persuasive speech on 4 day work week

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What would you do with a three-day weekend? You might spend more time with your family, catch up on a hobby or project, or learn to cook something new. The popularity of remote and hybrid work has many employers reexamining what styles of work make for the happiest and most productive employees. Many of those employers have decided to try something that would have been considered radical just a few years ago: a four-day workweek. 

The concept of the four-day workweek has become increasingly popular, and not just among small businesses. Amazon, Microsoft, and Panasonic are all currently running four-day workweek pilot programs. In the U.K., 61 companies tested a four-day workweek for what was supposed to be a six-month trial; more than a year later, 54 of those companies have kept it. 

Andrew Barnes , the author of The 4 Day Week , said, "By focusing on productivity and output rather than time spent in a workplace, the four-day week allows for better work-life balance, improved employee satisfaction, retention, and mental health."

What is a four-day workweek?

A four-day workweek is just what it sounds like, but its implementation can vary. Some plans compensate workers for five days worth of work , even though they're working a four-day workweek, while others only compensate workers for four days worth of work. Employers who implement a four-day workweek might require each workday to be ten hours long, rather than the standard eight-hour day. Each plan is unique to each organization and its policies, so there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.

There's a rising call for a four-day workweek, driven by several factors. Over the years, workers have been able to accomplish more within their work hours. However, the compensation hasn't seen a similar increase, leading to a discrepancy between productivity and pay. As a result, many are advocating for a shorter workweek to ensure fair compensation for their efforts and time.

Companies can also save money by using fewer resources when employees spend less time in the office. They won't have to pay for electricity and utility usage when no employees will be in the building. Office resources like paper and custodial services are also not used or needed on those off days, saving money. Companies also look for increased productivity from workers as they're more refreshed and ready to work from long weekends and better work-life balance .

A good case study of the benefits of a four-day workweek was done by Microsoft Japan in the summer of 2019. Employees there worked four days a week while receiving their normal five-day paycheck. The results that they saw speak for themselves.

They reported increased efficiency across the business. Decreased electricity usage, fewer meetings held, and fewer pages printed helped contribute. The company says this all resulted in a 40% productivity boost across the business.

The four-day workweek is quite popular in Europe as well. The UK Labour Party adopted the four-day workweek as an official policy. The Netherlands' average weekly working hours are about 29 hours, which is the lowest of any industrialized nation . This was implemented to ensure work-life balance for workers regardless of industry. Belgium recently became the first European country to actually legislate a four-day workweek , and others may soon follow suit. Germany started a pilot program in February 2024 testing a four-day workweek with 45 companies. 

All these policy changes are signs of increasing interest in finding new ways to work that provide increased benefits to workers.

Four-day workweek pros + cons

While a four-day workweek has many benefits, it also has some drawbacks. Balancing both is essential for the successful adoption of this workplace practice.

• Better work-life balance : Giving employees an extra personal day allows them to work on personal projects, hobbies, and spend more time with their families. Working long hours contributes to stress, which in turn can have negative health effects on workers. Improved work-life balance helps employees be healthier and ready to work.
• Increased productivity : Surprisingly, a shorter workweek can lead to increased productivity. With fewer days in the office, employees are often more focused and motivated to complete their tasks efficiently, reducing procrastination and time wasted during the workday.
• Competitive advantage for hiring : A four-day workweek is also a competitive advantage for employees. Employees value work-life balance and flexible scheduling. Companies that offer plans like this can advertise themselves as leaders in that space. Offering hybrid schedules and a four-day workweek is one of the most effective ways of giving employees the flexibility they crave while maintaining productivity. 
• Enhanced employee satisfaction : Offering a four-day workweek can significantly boost employee satisfaction and morale. Employees appreciate having an extra day off to pursue personal interests and hobbies, leading to higher levels of job satisfaction and loyalty to the company. Employees enjoy working at a company where management places employee satisfaction first.
• Complex to implement : Changing from a five-day to four-day workweek isn't easy to do. Schedules have to be changed, policies adjusted, and workers briefed about the change. This adjusts the way all aspects of your business function, so it can take time to roll it out. Consider whether your employees need to be in the office, remote, or hybrid. These policies may have to change if you transition to a four-day workweek. 
• Increased pressure with deadlines : Workers will have fewer days to complete projects while working reduced or the same number of hours per week. This can put increased pressure on employees to get things done when they have less time. Work from outside organizations can still come in on days that aren't worked, creating additional stress.
• Doesn't work with every industry : Not every industry can switch to a four-day workweek as well. Doctors and nurses need to be on call during the week, and giving them a day off can have severe consequences for their employer. Customers expect some stores to stay open five days a week, making switching team schedules hard.
• Potential decrease in work hours : While a four-day workweek may seem appealing, some employees may be concerned about a potential decrease in work hours and subsequent impact on their income. Companies must carefully consider how to maintain employee compensation while implementing a shorter workweek.

Four-day workweek statistics

• 59% of companies are open to a four-day working week ( Tech.co Impact of Technology in the Workplace Report )
• A quarter of survey respondents (25%) would even take a 15% pay cut for a four-day workweek. ( Owl Labs State of Remote Work )
• More than 95% of those with four-day workweeks reported healthier, happier work environments. ( Financial Times )
• The average U.K. office worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes on a normal workday. ( Vouchercloud.com )
• One in four (28%) workers said [a four-day workweek] would be appealing in a future employer, with non-managers being 40% more inclined to want it than managers. ( Owl Labs State of Remote Work )
• 73.1%, of teammates stated that they feel more energized [with a four-day workweek], while 26.9 percent don’t feel particularly different. ( Buffer Survey )
• Over 50% of professionals in the USA feel burnt out. ( LinkedIn Research )
• 56% of workers said that their level of work-related stress has increased since last year. ( Owl Labs State of Remote Work )
• 77% of workers reported increased productivity when working a four-day week. ( DriveResearch Study )
• 19% of workers selected a four-day work week as a top 3 benefit that would be most appealing in a prospective employer. ( Owl Labs State of Remote Work )

How to write a 4-Day workweek proposal

1. determine what business needs will be met by a four-day workweek..

Thinking of the reasons why you're changing your policy will pay off when you're writing it. Find things that are inefficient and think of how a four-day workweek will solve them. Run through as many as you find and then look back on them. This will stop you from writing up a plan only to discover that you don't need to change your workweek to gain some benefits.

Take into account the work style your organization currently offers. Are a substantial number of your employees hybrid workers? If so, are you going to allow them to continue their hybrid schedule when the four-day workweek is implemented? There is no right or wrong answer here, but you need to find what works best for your company and your team's goals. 

This will also help you find areas that are going to need more detail in writing. The ones that experience the biggest shifts to a four-day workweek such as scheduling, benefits, and payroll sections should be the most detailed to account for the change.

2. Consult with different areas of your business on what they need.

When you're writing this policy, you should be working with every area of your business for their input. The legal team will help clarify what language you can and should use, while your HR managers will help you compile resources that employees will need.

These changes impact every business area, so work with them to write the policy that works most fairly for everyone. You'll also see areas that should be written with more detail for workers so it's easy to pitch to your boss.

3. Be clear about what's changing and staying the same.

The policy should be easy to read and understand what will be happening. A shift like this is big, so it should be spelled out clearly what will be changing and staying the same. It's easier to weigh the risks when the pros and cons are easy to understand, so your boss will be more likely to approve it if it's clear.

One helpful way would be to go through each part of the organization and discuss the changes and what will be done to make sure things still work. This can be done from a top-down approach, going from the highest levels of the organization down to individual teams and workers. Your boss will be able to see how things will change and who will be most impacted.

4. Clearly label the intended benefits of the change.

The most important part to highlight is the benefits of this change. We know that changing to a four-day workweek has its benefits, so those must be the crux of the proposal. Without making the benefits clear, your manager probably won't read past the first page. Accompany each benefit with a plan to make sure it happens as well. If you're explaining how worker productivity will be increased, explain how you plan to make sure it happens if it doesn't occur at the expected level.

