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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. What'd you do this weekend? Did you catch up on sleep, do the laundry, or other errands and chores? Did you manage to see friends and spend time with your family? With only two days off from work a week, it can be impossible to get everything done. More often than not, we have to abandon some plans and promises just to make the most urgent things fit.

Well, now imagine you had one extra day off per week. What else could you do? Would you feel more rested? Less resentful? Would you be able to work on a passion project or take the kids on a trip? The concept of a three-day weekend has been floating around the American business consciousness for some time, but has never really taken hold. People worried about lost wages, lost productivity, and fewer dollars in the economy overall.

Now at least there are some data to support that the opposite might be true. Did you hear about this? Iceland just released results of a four-year study of more than 2,500 employees in different fields, whose workweeks were reduced by one day, and found an increased sense of well-being among workers with no loss of productivity. In fact, in some places, workers were more productive after cutting back their hours. What would it take to try it here, and has the pandemic, and all that working from home nudged us further in one direction or another?

With me now to talk about this is a writer who has made a name for herself talking about work burnout, and has written explicitly recently about the idea of a four-day week. It's Anne Helen Petersen, culture writer and co-author of a forthcoming book called Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. Hi, Anne, welcome back to WNYC.

Anne Helen Petersen: Hi, I'm so glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start by stating the obvious, which is that not everyone works full-time, not everyone works five days a week, some people work part-time, or freelance, or work more than five days a week. Do you have a sense of how approximately how many Americans work the stereotypical 40 hour or five-day workweek?

Anne Helen Petersen: I think it's really, really hard to gauge because there's a lot of people who are wage workers, who do clock in and clock out, but then might also be working second jobs or be working side hustles that are more difficult to quantify. People who are salaried who maybe extensively work a 40 hour week, anyone who worked from home during the pandemic, will tell you that they worked far more than 40 hours a week. There's also just a lot of slippage these days in terms of when work is expected to be completed and after-hours times.

I think that any data that the Department of Labor services has, it's still not necessarily a great accounting for how much work we're doing. Then also just thinking about if we say I work 40 hours a week, how much of those 40 hours are you actually working, and how much especially for people who do knowledge work or work on computers, how much are you just fiddling around on your computer and how much are you actually working?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You wrote that there's nothing natural about the length of our workweek. It has been and should continue to be malleable to the needs and health of workers, which is to say to the needs and health of society at large. That's a quote from you. Maybe people who haven't thought about this might like to hear you talk a little bit of the origin of the weekend as we know it.

Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. This is the work of labor advocates over the course of the 19th century, the mid 20th century. There was this push with the expansion of electricity to really expand their workday to anytime that people could be in factories, could have illumination that would allow them to do work. Over the course of the 1800s and 1900s, various guilds and labor organizations really pushed back against that to form what we now know as the five-day workweek. Another significant moment in that was Henry Ford allowing all of his workers a five-day workweek, which was the seismic shift that also opened it up to lots of other different types of workers.

The point is too, even before that, before electricity, lots of work was seasonal. There was different types of jobs that you just couldn't do for different seasons because it demanded that you'd be outside or that you have longer hours of illumination. Work has expanded and contracted and the great promise of automation that we are going through right now, computers can do so much more work for us is that we should be able to work less, not we should be working the same as we ever have before.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can get in on this. How would your life be different if you could take an extra day off a week, even if you work more hours per day for the four days to make it possible? As you hear, our guest, Anne Helen Peterson is also talking about just working fewer hours. 646-435-7280. What would you be able to get done in three days off that is impossible in two?

We also want to hear from bosses, from managers. Could you make a four-day week work in your office or business? What would the challenges be and what worries you about the concept if you are worried listening to this? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 from any of those perspectives or others, as we continue with Anne Helen Petersen, culture writer and co-author of the forthcoming book Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer. This new study comes out of Iceland. How did this experiment come to be, and what did it really reveal?

Anne Helen Petersen: This Iceland experiment is really, really interesting because the other experiments that have happened over the course of the last 5, 10 years have really been limited to just individual corporations. The fact that they're performed at individual corporations, allows other corporations to be like, "Well, that worked for them, but it would never work for us."

The difference with what happened with Iceland is they looked at similar countries, other Nordic countries that have similar safety nets, similar ideas about parental leave, all these different things, but saw that, in Iceland, people were working much longer hours, and were much more miserable at work, just looking at General survey questions about fatigue and feeling like they have time for friends or family, that sort of thing.

They thought, "If we have the same productivity level, the same GDP, why are our people working so much more? What if we tried encouraging them through a reduced workweek to do better work, more concentrated work when they're at work, and then create more space for leisure and time for rest in the rest of their week?" They started small with the Mayor's office like other federal agencies.

