Sam Podnar

May 16, 2023

There is a natural tendency to think of government as an entity that structures physical space—setting zoning laws, establishing social services like police fire departments, and building public amenities like parks, roads, and public transportation. Typically, infrastructural complaints focus on unfilled potholes, unkempt train stations, and crumbling public schools. President Biden spent months pushing the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act through Congress to its passage in late 2021, securing $1 trillion (an investment of over $3,000 per person in the U.S.) of federal money for updating public works projects, broadband access, and climate resilience; the massive effort is a response to widespread frustration with government neglect of public amenities.[i]

However, infrastructural policy also stretches into another dimension: time. Governing each day and determining the rhythms of our lives, from the minutiae to the big picture, is a sort of “temporal infrastructure.” This is made up of layers of laws and norms that scaffold our time, affecting our habits, social lives, and physical and mental health. This aspect of policymaking is not afforded the same sort of upkeep as physical infrastructure, but it is an area where attention and innovation are needed the most.

Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) recently reintroduced the “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act” to the House, a proposed amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act to shorten the standard workweek from 40 to 32 hours for non-exempt employees, or those entitled to overtime when they work more than 40 hours in a week.[ii]

The legislation comes on the heels of a study in the United Kingdom offering robust proof of the superiority of a shortened workweek. 61 companies experimented with different methods to shorten their employees’ time at work to a yearly average of 32 hours per week, while maintaining the same 40-hour workweek pay. Employees saw benefits in their sleep, stress levels, mental health, and personal lives, reporting that they had more time to spend with their loved ones and felt less burnt out. While business revenue stayed at parity—and was even an average of 35 percent higher when compared with a similar period from previous years—resignations and sick days decreased. 18 of the 61 participating companies said they would stick to the shift permanently, and an overwhelming 56 said they would continue a shortened workweek in some form after the pilot.[iii]

While a 40-hour workweek may feel reasonable because it is so ingrained in our lives, it is far from the norm across human history. It is certainly a luxury compared to the brutal standards during and immediately following the Industrial Revolution, during which a 70-hour workweek was common for Americans,[iv] but humans before the industrial period enjoyed a considerably more leisurely pace of work and life. Some scholars have estimated the workweek of hunter-gatherers to total only 15 to 20 hours, and in the medieval period, as much as a third of the year was taken off for holidays.[v]

As production ramped up with the advent of capitalism, incomes rose, but the free time of the proletariat shrank. While the modern economy’s emphasis on growth and productivity has raised the standard of living for the human population over the last 200 years, with child mortality rates decreasing and life expectancy rising, the long working hours have taken their own toll on human health. The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization estimate that working 55 or more hours per week led to 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in 2016, a 29 percent increase since 2000.[vi]

The proposal to implement a standard 32-hour workweek is by no means a silver bullet; at present, the transition is unrealistic for certain industries that already face mass staff shortages. Additionally, it is difficult to imagine how widespread the shift would be, considering how deeply the 40-hour workweek is ingrained in the operations of modern life.[vii] However, the change could very well have expansive positive ripple effects that include lowering healthcare costs, reducing emissions from commuting, and promoting social cohesion.[viii]

The reshaping of working hours has happened before through action both by everyday people organizing for better treatment and by policymakers pursuing innovative legislation. Child labor went relatively unregulated in Britain until the Factory Acts were passed in the early 19th century to cap the workday for children at 12 hours.[ix] Today, the 40-hour workweek is treated as a law of nature—but so was the intensive grind of the industrial period, until workers successfully rallied for the 10-hour day.[x] During the Great Depression, the government saw a shorter workweek as a tool to fight unemployment by spreading working hours over a greater number of people.[xi] Senator Hugo Black proposed a 30-hour workweek in 1932, but it took six more years until The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) established overtime pay for those working more than 40 hours per week.[xii] Though major pieces of legislation surrounding minimum wage, equal pay, and overtime compensation have been passed in the decades since, the trend of decreasing the length of the workweek stopped over 80 years ago with FLSA.

