A majority of Americans support the four-day workweek, according to a Newsweek poll. But experts doubt that the system will ever become the norm in the country.
: some 49 percent of respondents to the poll believe that a shorter workweek would make workers more productive, while 83 percent think they could complete their weekly workload in just four days.
Matthew Bidwell, a professor in Wharton's Management Department who studies career patterns and staffing in the new economy, agreed with Cameron—and said that the importance work has in many people's lives is something that should be considered in conversations about the shorter workweek. One way to reconcile the idea of a shorter workweek with the culture of valuing long hours, said Soomro, would be to shift the focus from the number of hours worked to the quality and productivity of work.
Bidwell said he's skeptical that in the long run the shorter workweek could be financially sustainable. While he believes that there are efficiency gains in moving to a four-day workweek, he doesn't think they would be enough to compensate for the productivity that he's sure would be lost by working fewer hours. The only way it would work, he thinks, is if people think having more free time is worth being paid less.
"It couldn't be the norm, there's too much going on in the U.S.," she said."I do think there are pockets of companies for which this will work really well—small to midsize companies that rely on knowledge workers who are actually able to benefit from taking away meetings, or compressing their time. But I also think that a big chunk of the U.S. economy does a different type of work, and they cannot use the four-day work week at all.
"For some jobs that are not knowledge-intensive, that rely on somebody being there, which is basically any sort of lower paid work—that we commonly call 'lower skilled' in America even though it's not lower skilled—they're just not going to be able to do this," she said."I think there are some hospitals in the U.K.
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