The Four-Day Workweek and Its Positive Effects Essay

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Introduction

The positive effects of the four-day workweek, experiment in japan, the negative effects of the four-day workweek, works cited.

Various organizations and companies have always been looking for a way to increase the productivity of their employees. One of these methods is to reduce the working week to four days. In connection with such a decision, people were divided into two camps. Some believe that a four-day working week will do more harm than good, and therefore such an experience should not be adopted. Other people are sure that such an approach has many undeniable advantages and is worthy of further consideration and application. The author of this work believes that a four-day working week is a promising and prosperous method, which, despite some shortcomings, will positively impact companies’ economy and the condition of employees.

Nowadays, the day of an ordinary person is painted literally by the minute. According to analytical data, the number of cases of burnout of employees of various companies is gradually increasing. Burnout often leads to health problems, which is bad not only for the employees themselves but also for the companies in which they work – they suffer losses. Burned out or just tired employees are less proactive, less productive, and the quality of their work is worse. Therefore, it is desirable to find an optimal balance between work and personal life. According to doctors, on average, a person can productively perform their duties for no more than 4-5 hours during the working day (Evans). The rest of the time is creating the appearance of work, smoke breaks, conversations, and coffee. Increasing the number of working hours, as a rule, does not lead to a rapid increase in the efficiency of the company.

It is advisable to consider the advantages of such a schedule in more detail.

• Some employees may be motivated by the idea of three days off and increase their productivity on working days (Evans).
• Employees are less likely to be distracted from the work that needs to be done in a week and try to solve all the day’s tasks without postponing tomorrow. The work should be done efficiently and on time because there will no longer be the fifth day to revise and correct errors.
• Due to three days off, employees get more time for their hobbies, creative development, additional training, and self-improvement.
• A four-day working week helps reduce traffic in cities and harmful emissions and fuel and travel costs (Evans).

Thus, a four-day work week provides employees with more time for families and hobbies and reduces stress levels while increasing productivity and efficiency.

In 2019, Microsoft Japan, the Japanese division of the American corporation, introduced a four-day working week. As part of the Work-Life Choice Challenge project, 2,300 employees began working from Monday to Thursday, and on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, they rested. The company then presented the results, comparing them with August 2016-2018, when there were no such experiments (International Business Times). As it turned out, employees began to go on sick leave less often, the number of days off decreased by a quarter, paper consumption fell by half, and electricity consumption decreased by about a quarter. Labor productivity increased by 39.9%, even though employees spent less time working (International Business Times). The company explained the increase in productivity, including a decrease in the number of working meetings and a reduction in their holding time. Thus, the experiment conducted in Japan ended successfully and demonstrated various advantages of a four-day working week.

Nevertheless, speaking about the advantages and positive aspects of such a schedule, it is necessary to mention the negative aspects that are undoubtedly present.

• Not everyone can switch to such a schedule, which includes four-working days a week. It is difficult to imagine a metallurgist, a seller in a store, or a public utility representative moving to a four-day working week. In most cases, only office employees can switch to a shortened week (Ovais, Bharatan and Shrivastava).
• After leaving for a four-day working week, the increase in labor productivity may fall after a while because, at first, a person experiences the joy of shortening the working week and then gets used to it.
• Shortening the working week without reducing the number of working hours leads to an increase in the level of fatigue on working days (Ovais, Bharatan and Shrivastava).
• Employees may experience significant stress from completing a task in just four days instead of five.
• Companies that have offered a shortened working week, in some cases, proportionally reduce employees’ salaries.
• The reduction in the average length of the working week is equivalent to the loss of several hundred thousand private jobs in the non-agricultural sector (Lazear).

Based on all of the above, it can be noted that such an initiative has some severe drawbacks that need to be taken into account during the transition to a four-day working week.

A shortened working week has real prospects for many companies, as it allows for positive changes in the economy and the condition of employees. This method increases the amount of free time that employees can spend on themselves, their families and hobbies, and raises their motivation level in the workplace. Although the shortened working week has an impressive number of positive aspects, it is impossible not to note the disadvantages that it also has. Nevertheless, this initiative is effective for many companies, as it has a beneficial effect on their corporate culture.

“4-Day Workweek Experiment Boosted Microsoft Japan’s Productivity By 40%.” International Business Times [U.S. ed.], 2019, p. N.A. Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints, Web.

Evans, Joseph. “It’s Time to Retire the Five-day Workweek.” Marriott Student Review 4.2 (2021): 15.

Lazear, Edward Paul. “The bad news in the good jobs numbers: the economy is creating more jobs, but shorter workweeks have wiped out the gains.” Hoover Digest, no. 3, 2014, p. 56+. Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints, Web.

Ovais, D., Bharatan, S., & Shrivastava, G. (2020). Four Day Workweek A Magic Trick or A False Impression: Sustainability Analysis In The Digital Era. In AU Virtual International Conference Entrepreneurship and Sustainability in the Digital Era (Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 89-103).

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IvyPanda . 2022. "The Four-Day Workweek and Its Positive Effects." December 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-four-day-workweek-and-its-positive-effects/.

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Bibliography

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Juliet Schor wants a four-day work week (Transcript)

Listen along.

The TED Interview Juliet Schor wants a four-day work week August 4, 2022

[00:00:00] Steven Johnson: Welcome to the TED Interview. I'm Steven Johnson. One of the defining properties of a global pandemic, beyond the life and death struggles with disease itself, is the fact that it disrupts so many of the routines of everyday life. Usually, we're glad when the case counts drop and we get to go back to normal life again, attending in-person school or dining out in restaurants.

But in certain cases, the COVID disruptions have left us wondering if some of our old routines were really the optimal ones. Nowhere is this rethinking of habit more pronounced than in the world of work, which is one reason we've decided to focus a number of shows this season on the future of the workplace.

We're obviously in the middle of a major conversation about the pros and cons of working from home, which has major implications for city downtowns and commercial real estate and the environment. But there's another movement that has been amplified by the pandemic, which is less about where we do our work and more about when, and that's the campaign for a four-day work week.

Just last month, 70 companies in the UK launched what organizers are calling the most ambitious test program yet, exploring the merits of a four-day work week where more than 3000 employees will work 80% of the time while still being paid 100% of their previous wages with the expectation that they remain just as productive as they were during the five day week.

Now that may sound like a fantastic deal to you, or it might sound like a fantasy, but either way, you want to hear from today's guest, Juliet Schor, who has been one of the most persuasive advocates for the four-day week in recent years. Schor is an economist, author, and professor of sociology at Boston College. She's the author of more than five books, including 1992’s The Overworked American, and a recent book on the sharing economy: After the Gig, which also has a lot of implications for the post-COVID labor landscape. We spoke earlier this year at TED Vancouver where she gave a talk on the four-day work week movement and her research with companies around the world who are giving it a try.

[00:02:29] Steven Johnson: Juliet Schor, welcome to the TED interview.

[00:02:32] Juliet Schor: Oh, thank you. Great pleasure to be here.

[00:02:35] Steven Johnson: So I wanted to start with just the, giving you an opportunity to reflect on the last two years. I mean, what has surprised you the most?

[00:02:42] Juliet Schor: It's been kind of mind-boggling, I have to say. As someone who has spent a lot of her career trying to sort of get change in the workplace and you know, frankly, been fairly unsuccessful. Both the speed and the extent to which previously held, strongly held views about what has to happen the way things need to be is being completely overturned.

Yeah. So we've talked so much in the national conversation about work from home, which of course has just been a massive transformation, you know, along these lines, but it's been much more than that. You know, I work on work, I also do a lot on climate and, and sort of changing consumption patterns and so forth.

And I don't know, a few months into the pandemic, you know, nobody was buying anything ‘cause there's nothing to buy. And you know, just hoping that people would change their habits sort of long term, and they would stop flying and doing all these things. And you know, I was saying all this like, “Oh, I hope this happens to that.”

