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% of 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 Adelp[hi 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.
To comment on this review, please visit the NJFAN Blog | | | July 2025 Labor Market Analysis | | | July 2025: Jobs and Hints of Recession
by Frank Stricker
August 12, 2025  The official unemployment rate was 4.1% in June. It had been 4.2% in July. It's been one or the other for the last year. (Just prior to that, in April and May of 2024, the rates were 3.9% and 4%.) Yet for many specific subsets of the general rate, the unemployment rate was quite high and it got higher. It is thus a kind of mystery why the overall official rate did not rise more. Here are examples of last month's changes in specific unemployment rates:
Persons with a disability: + 1.4 to 10%
Teens: + .8 to 15.2% Black teens: + 2.5 to 21.7%
African Americans + .4 to 7.2%
Asian + .4 to 3.9%
Some of these were large increases and the resultant unemployment rates were horrendous. But white rates increased only .1 to 3.7%, and for the whole class of adults, the unemployment rate also advanced only .1 to 4% for men, and .1% to 3.7% for women. Those numbers fit with the tiny increase of .1 in the overall official unemployment rate from 4.1% to 4.2%.
However, NJFAN's Full Count shows that job markets were much weaker than the official rates showed. The total number of officially unemployed increased by .2 million to 7 million. To that group we add part-timers who want full-time work and people who want jobs but are not currently searching or not searching in the right way. In each of those categories, the unemployment rate rose. NJFAN's full count of truly unemployed persons increased by .6 million people to a total of 18.1 million persons. Our unemployment rate was 10.3%. in July. That's two and a half times the official rate.
This darker view of things is in line with other economic negatives. The labor force participation rate measures the share of the adult population that is working or searching for work. That rate fell half of a percentage point from 62.7 to 62.2 over the past year. Not so much but moving in the wrong direction. In past two months the civilian labor force declined by 168,000. Some of that must reflect the government attack on immigrant workers. Yet, oddly, most of the added unemployment involves not people losing or leaving jobs but new entrants searching for work and not finding it. That increased the total number of unemployed by 275,000. Are more people desperate for jobs? Or are more of these people searching because they are confident that they will find jobs?
It is hard to believe that most workers today, especially those on the lower half of the income ladder, feel confident about the economy. Federal officials spew hostility and those at the top of the Executive branch often do not know what they are doing and gladly do bad things. Chaos and cruelty--these characterize presidential policies. Every day there is uncertainty for employers and employees from attacks on immigrants and other threats to the labor supply. Ever-changing tariff policies disrupt labor conditions and ultimately lift consumer prices. Tariffs mean higher prices for imports—that's the point--and most of the increase will be paid first by importers and then consumers--We the People. One estimate is that Trump's tariffs will cost the average household over $2000 a year. And, of course, the pain will be greater for low-income households.
Higher tariffs and hunting immigrants have done nothing to "bring back" manufacturing jobs. Their number has fallen by 37,000 over the last three months. And factory construction, which boomed under President Biden, is in decline. Meanwhile, job growth in the information sector was non-existent over the last three months, and, overall, tech companies cut 75,000 jobs from January through May. Is that AI devouring its creators?
Other bad news, unless you hate Federal employees and the work that they do: Federal jobs are down by 71,000 over the year. Also, thousands more are not at work anymore but are being paid "deferred resignations," and thus not yet counted as unemployed.
Another negative comes from the Establishment nonfarm job numbers that are based on employers' reports. The initial estimate for July was an increase of 73,000—not so hot. But employers are always tardy, so the reports for these numbers always trickle in over several months and that means several adjustments are made to the initial estimates for each month. This time there was a real shocker: the numbers for May and June were adjusted downward by a combined 258,000, meaning essentially no net gain.
Some commentators, including Mark Zandi at Moody's Analytics, think there's a recession brewing. There was little economic growth in the first quarter but good growth of 3% in the second quarter. The latter sounds like a plus to me, but high tariffs and a messed-up labor supply may sink the economy.
Meanwhile, back at the castle, Trump wants to ban bad news about jobs. He has made no effort to understand how the numbers work, nor did his sycophants try to get him to face reality. In the end it was, in effect, off with her head for the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Erika McEntarfer had nothing directly to do with the calculations, but this is the way things are done now by the royals over at the palace.
Frank Stricker is a writer and a board member of the National Jobs for All Network. He writes for Dollars and Sense and is the author of American Unemployment, Past, Present, and Future.
To comment on this article, visit NJFAN.org
| | | Officially unemployed: 7.2 MILLION (4.2%)
Hidden unemployment: 10.9 million
(Includes 4.7 million people working part-time
because they can't find a full-time job;
and 6.2 million people who want jobs,
but are not actively looking) Total: 18.1 MILLION (10.3% of the labor force)
There are 2.4 job-wanters for each available job!
For more information and analysis, visit: www.njfac.org
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics | | | Employment Statistics
Since its founding in 1994, the National Jobs for All Network (previously Coalition) has been "telling the whole story" about unemployment.*
Our founders recognized that the official unemployment rate reported monthly by the Labor Department leaves out more jobless and job short workers than it includes. To be counted as unemployed, one must work less than one hour a week in paid employment and be actively seeking employment. As the above figures show, more than half the unemployed or underemployed are left out of the official count. Consider the political consequences of this undercount—of a problem perceived by the public as less than half as widespread as it really is.
*See "Unemployment Statistics: Let's Tell the Whole Story" by NJFAC founders Helen Lachs Ginsburg, Bill Ayres, and June Zaccone, Employment Statistics: Let's Tell the Whole Story - NJFAC
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The National Jobs for All Network is dedicated to the proposition that meaningful employment is a precondition for a fulfilling life and that every person capable of working should have the right to a job. As part of our mission, the NJFAN promotes discussion, encourages networking, and disseminates information concerning the problem of unemployment, the struggle for workers' rights, and the goal of guaranteeing decent work for everyone who wants it.
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We are publishing this newsletter to provide a public forum where the multiple groups and countless individuals interested in promoting this goal can learn what others are doing to promote the jobs guarantee idea, build public support for it, and pursue legislative initiatives to implement it.
We invite our readers to: - Help us establish a Jobs for All Action clearinghouse by informing us of publications, actions, and events that promote a jobs guarantee and related economic justice goals to share the information with other readers
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Please send your updates and contact suggestions to njfan@njfac.org. Thanks so much in advance for your help in building this important social movement.
The views expressed in the articles published in the Jobs for All newsletter (including those authored by editors and writers of the newsletter and board members of the NJFAN) are not necessarily those of the NJFAN as an organization. We hope that the newsletter will become a forum of discussion and debate among jobs-for-all/full-employment/right-to-work/job-guarantee advocates. With that goal in mind, we plan to add a letter to the editor section to the newsletter and also encourage readers to email us to suggest articles they would like to contribute to the newsletter. We promise a quick response.
Newsletter Committee: Trudy Goldberg, Editor. Chuck Bell, Production Manager. Frank Stricker; Philip Harvey; Stephen Monroe Tomczak (Movement News); Logan Martinez; June Zaccone (Full Count and NJFAN website) and Noreen Connell.
National Jobs for All Network
P.O. Box 96
Lynbrook, NY 11563
203-856-3877
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Email: njfan@njfac.org
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