Inc. Magazine
AI might not just replace jobs but also redefine how we work. Economist Juliet Schor highlights how rising AI-driven productivity could fuel a shift to a four-day workweek using the 100-80-100 model. This change could reduce stress, improve well-being, preserve employment and finally turn technology into more leisure for workers.
Author: Jessica Stillman
There’s been plenty written about how artificial intelligence will soon be coming for a whole lot of jobs. People are already being laid off because AI has taken over their responsibilities. What’s more, in a recent New York Times piece, LinkedIn exec Aneesh Raman warned that AI technology is currently reducing the number of entry-level jobs available.
All of which has caused understandable concern among workers and job market experts. But does the AI story have to be one of loss and painful adjustment?
Not necessarily, according to Boston College economist Juliet Schor. Her research points to a more cheerful possible scenario for our near-term AI future. Instead of precarity and unemployment, we all get four-day workweeks and enjoy long weekends forever.
The 100-80-100 model is a proven success
The push for the four-day workweek started well before OpenAI released ChatGPT and rang the starting bell on the current AI race. Entrepreneurs have experimented with it as a way to boost efficiency and morale. Senator Bernie Sanders advocated the idea as a fairer way to distribute the fruits of our collective labors. And multiple countries, companies, and academic teams have run real-world trials of shortened workweeks.
Among the largest was a group of researchers led by Schor, who writes about their findings in her new book, Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter (Harper Business). The team’s three-year trial involved 400 companies around the world testing something called the 100-80-100 model: Employees get 100 percent of their previous pay for 80 percent of their previous hours but 100 percent of their previous productivity.
Like previous trials, it showed the four-day workweek is generally a resounding success by just about any metric. Around 90 percent of companies elected to keep the schedule after the trial ended, indicating management was happy with the innovation. Employees predictably loved it.
“We have 20 well-being metrics, and they all show improvement,” Schor reported in a recent interview with the MIT Sloan Management Review. Workers didn’t feel more frantic or less connected to each other, and barely anyone took a second job in their newly available free time. Staff turnover went way down.
AI supercharges the case for the four-day workweek
All of which sounds like the typical cheerleading you hear from four-day workweek advocates. What does it have to do with AI?
While the data-backed case for the four-day workweek was always strong, Schor claims that actually implementing the policy has taken on new urgency because of the expected productivity gains from AI.
As workplace experts from psychologist Adam Grant to computer scientist Cal Newport have documented, people have always wasted a ton of time at work. The four-day workweek was intended as a way to squeeze out that wasted time, making employees more productive and rewarding them for their efforts with more leisure.
But that’s not how things traditionally have gone, Schor pointed out in Project Syndicate. “We’ve been stuck at a five-day week, and the gains from productivity improvements have either been lost to Parkinson’s Law [‘work expands to fill the available time’] or funneled into the pockets of owners.”
“The four-day week is about ensuring that workers are reaping significant rewards from improvements in hourly productivity,” she adds.
With AI supercharging the process of making work more efficient, there should be more productivity gains than ever to share. That makes the question of how to distribute those spoils more pressing than ever.
Reasons for skepticism
Schor warns that, “the job-destroying potential of AI should lead everyone—from employers to unions to government officials—to think seriously about the four-day week as an employment-preserving response. Everyone recognizes AI’s potential to create a large and growing pool of unemployed and underemployed workers. That outcome would pour more gasoline on an already raging fire of social instability, discontent, and violence.”
The sensible and socially responsible response to AI productivity gains, then, is to pass some of them along to workers in the form of reduced working hours. That will make for a more stable (and humane) country and economy in the long run.
Which is a nice vision. Though there are reasons to be doubtful if it will come to pass. At least since the famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that his grandkids would one day work 15 hours a week, experts have been arguing that the benefits of tech progress should be passed along to workers in the form of greater leisure.
At least since then, workers and companies have instead opted to keep working long hours in order to earn more and consume more. For decades, when presented with a choice between having Fridays off or owning more stuff, we have collectively gone with more stuff.
Maybe not consciously. Maybe because we fear if we don’t work ourselves ragged someone else will eat our lunch. But make that choice we have.
The fate of the four-day workweek depends on business leaders
Maybe, thanks to the sheer scale of the disruption AI promises, this time could be different. Schor is fighting for that outcome.
“The sooner [the four-day workweek] becomes common practice, the easier the AI transition will be,” she says. “In fact, it’s one of the only things that will deliver on the promise that humans have expected from technological progress: to free us from unnecessary toil, provide a sufficient amount of leisure, and create a sane pace of life.”
Entrepreneurs, who set the policies at their companies, are in a unique position to help decide whether her plea is heeded.
If AI makes it possible to adopt the 100-80-100 model and bring the four-day workweek to your company, would you do it? Or would you opt for layoffs and a leaner company instead?
Credits: TCA, LLC.