And I can't say I really sort of had a lot of faith in the fact that those changes would happen. The workplace has been really different because the workplace, I thin, is changing, I don't wanna say forever, but it's a durable change. It's like they can't put Humpty back together again. They can’t.

[00:04:18] Steven Johnson: Yeah. It's a fascinating time. So we're here at, at the TED Conference and we're in Vancouver, and, uh, just a day or two ago you gave a terrific talk from the TED stage. Congratulations.

[00:04:28] Juliet Schor: Thank you. Thank you.

[00:04:29] Steven Johnson: I’m sure you're very relieved to have it behind you.

[00:04:31] Juliet Schor: Lot of fun.

[00:04:32[ Steven Johnson: Very well received. Um, and on the stage, you, you made the case for a, a very specific change, um, that has, you know, been floating around before COVID, but suddenly it seems more viable for all the reasons we're talking about now. And, and that is this idea of the four-day work week. Tell us about the, where it has been implemented and, and what the results have been. You know, kinda make the case for the four-day work week.

[00:04:59] Juliet Schor: Yeah. So you know, beginning in like 2014, almost 10 years ago, you start to see various governments and individual companies who are experimenting with shorter work hours. And the key bit to this is shorter work hours with no cuts in pay.

[00:05:20] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:05:21] Juliet Schor: And not four day, uh, condensed week where it's for 10 hours. I mean, you had that in Utah during the, um, financial crisis. They went to work, uh, 10-hour days, and people liked it a lot, but so these are real, genuine work time reductions with no reductions in pay. The biggest, uh, trial was in Iceland. Most of them went to 36, 35, and more and more going to 32. Phenomenal results, like less stress, lower work-family conflicts, more energy levels, productivity stays the same or gets better. Doesn't cost anything.

Everyone in Iceland now is either on one of these shorter hour schedules, or they can be, they have the, they're eligible for them. Um, and then you get individual companies doing it. Not a lot of them, but, uh, the one that made sort of the most, uh, you know, had the most headlines is a New Zealand company owned by a man named Andrew Barnes. He read a, an article in a business magazine saying the average worker works, I don't remember if it was two or three hours a day. I mean, some really low number. And he is like, “Wow, that's really interesting.” He believed it. I think it's probably enough not the rest of it. But anyway, but the point was absolutely right, that there's a lot of slack in the day, particularly—

[00:06:48] Steven Johnson: Right. Some of it actually spent on Slack.

[00:06:49] Juliet Schor: Yeah, exactly. So he goes back to New Zealand and says, “I'm gonna do this in my company.” And he gets a researcher from the University of Auckland to study exactly what happens. And it's fabulous. You know, people are much happier. Revenue is growing, the company's thriving, they're getting better people.

You know, everything that he's trying to measure looks good. And he becomes very, you know, passionate about this idea and starts a worldwide movement called Four Day Week Global to try and tell people about it. And um, meanwhile there are individual companies doing, a lot of them in tech. Um, once the pandemic started, the momentum started to build and they got in touch with me and we started our Irish trial February 1st.

So we are… Companies are voluntarily joining a trial. They're getting coaching, help on implementation and so forth. And then my team is researching the outcomes both on the company side and the employee side. We're looking at economic, social, and uh, carbon outcomes.

[00:08:03] Steven Johnson: Is there some reason this is only happening on island nations?

[00:08:06] Juliet Schor: Oh, oh no. You know what? Ireland was just the first.

[00:08:10] Steven Johnson: Okay. It's just like you got New Zealand, we've got Iceland, we've got Ireland.

[00:08:13] Juliet Schor: True. Now the UK's interesting. We have more than twice as many companies and employees, uh, signed up for the UK trial. They've had a four-day week campaign going for years in the UK.

Um, and then the Australasians are starting in, uh, in August. So we’re, we got all the English like—

[00:08:34] Steven Johnson: Moving off of the island.

[00:08:35] Juliet Schor: —and the Spanish government announced a four-day week trial months ago, in which they're paying the fifth day so the companies don't have to take the risk—

[00:08:45] Steven Johnson: Right.

[00:08:46] Juliet Schor: —uh, that productivity will go down. And we, we can talk about that. One of the big themes of these, Andrew Barnes’ perpetual guardian system is that people do 100% of the work in 80% of the time.

[00:08:57] Steven Johnson: Yeah, that’s, that's, I wanted to touch on that. I'm glad you’ve raised this. So when, when we see examples where productivity doesn't decline, we're not talking about adjusting for the fourth day, we're saying absolute productivity of the four-day week… The output at the end of that four-day week is the same or roughly the same as a five-day week?

[00:09:14] Juliet Schor: Yes.

[00:09:15] Steven Johnson: And the argument there is the slack time. The, basically, if people know they're there for five days, they spend more time checking Facebook and they spend more time, you know, they're just less efficient with their time. Is that, is that basically the idea?

[00:09:29] Juliet Schor: Yes. So the idea is that there's low or zero productivity activity going on and just get rid of it. Give people that full day off that you can get that 20%.

[00:09:43] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:09:43] Juliet Schor: One, one day. So the biggest thing is actually probably not slack, although that's yes: meetings. One of Andrew Barn's really important lessons was you have to reorganize work to get rid of that low productivity activity, and you have to let the employees themselves figure out how to do it.

[00:10:06] Steven Johnson: Right. Right.

[00:10:06] Juliet Schor: So meetings are the number one thing that the companies get control over in order to make this work. The dramatic case was Microsoft Japan, which, um, they had a sort of draconian change in meeting policy. and they actually had a 40% increase in productivity.

[00:10:28] Steven Johnson: Right. I, I have to say on the meetings front, I, I spent some time in my career in, in kind of tech startups where I was going into an office and, you know, working alongside other people and twice, I kind of shifted back to more or less being a writer, working from home.

And each time the vast, the, the single biggest improvement in my quality of life was the radical reduction in meetings. Like the meetings are just a terrible time suck and, and soul, um, a soul suck on some level. Um, and it was just super liberating to, to be out of that. So I can see that if, if you, if you pare them back, you can really get a lot more efficiency.

[00:11:03] Juliet Schor: Yeah. And there are dimensions to meetings. So they're like: how many meetings are there? How long do they last? How many people go to them? Um, how much time do you have to prepare for them? And so that's, that's the number one thing. And then you also have, you know, some of the employees that I've interviewed will talk about things like, um, you know, I don't make phone calls to people anymore. I just message them. ‘Cause then we don't have any chit chat. I mean, you're losing something there, but they're saying it's worth it.

[00:11:29] Steven Johnson: Right. Tell me a little bit about the, the work environments where this doesn’t play very well.

[00:11:37] Juliet Schor: So we'll start with manufacturing.

[00:11:40] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:11:40] Juliet Schor: Um, I think you mentioned that I wrote the Overworked American in 1992.

[00:11:45] Steven Johnson: Yes.

[00:11:46] Juliet Schor: Uh, after I wrote that I was looking for companies who were interested in reducing work time, and I wanted to study what would happen. And I went to Motorola, I had a contact and, and you know, we talked everything through and they said, “You know what? We have intensified work so much we cannot intensify anymore.” They'd already been through all that Japanese management, and so manufacturing is at a pretty high pace in a lot of places.

So any kind of workplace where people are either really working very intensively now, where they're overworked, where they're too stressed out, you can't ask them to intensify their work. You, you can't ask them to pay for that with more work intensity. So I think about teachers, I think about, um, healthcare workers, manufacturing workers, you know, there are other service workers who are already at really high pace, and so, those people also deserve free time.

And the, here we have other interesting experiments where people were just given free time without being asked to intensify. So there were some trials done in Sweden with nurses where they were given six-hour days, and they just hired new people. They get a lot of cost savings on the healthcare side with the nurses, and on the fewer sick days, fewer, less unemployment benefits.

