Punching In: Senators Weigh Whether AI Can Shorten the Workweek

Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.

Senate Considers 32-Hour Workweek|Wage and Hour Staffing Update

Diego Areas Munhoz: Artificial intelligence isn’t all doom and gloom—it can help us work less, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Sanders, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, introduced legislation last week that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to reduce the workweek to 32 hours over four years without loss of pay. Workers would be eligible for overtime for shifts longer than eight hours and for workweeks that go beyond 32 hours.

The idea isn’t exactly new; Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) has been pushing similar legislation since 2021. But it is popular with labor unions—the AFL-CIO, United Auto Workers, and Service Employees International Union have all endorsed Sanders’ bill.

But it’s chances of becoming a reality still have several roadblocks in Congress ahead.

“My legislation probably will not be passing tomorrow,” Sanders said during a hearing March 14. “But the point of this hearing is to try to raise at the congressional level something that hasn’t been discussed in decades after decades.”

Sanders noted that there is some precedent for Congress’ involvement in designing the US workweek. In the early 1930s, the Senate passed a bill to establish a 30-hour workweek, but the bill didn’t pass the House and years later, in 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the FLSA, which cemented the 40-hour standard.

Sanders said productivity has risen over these past 80 years, yet Americans are working more and more and not taking advantage of technological advancements like AI. In Sanders’ corner was UAW President Shawn Fain, who pushed for a 32-hour workweek in negotiations between the union and Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year.

“I know that when my members look back at their lives, they never say ‘I wish I worked more,’” Fain said in his remarks at the hearing. “What they wish for is they wish they had more time.”

Juliet Schor, who led a global study on the four-day workweek with over 200 companies, said her research shows the reduction in time worked has boosted productivity while bringing down anxiety and fatigue.

“Participants tell us that the new schedule is ‘life changing,’” Schor said.

Republicans and their chosen witnesses for the panel praised companies that can adapt to a 32-hour workweek, but said what works for some may not work well for others.

Data from these four-day workweek studies is misleading, said Liberty Vittert, a data science professor at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. The companies who sign up for these experiments have business models that are more easily adaptable to a shorter week because they are mostly in white-collar industries, she said.

“Given the types of companies that are potentially capable of cutting their workweek, we could see a divide of the rich getting richer, having more time, and the poor needing to take on three part-time jobs in order to pay the bills,” Vittert told lawmakers.

Moreover, a government mandate would make workforce shortages worse and increase labor costs for small businesses, which would be passed on to consumers, said Roger King, senior labor and employment counsel at the HR Policy Association.

“Let the market decide,” he said.

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions ranking member Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during a March 2023 hearing.

Al Drago/Bloomberg

Rebecca Rainey: Spending caps enacted by Congress last summer will likely kneecap the US Labor Department’s efforts to reverse attrition among investigators at its Wage and Hour Division, the federal agency tasked with enforcing minimum wage, overtime, and child labor laws.

The White House budget blueprint released last week—which is typically a wishlist that never resembles the agency’s final appropriation—requested 187 new full time staff at the wage division for FY 2025, less than half of the enforcement staff sought in the agency’s budget request for FY 2024.

The request noted that “over the last decade, WHD enforcement capacity has decreased from more than 1,000 on-board investigators to just over 720 investigators—one of the lowest levels in fifty years.”

In the proposed budget for fiscal 2024, the DOL requested 389 new full-time employees for enforcement purposes at the wage division. The agency had roughly 810 investigative staff on board before it made that request last March.

Current and former wage division staff have blamed the decline in agency enforcement personnel on overwhelming case loads and poor pay compared to other federal agencies.

The reduced request for FY 2025 comes as DOL officials are pleading with Congress for more resources at the wage division to help reverse a staggering trend of child labor violations in the US workforce. In fiscal 2023, the agency uncovered nearly 6,000 minors working in illegal conditions, a nearly 50% increase from FY 2022.

But despite the growing child labor issue, caps enacted under the debt ceiling bill mean the White House has no choice but to ask for less. As part of the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling signed into law in June 2023, Biden and lawmakers agreed to impose budgetary caps on federal spending in fiscal years 2024 and 2025, maxing out nondefense spending at $710.7 billion for FY 2025. By comparison, the enacted non-defense spending level for the federal government in FY 2023 was $767.2 billion.

The DOL didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on its budget.

Even with the pared-back request, the wage division would still be on track to double their investigative staff by FY 2030, said Reid Maki, coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition, which advocates for policies to protect children from labor exploitation.

“The Child Labor Coalition and the Campaign to End US Child Labor have each called for a doubling of the inspectorate over the next five years; adding 187 a year for five years would get the agency inspectorate past 1,600 and achieve the goal,” he said in a statement.

However, Maki said that “front-loading” the division’s requests for staffing “makes sense,” because of the numerous reports of minors working in dangerous and illegal conditions in 2023.

“Under the current staffing levels, on average, each DOL labor inspector is trying to safeguard over 200,000 of America’s workers who toil in 11 million workplaces,” Maki said. “Clearly, we need more inspectors.”

We’re punching out. Daily Labor Report subscribers, please check in for updates during the week, and feel free to reach out to us.