The temporal infrastructure surrounding work is dramatically shaped by the economy, but public policy also plays a substantial role. Upper bounds on working hours have been implemented before; it is not unreasonable to argue that government should ensure that our temporal infrastructure promotes health, safety, and well-being. Live-to-work culture makes us lose sight of the fact that, while we can and should most certainly find meaning through our jobs, an equivalent and even greater amount of meaning can be found in the hours of the day spent not working, especially through the time necessary to support healthy families and foster close-knit communities.

The enshrining of healthy boundaries around time has an exemplar in America’s past. Colonial America saw the widespread adoption of blue laws, or regulations that forbid most labor on Sundays to preserve the Christian Sabbath.[xiii] In a 1961 Supreme Court case upholding the constitutionality of Sunday closing laws, Chief Justice Warren argued that while the Sabbath may have started as a religious institution, it became a vital civic institution—that over time, Sunday “had a character of its own which became, in itself, a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.”[xiv]

In a conversation with journalist Ezra Klein, Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, argues that the Sabbath now feels radical and countercultural, as the practice of taking a day off to rest—and treating that rest as something full in itself, rather than as a lack of productivity—has been eschewed by a society obsessed with work. But taking a day off enables us to partake in a sort of bounding and framing of our time, imbuing it with meaning by filling it with community and joy.[xv]

Most importantly, temporal infrastructure is a social institution rather than an individual practice. For a person to comfortably move at a slower pace, they must be surrounded by others doing the same so that they are not moving against the social rhythm of the week; the true benefits emerge when the practice is expanded to entire communities. Shulevitz describes it as “collective non-work” and a “socially reinforced temporal structure,” and she outlines a program for creating community in this way, the first step of which is to enact laws limiting work time.[xvi]

The burden of maintaining a healthy work-life balance seems to fall exclusively on the shoulders of us as individuals. We are told to get in a quick workout in between the daily commute home and grocery shopping, spend less time on our phones, and multi-task to eke out every ounce of productivity from spare bits of time—and as a result, our free time never really belongs to us. Ever-present is the pressure to do something ostensibly useful encroaching on hours that should be restful. This is especially true as the shift to more online and hybrid work enables work to pervade areas from which it was previously barred. But this framing of the problem as an individual burden ignores its social and political dimensions. Our temporal infrastructure, especially surrounding work, is weak—perhaps purposefully so—and the result is worse outcomes in health, enjoyment, and community.

Public policy can be a tool for building community and promoting better mental and physical health. For instance, sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third places,” which refers to places people go outside of home and work to interact with others and build community; in light of a recent study finding the outsized impact of cross-class friendships in boosting social mobility, the construction of such physical infrastructure seems even more vital.[xvii]

Following this logic, could we also utilize public policy to build temporal infrastructure that prioritizes quality of life metrics over productivity, nourishing the cultivation of health, community, and joy?

For example, the peak hours during the week for children to both commit crimes and become victims of violence are those immediately after school. The implementation of after school programs has been seen to reduce juvenile arrest rates by a dramatic amount and has even bolstered academic performance and attendance.[xviii] What about how late public amenities are open and how easy and acceptable it is to access them at certain times? The government routinely punishes people for being in public spaces, like parks or streets, at night; this criminalization of inherently innocuous activities most directly impacts those suffering from homelessness, but it also sends the message that safety and accessibility are not features of a community that exist around the clock. The structure of time, guided by government, changes the options and incentives available to the public at any given moment, directly influencing individual decision-making and ultimately driving society-wide outcomes.

Just as the shift must be communal, the benefits also have the potential to be communal and cumulative. A 22-year-old entering the workforce would gain nearly two years of their life back over the course of their career with a workweek shortened by eight hours, but a community would gain back decades.[xix] What valuable projects could be cultivated if enough time was set aside for them? What other institutions could be built, what injustices corrected, if there was simply more time available?

Ultimately, the answer to this question comes not in the design of individual habits but in policy that intentionally shapes the rhythms of society to promote health and harmony. The idea of leveraging policymaking to build temporal infrastructure may sound radical for the same reason Shulevitz says the Sabbath feels radical: our time has not truly belonged to us at any point in recent history, and our government has been ineffective in safeguarding it from the demands of modern capitalism. Feeling entitled to the healthy use and structure of our time should not be seen as countercultural, but instead be a priority for lawmakers to address, with the aim of creating norms that truly work for everyone.