People are not quitting and burning out. I had a COVID test this morning, and uh, the nurse who did my tests said she had seen my talk, and she was just, “Finally someone understanding what's going on with nurses. I'm sending this out to all of my nurse friends.” But they're experiencing that burnout. You do have some companies that are giving four-day weeks to those kinds of workers without expecting them to intensify.

So we have a restaurant, Jane, that's part of our trial. Their managers are at 55 hours and they're going down into the 40s. Um, Because they're, they're burning people out. They can't get people. People are resigning. So you've got a lot of heterogeneity in the workforce, but the four-day week can work for those different kinds of situations.

[00:14:12] Steven Johnson: The other thing that you mentioned in the talk that I thought was striking is using that fifth day as a place where you stack up all errands or your doctor's appointments or things like that. It's not just like another day of leisure, it's just you're more efficient about, “Okay, I know that Fridays I'm not going to the office, and I'm not expected to work, and so that's when I can schedule all the extra things in the week that I need to do.”

[00:14:35] Juliet Schor: Yeah, I mean, beforehand you would've been leaving the office to go to the doctor’s, right? So your company wasn't getting that.

[00:14:42] Steven Johnson: And I think it's probably worth just reminding our listeners that the five-day week was itself a kind of invention? Um, can you just tell us briefly like the, the history of, of that convention?

[00:14:55] Juliet Schor: Yeah, we'll go back a little earlier.

[00:14:57] Steven Johnson: Oh, good.

[00:14:58] Juliet Schor: So with the development of industrial capitalism, and of course also with plantation agriculture, you get a tremendous increase in working hours. So more and more days per week, lengthening of the working day, um, as people went into factories and plantations and so forth, and so, you know, by the second half of the 19th century working hours were, you know, twice what they came to be, you know, roughly around now. They're, they're a little bit, even less than that now, but, you know, we're talking average 60 hour weeks, 3000 hours a year. I mean, really arduous schedules.

[00:15:37] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:15:38] Juliet Schor: So you, you begin to get the, uh, pressure from workers, so through labor unions and other kinds of pressures to reduce working hours. And that process starts, you know, roughly 1870 or so forth in Britain. You get it in the United States, and the first thing that happens is you get rid of Sunday work. And then, you get the two-day weekend. You've probably seen the bumper sticker, you know, “The labor movement were the people who brought you the weekend.” And you're moving to the five-day week, um, in the first half of the 20th century. And it, it happens unevenly. The US is the first of the wealthy nations to go to a five-day week. And then of course in the Depression, we get the Fair Labor Standards Acts, which enshrines the 40-hour week as the normative work week.

[00:16:30] Steven Johnson: That's very helpful. I mean, I, I think we forget just how much work we've grown accustomed to in a postindustrial society compared to previous societies, particularly if you go back to pre-agricultural societies, and we're gonna stay focused on the modern day, but I just read, read this amazing study looking at people's activity, kind of hourly activity in hunter-gatherer societies, just kind of itemizing what they were doing and the, the most striking discovery was that they would spend something like 20% of their time doing nothing. That there was a huge block of time… it wasn't just, it wasn't just leisure versus work. It was actual sitting around doing nothing was, was a significant part of the day, which it seems unimaginable to us now, I think.

[00:17:13] Juliet Schor: It’s, it absolutely is because the vantage point from which most people think about work in our society is that mid-19th century point, which is the period of the highest working hours in all of human history, history and they think, “Isn't capitalism wonderful? It gave us all this leisure.”

And that was, you know, one of the big messages of the Overworked American was to say “No, look at what happened in the, you know, 150 years before that.” ‘Cause it's a long period in which, you know, all those saints’ days and non-working days, and, um, there's a, a line from my book about, you know, the average medieval peasant worked, I don't know what it is, a thousand hours a year or something, you know, that it keeps showing up on Twitter and people keep retweeting it because it's like, “Wow. I thought everybody before us worked all the time.” ‘Cause they were poor. They were poor, but they weren't working that much..

[00:18:17] Steven Johnson: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:29] Steven Johnson: Now I wanna shift a little bit, um, to your 2020 book, After the Gig. And it's a book that's wrestling with the kind of the original promise, and I think the disillusion that a lot of us have now with the sharing economy, um, goes by many names, but that's generally the, the way we've come to describe it.

Um, but one of the things I love about it is that it also has a really interesting, um, concrete set of proposals for how we can actually live up to that original promise, um, in some new organizational forms. And just like the four-day work week, I think it's a wonderful time to talk about this because we are in a, in a time of, of possibility, right? Where it feels like changes can actually happen. So I wanna begin just again, with a little bit of history. Um, take us through, the, the kind of utopian vision of this new sharing economy.

[00:19:26] Juliet Schor: Yeah, it's, it's so interesting to think back to the, what people thought that the sharing economy was gonna do. So there are multiple dimensions to it. Um, one of them had to do with cutting out the middlemen and, and giving value to the consumer and the, the producer. It was also thought that it was going to be fantastic for the climate crisis. It was gonna reduce carbon emissions because now instead of staying in a hotel, you were gonna stay in someone’s home and Airbnb or Uber, you were gonna be, somebody was gonna be driving somewhere and they were just gonna give you a ride.

Right? That was like one of the original ride-sharing.

[00:20:11] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:20:12] Juliet Schor: Um, and then a, a big part of the excitement about it had to do with work and a new way to work, and the sort of big promise was that it was gonna free people from bosses. And, and this is why I got interested in it, ‘cause I've been, you know, studying hours of work for a long time. People could choose the number of hours they worked and when they worked. So complete control over their own schedules, which is a huge thing because most people don't have that in our economy. And more and more people needed it and wanted it. So the freedom for managerial control and the freedom to set your schedule and of course also make some money.

[00:20:54] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:20:54] Juliet Schor: You know, ‘cause many of the people who went to these apps had other jobs and other sources of income.

[00:21:00] Steven Johnson: So you did extensive studies of people working in this world. What, what was the scale of that?

[00:21:04] Juliet Schor: So I, uh, put together a team of graduate students. I was funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and we sort of went case by case. I think we had something like 13 cases. So each grad student could pick a. an app or a… We also looked at non-profits, different like different sharing economy, non-profits, a maker space, a food swap, and uh, so we were doing in some cases, ethnography where we'd be hanging out at these sites or we'd be doing these trades ourselves and then interviews with, uh, users, uh, people earning money on them also with the consumers or in the nonprofits, you know, any of the users.

We did, uh, some big data analysis for Airbnb. We've got a lot of that and that's still continuing. Um, but, you know, ride hail. food delivery, Airbnb, Turo. Um, we did a lot of Task Rabbit, um, and it went on, we did about seven years. Wow. The project went on for seven years, and this was an emergent sector. We were able to move with the sector.

[00:22:19] Steven Johnson: Interesting… right.

[00:22:19] Juliet Schor: We just kind of interesting, followed the trends. Um, people started so many of these sites and apps. I mean, just hundreds and hundreds of them. So many of these things failed. But we, we followed the ones that, you know, were getting big enough that they were worth looking at. And, um, we wrote a lot of papers that were sort of cross-case, which made our research very different than most. Most people did at single. You know, they'd study, Uber or they'd study Airbnb, and we were doing so many of them. We had more cases than any project.

[00:22:55] Steven Johnson: The other thing that was really, I think, you know, quas-utopian about it, and I've written a lot about cities over the years and, and part of the values that we associate with cities is interaction between strangers, right? That you, you, you have, you're forced to have these exchanges with people you don't necessarily know.

And I think we sometimes mythologize that a little bit. Like you kind of are interacting with people on the subway, but most of the time you're just sitting next to a stranger, and you're not actually having a conversation.

And suddenly there were these, you know, Airbnb’s probably the best example where people are actually welcoming strangers into their home. And you talk about it in the book, about people kind of befriending people who stay at their homes and things like that. And so there was this sense of a lovely new kind of social commercial interaction was possible back then.

