Bernie Sanders Calls For 4-Day Workweek As Autoworkers Threaten To Strike

Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator and Chairman of the Well being Training Labor and Pensions Committee, referred to as as soon as once more for a transfer to a four-day work week following one of many nation’s largest sectors of staff threatening to strike over poor wages and dealing hours.

That comes as 150,000 members of the United Auto Staff (UAW), one of many largest unions within the nation, have threatened to strike on September 14 if the Large 3 U.S. automakers — Normal Motors, Ford, and Stellantis — fail to succeed in an settlement on a four-day workweek at full-time pay and a 46% wage improve, amongst different calls for.

Thus far, the corporate’s counteroffers to the union protect the five-day workweek with out some other profit will increase, akin to paid trip and household days, which have been final up to date in 2019, and held that staff could be “well-compensated below its provide of a 9% wage improve over the time period of the contract,” ABC News reports.

Sanders has lengthy been a vocal advocate for American staff, whom he says are 480% extra productive than they have been within the Nineteen Forties, when many of the legal guidelines concerning working hours have been established, below the Honest Labor Requirements Act.

“It’s time that working households have been in a position to make the most of the elevated productiveness that new applied sciences present in order that they’ll get pleasure from extra leisure time, household time, academic and cultural alternatives — and fewer stress,” Sanders writes in an op-ed on The Guardian.

Current analysis on the four-day workweek has proven benefits for workers and employers alike, with fewer sick days and better ranges of retainment, with three-quarters of staff in a serious U.Ok. trial run reporting decreased emotions of burnout — all of which, the argument goes, results in elevated productiveness.

“Shifting to a 32-hour work week with no lack of pay isn’t a radical thought. In actual fact, motion in that path is already going down in different developed nations,” Sanders writes. “France, the seventh-largest financial system on this planet, has a 35-hour work week and is contemplating lowering it to 32 hours. The work week in Norway and Denmark is about 37 hours every week.”

Sanders additionally factors to different pilot applications that persistently present advantages for staff and firms when adopting a shorter workweek, together with the big research from the U.Ok., with greater than 60 corporations taking part.

“Not surprisingly, it confirmed that completely happy staff have been extra productive,” Sanders notes. “The pilot was so profitable that 92% of the businesses that participated determined to keep up a four-day work week due to the advantages to each employers and staff.”

He continues: “Evidently, modifications that profit the working class of our nation will not be going to be simply handed over by the company elite.”

And Sanders strongly believes that the battle for a four-day workweek is important. “It isn’t utopian pondering to think about that, for the primary time in world historical past, we may enter a time by which each man, girl, and baby has a good lifestyle and improved high quality of life.”