The first organization that they partnered with was actually a group that works with their form of foster care and Child Protective Services because those professions as in the United States, are professions with incredibly high rates of burnout and stress. They wanted to figure out how can we decrease some of that burnout and stress by actually decreasing the number of hours these people work? It slowly expanded over the course of the next few years, and also importantly, expanded to people, not just doing office work, but also people doing construction, people doing maintenance, people working front desk.

Each organization within the study had to really figure out, "How are we going to make this work for us?" because it really is different profession by profession, job by job, office by office, how you can reduce hours, but still have the same levels of service. The results, they're very clear. Productivity is up, happiness is up, absenteeism is down. Basically, people are better workers when they are working less, but the services, the quality of service, remains the same.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from, I think, somebody who's doing this. Cindy in Williamsburg, you're on WNYC. Hi, Cindy.

Cindy: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to call in. I'm one of the co-owners of Beacon's Closet, which is a buy-sell-trade business that's been in Brooklyn and in Manhattan for about 24 years. We've implemented the four-day workweek for about 23 years. A full-time week at our store is between 32 and 36 hours. It's a high-volume retail. People get really burned out dealing with the public. When you're stressed out, you're not nice to people. For us, it just always works. We've been able to pay a living wage, we provide health insurance for our employees 100% paid. It's worked for us and it's a kinder way to run a business. It's more human, and I just wanted to say that it works.

Brian Lehrer: That's really great. What trade-offs did you make in order to enable this? In other words, did you hire more people because they were each working fewer hours than at other stores, but you weren't able to pay each one as much as if they were working 40-hour weeks or any other trade-offs.

Cindy: I think what we did is we have a large staff and we do have a young staff. There's a lot of part-time people, but our management tends to stay with us from anywhere from four to 10 years. I don't know that there is really a trade off. I think that we do have a large part-time staff, but the people that work full-time, like I said, work usually around 36 hours. The thing is too, it's a retail day, so we're open like 11:00 to 8:00. Your four days might be longer hours than the standard 9:00 to 5:00 job, but you still get that day off. I just think it makes people happier.

Brian Lehrer: Cindy, thank you very much. Let's take another caller. Susan in Long Beach, you're on WNYC. Hi, Susan.

Susan: Hi. So nice to talk to you. Yes, my father had a factory in the '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. They made custom-made upholstery, draperies. Everyone was working in a factory, a lot of seamstresses, and the women approached my dad at one point and said, "Would you be willing to do a four-day week? We can't get all our chores done, our errands." Back in those days, in the '60s and '70s, stores weren't necessarily opened on Sundays. He thought about it and he said, "Sure. Let's try it." It became the standard for his business. Everybody was happier. They got into a groove of work, so instead of leaving the factory at 4:00, they were still humming along till 6:00. Then they had a three-day weekend and they'd get a lot done and everybody was happy.

Brian Lehrer: In that model, it is roughly the 40-hour week. It's just four longer days rather than five shorter ones, correct?

Susan: Yes. I think three days off really gave these people a sense of, "When I'm at home, I'm really at home. I'm really taking care of business at home. I'm spending time with my family and I'm getting everything done." Anyone that runs a home knows you can't get it all done on a Saturday or a Sunday. The stores are packed. You have to go to the bank, the supermarket, the post office, all of these things. You have to do the laundry, clean the house, make all the food. It's just not possible. It's not possible.

Brian Lehrer: That was back when we actually made furniture in the United States. Now they make it all in Indonesia or somewhere.

Susan: In Queens, New York.

Brian Lehrer: Queens, New York. I've heard of it. Susan, thank you very much. Anne Helen Petersen, I think we heard two different models from those two callers and I'm not sure if what you write includes the one we just heard from Susan whose father ran a furniture factory in Queens. It's still a 40-hour week. It's not working less, it's just working longer four days.

Anne Helen Peterson: Yes. The four-tens, that's what it's sometimes called as you work four days for 10 hours, is a different model in so much as, I think, a lot of places, that hasn't been a difficult argument to make. Lots of different government offices has done this in part, because if you close down the office and you don't have to pay for air conditioning on Friday, then it's actually cheaper in the long run in a lot of ways. I do think if you talk to people who work those four-tens, it's really exhausting. A 10-hour workday, especially doing anything that requires interacting with the public or a really attentive work, you're wiped after that day. I think some companies might have to try that model to get to a different model, but I think you don't see as much rejuvenation as you do with the actual reduced 32-hour model.

Brian Lehrer: I thought it was really interesting too that the caller Susan said it was the women at the factory who pushed for the four-day week. She didn't mention childcare explicitly or any family responsibilities, but we know how this tends to fall in the division of labor. I'm curious if you had any reaction or had put that in cultural context at all hearing that anecdote.