[00:23:39] Juliet Schor: Absolutely. So I, I use the term “stranger sharing.”

[00:23:44] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:23:45] Juliet Schor: Um, and the, sort of the technological innovation here was mostly people historically didn't like to share with strangers, ‘cause you don't know them and you, it's uncertain and you don't wanna take the risk. So all of these apps followed what eBay pioneered, which is crowdsourcing ratings and reputational information.

So the idea is you get, uh, an explosion of stranger sharing, and my team was studying this before almost anybody was. And in the early days, so many of the people on these apps were there ‘cause they believed in that connection piece of it. Um, and they were connecting with each other. Over time, of course, that mostly changes. So, in the early days of Lyft, you sat in the front and you gave the fist bump to your driver and you, you became friends.

Yeah. Um, and now, you know, in the book I have that thing where, you know, Uber puts in that “shut up and drive button” where you can like, tell your driver—

[00:24:51] Steven Johnson: Please don’t talk to me.

[00:24:52] Juliet Schor: —“Leave me alone.” Right? And nobody sits in the front anymore, right? And it just became, uh, conventionalized in terms of arms-length transactions, but people really believed, more on some apps than others, like Airbnb the most, I think, that they were creating a new kind of market exchange.

[00:25:12] Steven Johnson: Well, let's talk about that. So what, describe for us what you think happened. Why, why did this not live up to its promise?

[00:25:20] Juliet Schor: You get commercialization. So rather than just a, a person who's renting out a room occasionally to other individuals, you get ghost hotel operators in which there is, you never see the person who owns it and it all, it becomes very business-like. They hire a concierge who you probably also don't see. So you get a lot of, um, contactless on some of these apps, and then, with ride-hail and with the food delivery also, the companies become very predatory.

So there's a class dimension here, because I think in the early days you had a lot more highly educated sort of college students or graduates, middle-class white people doing this. Partly ‘cause this all happened with the financial crash.

[00:26:16] Steven Johnson: Right.

[00:26:16] Juliet Schor: 2008, they couldn't find jobs. So you have that, uh, homophily, we call it, but, you know, love of same, uh, the customers and the providers were in the same class.

And then over time, as the companies start reducing what they're paying and making the conditions more onerous and so forth, it gets replaced by an immigrant workforce in ride-hail where you, it's you have a, a class and race, uh, difference between the customer and the provider. And that also undermines the personal dimension of it because of the insidious nature of class and racial relations in this country and, and domination.

[00:27:01] Steven Johnson: You know, and it’s also that, in a sense, in those early days, you had this incredible influx of venture capital, which was enabling companies like Uber to pay these higher rates for the drivers. So it seemed like it was a great deal. They had, the drivers had more flexibility, they were getting paid good money. Um, and then companies like Uber go public, and suddenly, they realize that they actually have to theoretically make a profit. Um, and all of a sudden they start paying their drivers less.

[00:27:34] Juliet Schor: You know what? It happens long before they go public. So, the early days, the money was fabulous, and then, they just realized, wow, they're paying far above market for skills that are pretty general in the population, like knowing how to drive or how to ride a bike to deliver food. And they just start squeezing and squeezing and squeezing and, you know, yes, they're preparing to go public, but the, the, the squeeze starts so many years before, uh, the companies actually go public.

[00:28:06] Steven Johnson: Did you end up with a kind of a ranking in your head of, of the big platforms in terms of the ones that have come closest to living up to that original promise and the ones that have failed the most conspicuously?

[00:28:19] Juliet Schor: Yeah, I think I call it the platform hierarchy in the—

[00:28:24] Steven Johnson: There you go.

[00:28:24] Juliet Schor: In the book, I mean, it, it's more about how lucrative is it, uh, who's on it, you know? So the, like, Airbnb is higher. Well, it's a capital asset platform, and the people who go on it are more privileged. They're whiter, you know, they have more money to begin with.

But, uh, yeah, so all the way down to the lowest paid of them is the, uh, food delivery. I mean, ride-hail’s above it. You have to have a car to do ride-hail. TaskRabbit was a very interesting platform because it was very heavily dominated on the provider side by people with college degrees, so they, they did pretty well in terms of the hourly wage.

Now they, they couldn't always get enough jobs, so we had the people who were trying to do it full-time could have a good hourly wage, but they were all making below the poverty line. But on the other hand, you know, Uber is just a predatory, predatory platform that has been just disastrous for workers, and that came out very clearly in our research.

[00:29:38] Steven Johnson: So in our last section, I want to talk about this very interesting vision you have of a, a way to fix some of these problems. And the example that I'm really drawn to, which is just a kind of a new organizational form that has some echoes of older ones, um, is this idea of a, of a platform cooperative. Um, so just tell us what that is kind of in the abstract. Like how do you organize a platform cooperative? And then we can maybe get into a specific example.

[00:30:10] Juliet Schor: Yes. I love the platform cooperative. So what is a cooperative? It's a worker-owned entity. All the cooperatives have management, but you know, the workers may vote the management in, but there's still the management function.

Now you don't need that because the software of the platform obviates a huge amount of management. You still have to make the decisions, like what is the algorithm that you're gonna build or what is the policy that you have? But the workers can do that. So the idea is that the workers own the platform. They determine, um, you know, the policies. Now, one difference with the traditional worker co-op to a platform co-op is these are all individual contributor kinds of services. Whereas if you have, you know, uh, the industry that you know, historically has had the most co-ops, worker co-ops in the US is sawmills.

So if you have a sawmill, right?

[00:31:09] Steven Johnson: I didn’t know that. Interesting.

[00:31:10] Juliet Schor: There seems to be a lot of them. But, uh, if you have a sawmill, you're all making the product together. But if it's a ride-hail or a food co-op or, or a, uh, house cleaning co-op or whatever, those are individual contributors. So that's a question about how they get paid? Do they just get the business that they bring in, or, but yeah, so that's what a platform cooperative is.

[00:31:33] Steven Johnson: And you have a specific example that you talk about in After the Gig, which is, uh, the, the platform Stocksy.

[00:31:39] Juliet Schor: Yes.

[00:31:39] Steven Johnson: Uh, which is a, is basically a stock photography platform. Is that the idea?

[00:31:45] Juliet Schor: Yes, exactly. It's a stock photography platform. It's like Getty Images or Shutterstock or something.

[00:31:51] Steven Johnson: Yep. Yep.

[00:31:51] Juliet Schor: And at the time I was doing the research, it was really the only one, the only big-ish successful platform co-op that existed. So it's a little bit different than say, a ride-hail co-op or now there are many, many, um, in food delivery, in ride-hail, but, um, phenomenally successful co-ops.

Um, they started with a th—about a thousand artists. Very, very competitive to get into it. Uh, you know, I think they used to say like, harder to get into than Harvard College. Um, and that makes it different than most other, uh, platforms. Most of these platforms are what we call open access. So anybody as, as long as you don't have a criminal record or you know, if you want to be a ride-hail driver, your car has to be a certain vintage or something, but, um, the artists themselves make the, uh, make decisions about the platform. They own the platform. Um, and it's been super, super successful.

[00:32:57] Steven Johnson: And how… obviously one of the problems that these co-ops have faced: all the, the traditional platforms like an Uber have been venture funded. So you, there is some upfront cost obviously in creating the platform itself.

[00:33:10] Juliet Schor: Yeah.

[00:33:10] Steven Johnson: So, how do you get around that chicken and egg problem?

[00:33:13] Juliet Schor: So you do need to be able to raise the capital. Um, but I think there's more and more opportunity for that. Uh, you have some municipal governments that are trying to support co-ops. You have crowdfunding. You have, there are some ways, and some of this technology has gotten cheap. The bigger problem for them is getting the markets, getting the demand. Stocksy was successful in part because it had, well, two things. One is because it was a co-op, it attracted people who would never have sold their photos on stock before, ‘cause it’s a kind of low-class part of the market. But, like, phenomenally successful photographers thought it's so cool.

