Work Less

Description

You can’t have a healthy economy with an unhealthy work force. Work Less proposes ways to reduce work hours and keep workers happier, healthier, and more productive.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed just how stressed out many workers are. While the trend to longer hours has been developing for several decades, the trend’s effects have been aggravated during the pandemic by the growing use of Zoom and other new technologies instead of face-to-face meetings with clients, customers, and co-workers.

Exhausted and fed up, today’s workers are starting to insist on shorter hours and greater flexibility as to where they do their work. There’s growing consensus that the forty-hour week, the norm since the 1940s, has outlived its usefulness. There’s an urgent need for new work schedules that adequately reflect the far greater intensity of work today, as well as the greater non-work demands on a work force that’s nearly half female.

Work Less offers practical scheduling suggestions to employers and workers and numerous policy options for government policy-makers to improve working conditions.