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[i] Cochrane, Emily. “Senate Passes $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill, Handing Biden a Bipartisan Win.” The New York Times, 10 Aug. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/infrastructure-bill-passes.html.

[ii] Martichoux, Alix. “32-hour workweek bill reintroduced in Congress: Will it pass?” The Hill, 17 March 2023, https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/3903040-32-hour-workweek-bill-reintroduced-in-congress-will-it-pass/.

[iii] Timsit, Annabelle. “A four-day workweek pilot was so successful most firms say they won’t go back.” The Washington Post, 21 Feb. 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/21/four-day-work-week-results-uk/.

[iv] Horowitz-Ghazi, Alexi. “How the 40-hour work week became the norm.” NPR, 5 Nov. 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-work-week-became-the-norm.

[v] Sahlins, Marshall. Stone-Age Economics.

Schor, Juliet. The Overworked America: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. MIT CSAIL, 1993, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html.

[vi] “Long working hours increasing deaths from heart disease and stroke: WHO, ILO.” WHO, 17 May 2021, https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2021-long-working-hours-increasing-deaths-from-heart-disease-and-stroke-who-ilo.

[vii] Timsit, Annabelle. “A four-day workweek pilot was so successful most firms say they won’t go back.” The Washington Post, 21 Feb. 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/21/four-day-work-week-results-uk/.

[viii] Chung, Heejung. “A Social Policy Case for a Four-Day Week.” Cambridge University Press, 28 March 2022, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-social-policy/article/social-policy-case-for-a-fourday-week/0621494A8D4DA2D1A753BEE8E2BBA490.

[ix] Beck, Elias. “Factory Acts in the Industrial Revolution.” History Crunch, 3 Oct. 2016, https://www.historycrunch.com/factory-acts-in-the-industrial-revolution.html#/.

[x] Horowitz-Ghazi, Alexi. “How the 40-hour work week became the norm.” NPR, 5 Nov. 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-work-week-became-the-norm.

[xi] Horowitz-Ghazi, Alexi. “How the 40-hour work week became the norm.” NPR, 5 Nov. 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-work-week-became-the-norm.

[xii] Suitts, Steve. “Hugo L. Black.” Encyclopedia of Alabama, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1848.

Ortiz, Erik. “Where Did the 40-Hour Workweek Come From?” NBC, 1 Sept. 2014, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/where-did-40-hour-workweek-come-n192276.

[xiii] Zeigler, Sara. “Sunday Blue Laws.” The First Amendment Encyclopedia, 2009, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1243/sunday-blue-laws.

[xiv] “McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961).” Justia, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/366/420/.

[xv] Klein, Ezra, narrator. “Sabbath and the Art of Rest.” The Ezra Klein Show, 3 Jan. 2023, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UcvTnLzxlcYdiSqYKbK24?si=Xw9xlW5JQNq3fQEg3t7vhw.

[xvi] Klein, Ezra, narrator. “Sabbath and the Art of Rest.” The Ezra Klein Show, 3 Jan. 2023, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UcvTnLzxlcYdiSqYKbK24?si=Xw9xlW5JQNq3fQEg3t7vhw.

[xvii] Diaz, Carmen and Stuart Butler. “‘Third places’ as community builders.” Brookings, 14 Sept. 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/09/14/third-places-as-community-builders/.

Fall, Coura and Richard Reeves. “Seven key takeaways from Chetty’s new research on friendship and economic mobility.” Brookings, 2 Aug. 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2022/08/02/7-key-takeaways-from-chettys-new-research-on-friendship-and-economic-mobility/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.

[xviii] “After-School Programs Can Prevent Crime.” Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, https://sedn.senate.ca.gov/sites/sedn.senate.ca.gov/files/2pgr_-_as_2015.pdf.
“Evaluations Backgrounder: A Summary of Formal Evaluations of the Academic Impact of Afterschool Programs.” Afterschool Alliance, July 2008, http://www.afterschoolalliance.org/Evaluations%20Backgrounder%20Academic_08_FINAL.pdf.

[xix] “What would your four-day workweek look like?” The Washington Post, 17 March 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/four-day-work-week/.