So they kind of went upscale from Getty and developed a niche. It's a narrow segment of the market. It's not a bad place to start. And then you can try and expand into, to a bigger market share after that.

[00:34:08] Steven Johnson: I think, you know, examples like Stocksy where you know, you can see it actually working, and it's a genuinely new model, and it's out there, you know, actually getting better returns for its members or you know, the, the participants in it, um, it's just really exciting to see, uh, and I think that we're in this moment where new forms of organization are on the table in a way that they hadn’t, you know, 10 or 20 years ago. That's, I think that's really exciting.

We have a, a bonus question that we like to ask our guests on the interview. Um, and, and that is, what's the unsolved problem in your field that you're most interested in?

[00:34:47] Juliet Schor: So for me, when we've been talking about the future of work, and you're, you're working on the future of work, um, one of the things I feel really strongly about is that we have to connect this conversation to the conversation about the climate crisis and carbon reduction. So what are we doing in the world of work that is pushing decarbonization?

Um, obviously we're working on energy and so forth, but just in terms of our daily patterns and what households are doing and what businesses are doing, and so that's a big question.

[00:35:20] Steven Johnson: Yeah.

[00:35:20] Juliet Schor: And for me, most important about the shorter work time movement is what's the impact of the four-day week with five days’ pay on carbon emissions?

And that's one of the things we're studying. Are the companies going to shut down the light and heat in the offices on that Friday? Uh, how is that gonna balance out the people who are now in their homes turning on the lights and heating them where the homes might have been empty and dark? Um, are people gonna go traveling for three-day weekends because they have as much money as they did before and they're gonna get on a plane? You know, in Ireland especially, one of the things we're looking at is all those cheap flights. I mean, you can get on a, you can get—

[00:36:07] Steven Johnson: Right. Would you like to be in Rome in two hours?

[00:36:07] Juliet Schor: Exactly. And it costs you $19, or euros, but—

[00:36:11] Steven Johnson: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:12] Juliet Schor: Um, so that's, you know, we're, we're gonna be looking at that.

[00:36:18] Steven Johnson: Well, Juliet Schor, thank you so much for both your context and the history and, and the research, but also the optimism and the vision of how we could continue to improvise these new forms, um, in really concrete ways. I, I just really enjoyed it and find it inspiring, so thanks for being on the show.

[00:36:35] Juliet Schor: Oh, thank you. It's been a really, really fun and interesting conversation for me.

[00:36:46] Steven Johnson: The TED Interview is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Allie Graham. The show is brought to you by TED and Transmitter Media. Sammy Case is our story editor. Fact-checking by Taha Abdul Wasi. Farrah Desgranges is our project manager. Constanza Gallardo is our managing producer, and Gretta Cohn is our executive producer.

Special thanks to Michelle Quint and Anna Phelan. I'm your host, Steven Johnson. For more information on my other projects, including my latest book Extra Life, you can follow me on Twitter at @stevenbjohnson or sign up for my Substack newsletter, Adjacent Possible.

Why we need to consider switching to a 4-day workweek — now 

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Iceland has made recent headlines by declaring the world’s largest ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector a resounding success. After more than 2,500 workers moved to a 35- or 36-hour workweek and declared themselves happier, healthier and less stressed, the country is now moving to make this an option for the majority of its workforce.

This, of course, goes against today’s always-on, 24/7 global economy, where long hours can seem inevitable, inescapable and natural. Years of “rise and grind,” laser-like focus and unrelenting labor, we are told, are behind the success of tech billionaires, professional athletes, “unicorn” companies and even entire economies.

Yet the four-day workweek isn’t just for the public sector — many private companies are discovering that by switching to a four days, they can protect time for undistracted work and give people more time for leisure. The results: Increased productivity and creativity; improved recruitment and retention; less burnout for founders and leaders; and more balanced and sustainable lives for workers — all without cutting salaries or sacrificing customer service.

My book about the move towards four-day workweek, Shorter , was published in the US in early March 2020. The next day, my home state of California reported its first coronavirus death, and a week later, schools, businesses and public spaces across America began closing.

At first, I worried that it was exactly the wrong time to publish a book on the four-day week. But it soon became clear — once the initial confusion over shutdowns and remote work settled — that the global movement to shorten the workweek wasn’t slowing down. In fact, the pandemic was making it possible for more companies to shorten their working hours, highlighting the urgent need to redesign how we work, and teaching me some new things about the four-day week as well as the future of work.

The four-day week before the pandemic

Before the pandemic, hundreds of companies around the world, including in Korea and Japan, two countries whose languages have invented words for “death by overwork”, had moved to four-day weeks, six-hour days or other shorter workweeks. Most were small companies with fewer than 100 people, and they included creative and professional service firms but also software startups, restaurants, factories and nursing homes — industries where overwork is common and deadlines can be inflexible.

Almost all these companies were led by seasoned founders who were now facing burnout or some existential threat to their company. They had concluded that ever-longer hours were unsustainable.

Why did they do it? For many, it was a question of change-or-die. Almost all these companies were led by seasoned founders who found themselves facing burnout or some existential threat to their company. They had concluded that ever-longer hours were unsustainable and thought they could invent a better way of working. For everyone, the benefits of a three-day weekend were obvious: Better work-life balance; more time for “life admin” and family; and more energy for professional and personal development, restorative hobbies and exercise.

No company just lopped a day off their calendar. Instead, they had to meaningfully redesign how they worked. The key to unlocking a shorter workweek without reducing productivity lies in three areas: 1) tightening meetings; 2) introducing “focus time” when everyone can concentrate on their key tasks; and 3) using technology more mindfully.

For example, Flocc London digital consultancy ELSE holds their internal meetings on hard chairs to encourage people to be brief, while at Copenhagen-based IIH Nordic, they use countdown timers to keep meetings short. Studies show that while technology has made knowledge work much more productive, office workers are wasting two to four hours a day thanks to outmoded processes, multitasking , overly-long meetings  and interruptions . Deal with those, and you go a long way towards making a four-day week possible.

Having more focused time also gives companies space for dedicated social time during the day. Flocc alternates heads-down “red time” with Swedish fika ( a coffee break), while Glasgow call center Pursuit Marketing offers workers free breakfast before they hit the phones.

Companies aren’t losing out on their bottom line, and they have happier, healthier and better workers.

Many companies found they could be just as productive in four days as in five, and a few even saw employee productivity go up dramatically. What’s more, revenues and profits rose because four-day weeks were cheap to implement and actually attracted new customers.

As a result, companies didn’t cut salaries when they reduced hours. This, in turn, boosted retention rates and attracted more experienced workers, and plucky startups and small-town firms could now compete with established companies in London or Silicon Valley for senior talent. Rich Leigh, whose Gloucester firm Radioactive PR moved to a four-day week in 2019, told me, “I can’t move for great resumes from great people” who were wanting to escape London but remain  in the industry. A few years ago, Korean e-commerce company Woowa Brothers used a shorter workweek to lure people from Samsung and LG; it’s currently  valued at more than US $4 billion. Companies aren’t losing out on their bottom line, and they have happier, healthier and better workers.

Synergy Vision, a London-based medical and health care communications company, introduced a four-day week in late 2018. After six months, in a company-wide survey, 51 percent of employees said they were “very happy” at work (up from 12 percent) and 88 percent said they had enough time for personal tasks (up from 54 percent). Incredibly, 79 percent said they had enough time to get all their work done — even though they were working one day less.

“[M]y life is better off, thanks to the 4-day work week,” one employee wrote . “I spend extra time doing things for myself, like walking in Hampstead Health, getting through the pile of unread books and planning my wedding.” Another observed , “Everyone spends their time differently — some people have taken up a new hobby, some people do bugger-all and use it to recharge, and a lot of people use it to ensure their weekends are free to be properly enjoyed with friends and family.”

