil fuels?
“Will AI Give Us a Four-Day Week?” This is the title of a chapter in which Schor discusses the effects of AI on work time. She cites the optimists who hold that we should not be afraid of technologies that increase productivity but aligns herself with those who are more pessimistic.
“There will be labor displacement, a great deal of it.” A recent memo (June 2025) of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to employees stated that increased AI use and efficiency gains would lead to a need for “fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.” However, he added that there would be “more people doing other types of jobs.”
Schor notes some negative AI effects other than job loss: that “algorithms are often pernicious agents of racial and gender discriminations and bias.” And there are negative environmental consequences as well–for example, that an AI-powered search uses ten times the electricity of standard googling.
What about the power to resist the negative effects of AI? Schor began her chapter on AI and the four-day week by citing the ability of a powerful union to resist AI: the Writers Guild of America which mounted one of the longest strikes in Hollywood history and secured an agreement that prevented AI-generated scripts and source material such as a novel or play for adaptation. She concludes that the impact of AI on work is ultimately a question of control at many levels.
A revitalized labor movement, joined by powerful movements for a sustainable environment and for economic and social justice are potential countervailing forces. Not to mention a government committed to economic equity, worker power, and vigorous action to prevent environmental disaster. Since Schor wrote, the United States has moved in the opposite direction.
“Four days a week” is clearly a gain for the relatively privileged workers who participated in the experiment conducted by Schor and her colleagues. But what about the large numbers of workers who suffer the crises of unemployment, underemployment, low pay, and poor working conditions? In July 2025, with a relatively low official unemployment rate of 4.2%, there were 18.1 million unemployed workers in the US. A Full Count of joblessness, moreover, includes an additional 4.7 million who worked part-time but wanted full-time work and 6.2 million who were unemployed but not counted in official unemployment statistics—a total of 18.1 million people. Moreover, 16.3 million workers were working poor—employed full-time, year-round for less than the paltry US poverty standard of $31,200 for a family of four (latest figures, 2023).*
For these workers and their families, the crisis is not overwork but poverty—lack of affordable housing and health care, homelessness, food insufficiency …. The working poor, if offered reduced work time, would, in contrast to the workers who tested the 100-80-100 Model, probably look for a second job or keep the one they have. Interestingly, a McDonald’s on-line personal budget guide to help workers spend their earnings in a rational and frugal manner assumed that their employees work two full-time jobs. Reducing these crises and ending their deeply harmful effects on workers and their families should be among our highest priorities.
*See the July 2025 Full Count and Frank Stricker’s labor market analysis in this issue of the NJFAN Newsletter.
Trudy Goldberg is Professor Emerita of Social Work and Social Policy at Adelphi University and Chair of NJFAN. She is the author of numerous popular and scholarly works on comparative welfare states focusing on the poverty of women, the New Deal, and the struggle for economic justice.