Anne Helen Peterson: Oh yes. There are two arguments that you can make about the four-day week. One really is directed at people who are concerned about profits. That's where you make all of these arguments about productivity and attrition and you'll have less turnover, et cetera. Then you make the argument to the worker and you say, as this previous caller was saying, right now for a lot of people, half of their weekend is just totally filled up with trying to manage everything from the week that got pushed to the weekend. Then maybe they have a slight moment of relaxation, depending on their lives on Sunday.

The three-day week allows you to have more time to attend to the errands of life, but it also gives you a chance-- This is what they've actually seen in companies that have tried these pilot programs. It gives people a chance to make the commitments that they would otherwise not be able to make in terms of volunteering, being at their kids' schools. People who are grandparents, they can very easily be like, "I will take the afternoon on Friday to take care of the kids," or "I will always do pick-up on Friday from school." It gives those childcare opportunities that aren't always possible. It doesn't have to be Friday or it doesn't have to be Monday. Some companies make it so that in order to make this work, people take the day throughout the week. Let's say you have a family and both parents work for companies that have this four-day week. One of the parents takes the day on Tuesday, the other day takes it on Thursday or the other parent takes it on Thursday. There were two days of childcare that are covered.

Brian Lehrer: The success of the trial, this experiment in Iceland, from what I've read, has led to widespread adoption of a four-day week across that country. When the study was published earlier this month, 86% of Iceland's working population either had a reduced workweek or the right to one. A study comes out in this country and they talk about it in the media for a couple of days, but it doesn't change the power structure. Did this actually happen that way?

Anne Helen Peterson: Well, it happened through the power of unions. I think that's a really important thing to underline is that unions and other advocates, but primarily unions and guilds in Iceland were the ones who started pushing for the pilot programs. Once the data was there, they said, "Okay. This is something that we want to advocate for moving forward." I think you could see various unions start to push for this in the United States as well and industries that aren't unionized, that's where you're going to see it I think a little bit more coming from CEOs and from employees. There are companies that are really eager to do this.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You write that you were struck by the word that the authors of the report from Iceland used to describe participants shift in work-life balance. They felt they were achieving something close to harmony, but already in Iceland and in Scandinavia, these international surveys of happiness always tend to come out a lot higher in places like that than in this country. I'm just curious what struck you about the word harmony in this context.

Anne Helen Peterson: I think harmony is just a much better word than work-life balance because I think now that phrase has really been hollowed out. When a company starts talking about the importance of work-life balance, it's usually because they're inviting you to have none of it in order to distinguish yourself. I think something like harmony tries to get at this idea that you are a better person at work and that makes you a better person in your non-work life and vice versa. They have a really good symbiotic effect on one another. I think right now, we do have a symbiotic effect, but it's an unharmonic, dissonant effect in that the amount that we work makes us worse people in our non-work lives.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Gayle in Central Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gayle.

Gayle: Hi. I come from the point of view of healthcare. Healthcare in New Jersey covers a third of our working population, but healthcare in many cases are 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We spend years without realizing what a weekend is, because our weekends are sometimes during the middle of the week. Plus, what do you do when the workload doesn't go down and someone has to be physically present to do it if you can't do it?

Brian Lehrer: Gayle, thank you so much. Briefly, Anne, because we're going to run out of time shortly. Does this apply beyond what you called, at the beginning, knowledge workers?

Anne Helen Peterson: Yes, for sure. In Iceland and in other countries that make this work, they have people working those shifts. It's not about not having people work 9:00 to 5:00. It's about staggering those shifts, but then people still have a less than 40-hour work week and they are more attentive medical professionals because of it.

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, does the pandemic affect the conversation in this country on this already? Does it actually affect it, or is it just media chatter?

Anne Helen Peterson: Well, I do think that people are reconsidering the placement of work in their lives and also priorities in their lives. The other thing is that I think that it's an employee market right now when it comes to hiring. Employees have some power both in retail jobs and also in knowledge jobs that they have not had before. This is one way to make yourself an attractive employer.

Brian Lehrer: They have more power, why? We just had like 20% unemployment in this country a year ago because of the pandemic. How did the employees, and we just really literally have 15 seconds for this answer, but how did employees wind up with more power?

Anne Helen Peterson: Well, they had the ability to say no. Part of that was unemployment insurance, and part of that is people who were knowledge workers and had accumulated some form of savings can now say, "I want to work for a different sort of company. I want to have a different approach to work."

Brian Lehrer: Helen Peterson, her forthcoming book, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. Thank you so much.

Anne Helen Peterson: Thank you.

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