Working hours, innovation and the pandemic

Companies that moved to four-day weeks before the pandemic were able to respond quickly to the challenges of lockdowns. At Copenhagen-based software and design agency Abtion, employees had learned how to redesign working hours, meeting schedules and adopt new technologies when they chose to adopt a 4-day week. When the pandemic hit Danish businesses, “we did not dictate solutions” to employees, chief production officer Bo Konskov told journalist Pernille Garde Abildgaard — the leadership knew that workers already had the skills to adapt. And once they were working from home, nobody had to “constantly document that one is at work,” Konskov said. “It would be a waste of time, because we know that all our employees are on and working.”

The impact on morale of switching to a four-day week was immediate. “Instantly, you see happier people,” says Paul McNulty, whose online publishing company adopted this schedule in mid-2020.

Companies that made the shift to a shorter week during the pandemic often did so because they found that efficiencies of remote work and better use of technology created more free time, which they could in turn give back to employees who were feeling stressed or overworked because of pandemic life. If a company in early 2020 wasn’t already using tools like Google Suite, Asana, Trello and Slack to let workers collaborate and communicate  online and serve customers remotely, they quickly learned how to use them when they went remote.

After a few months, this meant that workflows became better-documented and -routinized, pushing hourly productivity upward. At the same time, the challenges of managing life under lockdown were growing, as workers juggled home-schooling, the disappearance of work-life boundaries and longer working hours. The solution: Share those productivity gains with workers, in the form of a shorter workweek.

After months of adapting to work from home and the uncertainty of living in the shadow of a pandemic, the impact on morale was immediate. “Instantly, you see happier people,” says Paul McNulty, whose online publishing company 3D Issue moved to a four-day week in mid-2020. “That’s really great to see.”  Before making the change, he gave staff the option of a pay rise or shortened working hours, and they voted in favor of the latter.

Employees with children “see this a day to themselves,” and everyone feels more loyal to the company. Shortening the workweek also encouraged people to be more thoughtful about how they worked. At Uncharted, a Denver nonprofit, “Giving people the space to figure out their working style has been an important optimization,” Banks Benitez tells me.

The four-day week and the future of work

An economic and public health crisis might not seem like a good time for businesses to try a 4-day week. So far, however, every company has survived a crisis unprecedented in recent history. Soon they’ll need to become more flexible, more agile with their time and less beholden to convention, as they redesign workplaces and routines for a workers newly accustomed to flexible work, reopen offices and stores, figure out what work must happen face-to-face and what can be done remotely, and prepare for the next pandemic or economic downturn.

Many companies have already made the kinds of technology investments necessary to implement a shorter workweek, so the 4-day week is more accessible than ever.

This will demand resilience, reflection and problem-solving among employees and in organizations. The four-day week provides an incentive for companies to develop those abilities, and it can play a role in helping companies deal with the practical problems of reopening and reforming work. And because many have already made the kinds of tech investments necessary to implement a shorter workweek without cutting salaries or sacrificing service, the four-day week is more accessible than ever.

A recent survey by Be The Business, a London-based nonprofit, found that 18 percent of companies in the UK were open to moving to a four-day work week after the pandemic ends, and 5 percent already offer a four-day week to workers.

Growing interest among politicians and governments is also raising the prominence of the four-day week in the post-pandemic workplace. In recent months, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon , New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern  and Japanese politician Kuniko Inoguchi have all expressed support for a four-day week. Mayoral candidates in Seoul, South Korea, promised to launch programs to encourage companies to experiment with four-and-a-half-day weeks. In the US, I am currently working on a campaign to encourage companies to adopt a four-day week; it launched in late June 2021.

Job losses in 2020 erased decades of gains made by women in the workplace, and the 4-day workweek could help them recover.

Some local governments have implemented a four-day week, or they’re contemplating it. The Danish kommune (or province) of Odsherred began a three-year trial of a four-day week in 2019; in the US, Morgantown, West Virginia , and Colorado‘s Jefferson County adopted it in 2020; and in 2021, Valencia, Spain, announced plans to trial it.

The four-day week can also help us address structural inequalities that the pandemic threw into sharp relief. Job losses in 2020 erased decades of gains made by women in the workplace, and the four-day week could help them recover. In my interviews with companies who’ve adopted this model, I found they often prefer working mothers whom they value for their experience, organizational skills, collaborative ability, time management and ruthless ability to prioritize.

Labor markets that reward staying late and not having a life end up charging a penalty for motherhood; in contrast, companies that work shorter weeks pay a premium for it. Working mothers “are actually the kinds of people that we want to attract,” Anna Ross, CEO of Australian beauty products company Kester Black, tells me.

A report published by UK’s 4 Day Week Campaign shows that shifting to this work pattern could reduce the entire country’s carbon footprint by 21.3 percent per year — the equivalent of taking nearly every car off the road.

Shorter working hours also translate into lower energy consumption, less carbon emissions and less commuting time. A report published by the 4 Day Week Campaign in the UK shows that shifting to this work pattern could reduce the entire country’s carbon footprint by 21.3 percent per year — the equivalent of taking nearly every car off the road. As has been the case during the pandemic, the report also found evidence that people are more likely to spend their non-work time engaged in less carbon-intensive activities, like preparing their own meals and walking or cycling instead of driving.

A shorter workweek could also benefit regions and countries trying to become magnets for global talent or attract young people to move back home. An economy in which workers have a bigger voice in how work is automated and get a bigger share of the benefits of increased productivity is one which is less likely to suffer huge disruptions from automation and AI.

Finally the four-day week can help us develop a healthier vision of work and time. In recent decades, globalization, outsourcing, automation, digitization and, most recently, the rise of the gig economy have created an economy in which we are encouraged, or required, to work ever-longer hours in the name of “doing what you love,” bringing your whole self to work or avoiding redundancy.

But one of the most important lessons companies that adopt four-day weeks can teach us is that — with the right incentives and culture — workplaces can replace the worship of destructive creativity with a vision of sustainable creativity, in which work and life are better balanced, rest fuels creativity, and companies tap into employees’ passions. The four-day week is within our grasp. We just need to see it, and be bold enough to seize it.

Watch Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s TEDxYouth@Monterey Talk here: 

Watch this TEDxAuckland Talk on the four-day workweek now: 

About the author

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is the author of "Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less", and "Shorter: Work Better, Smarter and Less". His consultancy Strategy + Rest helps companies move to 4-day weeks. You can follow him at @askpang or visit his website www.strategy.rest.

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March 7, 2023

A Four-Day Workweek Reduces Stress without Hurting Productivity

The results of a test involving dozens of employers and thousands of employees suggests that working only four days instead of five is good for workers’ well-being—without hurting companies

By Jan Dönges & Sophie Bushwick

Jose Luis Pelaez/Getty Images

Working four days instead of five—with the same pay—leads to improved well-being among employees without damaging the company’s productivity. That’s the recently reported result of a four-day workweek test that ran for six months, from June to December 2022, and involved a total of 61 U.K. companies with a combined workforce of about 2,900 employees.

During the COVID pandemic, many workers experienced increased stress and even burnout, a state of exhaustion that can make it difficult to meet work goals. “It’s a very huge issue,” says independent organizational psychologist and consultant Michael Leiter, who was not involved in the new report. “You see it particularly in health care, where I do a lot of my work. It’s making it much more difficult to hold on to talented people.” He explains that stress in the workplace makes it difficult for companies in health care and many other fields to recruit new hires and keep existing employees. But a greater awareness of burnout and related issues can have a positive effect, Leiter adds. “People are demanding more changes in how the work is organized,” he says.

That demand is what led the independent research organization Autonomy , in conjunction with the advocacy groups 4 Day Week Global and  4 Day Week Campaign and researchers at the University of Cambridge, Boston College and other institutions, to publish a report on what happens when companies reduce the number of days in a workweek. According to surveys of participants, 71 percent of respondents reported lower levels of burnout, and 39 percent reported being less stressed than when they began the test. Companies experienced 65 percent fewer sick and personal days. And the number of resignations dropped by more than half, compared with an earlier six-month period. Despite employees logging fewer work hours, companies’ revenues barely changed during the test period. In fact, they actually increased slightly, by 1.4 percent on average.

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Even before the COVID pandemic, companies tried to enhance employee well-being with interventions such as wellness programs. The new report suggests that a four-day workweek could be a tool for this purpose. “We think this is a far more effective and powerful way to have an impact on employees,” says report co-author Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College. Unlike most wellness benefits or flexible-hour schedules, which are typically options for individuals, the four-day week would be an organization-wide policy. As a result, Schor says, making that change would not harm workers’ career prospects or income.

When it comes to helping workers in distress, “so much of the effort goes into making them feel better rather than actually changing the nature of work,” Leiter says. “The kinds of results that [the researchers are] reporting are more substantial than many of those [wellness] programs. Because again, a lot of what these programs are doing are helping people tolerate the situation that they’re in rather than changing [that situation]. It’s a much more profound thing to do—to change the nature of work—than it is to help people put up with what they’ve got.”

This is not the only test of a shorter workweek. In 2008, for example, Utah  started a program to try to save building energy costs by closing state employees’ offices on Fridays, although that program kept employees working for 40-hour weeks and merely redistributed the hours over four days instead of five. Other researchers have studied workweeks or days with fewer hours, although those assessments have often included workers at only one organization. “Prior to 2022, which is when 4 Day Week Global began running trials of companies doing four-day weeks ..., to our knowledge, there were no multicompany studies of the four-day week,” Schor says. The organization has conducted multiple studies on the shortened week’s impact in other countries. The recent one in the U.K. was its largest effort thus far, however.

In addition to surveys, the researchers performed in-depth interviews with participants in the new report. From those interviews, it emerged that employees used the additional day off mostly for organization and everyday tasks. This, in turn, allowed them to reserve the weekend primarily for recreation, so they could spend time with their families and hobbies.

The test included companies from a variety of industries, including online retailers, financial services firms, animation studios and a fish-and-chips store. Each company chose how to implement its four-day week—making Friday a day off for everyone or allowing employees to choose any day off, for example. Participants also reduced hours by eliminating time-wasting tasks such as overlong meetings, the surveys found. Ninety-two percent of the companies that took part in the pilot program said they would continue to test the four-day week, and 18 companies decided to keep their reduced working hours permanently.

The test period of six months was relatively short, so it remains unclear whether the favorable impact on well-being will persist in the long term. Employees might become accustomed to the reduced working hours over time, and the lighter workweek would begin to have only a limited effect on stress levels. The researchers plan on conducting a follow-up survey with the participating companies that are maintaining a four-day workweek at the one-year mark in order to see if these positive results continue—and Schor expects they will. “One reason we think they will is that we did a midpoint survey on all of these,” she says. Key outcomes such as stress and burnout “improved in the first three months, and that improvement was maintained. So we do know that in months three to six, we didn’t get regression.”

Leiter would have preferred the team to have used a more established measure to assess burnout. The surveys asked questions related to exhaustion and frustration, he explains, rather than using an assessment like the Maslach Burnout Inventory , which is currently considered the gold standard. “There’s a colloquial idea of burnout, which is that it’s being tired, and it’s being really frustrated with work,” he says. In Leiter’s research , that state would be called “overextended,” he notes. “Burnout has that quality but is also being very cynical and discouraged and depersonalizing things and really losing your sense of accomplishment, which is a much more dark place to be.” Still, he says that the four-day workweek is likely to reduce this more rigorous definition of burnout as well, “because it gives people more control over their life and their relationship with work.”

Companies may be more willing to try out a four-day workweek after seeing new work-from-home policies succeed. “When companies switched to work from home because of the pandemic, this was something they had the technology to do all along and just were really reluctant to let people do it,” Schor says. “And so that really changed employers’ point of view. I think it opened their minds.” Leiter agrees. “I think people were very much into a rut about how work has to be organized,” he says. “What’s come out of the pandemic for a lot of people was reflection, saying, ‘It really doesn’t have to be that way. We can change things drastically—because we just did.’”

A version of this article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.

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10-07-2021 WORKPLACE EVOLUTION

How to convince your boss to consider a four-day workweek

Research suggests that a four-day workweek could make workers more productive. Now you just need to convince your manager.

[Source photos: Olya Kobruseva /Pexels; Gérôme Bruneau /Unsplash]

BY  Stephanie Vozza 4 minute read

If weekends seem to fly by, be thankful you weren’t born during the early 20th century when having one day off a week was the standard for most employers. In 1922, Henry Ford doubled time off by implementing the Monday-through-Friday timeline at The Ford Company.

A five-day, 40-hour workweek may work well when output is measured by items coming down an assembly line, but productivity is different when it comes to knowledge work. COVID disrupted standard ways of working and created an experiment where companies learned that productivity isn’t measured by hours in a chair.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the workweek and do things differently, says Joe Sanok, author of Thursday is the New Friday: How to Work Fewer Hours, Make More Money, and Spend Time Doing What You Want .

“Our best work never comes when we’re stressed and maxed out,” he says. “It’s intuitive but research points to it, too. When you move to a four-day workweek with strong boundaries around when work starts and stops, employees are often more creative and more productive.”

Why Less Is More

Researchers in Iceland tracked a group of 2,500 employees who worked a four-day workweek with the same pay and found that their wellbeing dramatically increased, and they reported less stress and burnout and better work-life balance. Microsoft Japan experimented with a four-day workweek and experienced a 40% boost in productivity, although they’ve since discontinued the practice.

It seems counterintuitive that less time results in more output. If you’ve ever tried to finish up work before a three-day holiday weekend, however, you know it’s possible to fit five days of work into a shortened week, says Sanok.

“When you reduce the amount of time you have, it forces you to make the best use of that time,” he says. “If you have 20 tasks and only time for 14, you’ll choose the best 14 and do the most essential things first.”

Most of us have heard of Parkinson’s Law, which says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. By adopting a four-day workweek, Sanok says you’ll look at it in a new way. “It forces you to examine what you’re doing and drop the things you should not be spending time doing. You also have to address procrastination head on.”

How to Implement a Four-Day Workweek

To adjust your workdays, Sanok says you need to set up hard and soft boundaries around your time. Hard boundaries are non-negotiable and soft boundaries are rules that can be relaxed when an emergency arises and can’t wait until Monday to be fixed.

The hardest part may be setting boundaries with yourself, especially if you’re self employed or work from home. Many of us may work out of boredom if we don’t have anything else planned or out of anxiety. Identify what is the trigger for working outside of the time you want to work.

“If it’s out of boredom, schedule some hobbies that provide fulfillment,” says Sanok. “If it’s out of anxiety or out of a feeling that your business isn’t running appropriately, add an extra set of eyes to determine what isn’t working correctly.”

Then measure your progress to determine if the shift to four days is working well. “You can track how many hours you work and how much money you produce,” says Sanok. “If you work 10 less hours and made 5% more, then you’ve made the case to yourself.”

Getting Your Boss On Board

If you are an employee, you have to gauge if your supervisor has an industrial mindset and sees you like a machine. If you think there’s an opportunity for them to be adaptable to new model, Sanok suggests having a discussion.

“Are there clear KPIs for your role?” he asks. “How are you already judged? And consider what are the potential fires that could happen when you’re not in the office or clocked in. Then identify who could cover that.”

Four-day workweeks often work best when an entire team is on the same schedule. To handle client emergencies, Sanok suggests companies put a contingency plan in place, with one person on call on a rotating schedule. He also suggests that companies try a four-day workweek as a two- to three-month experiment, or have one team pilot it to determine how it might impact others. Then hold a monthly 360-degree review to determine what’s going well and what needs adjustment.

“No supervisor wants to look like they made numbers drop due to an experiment,” says Sanok. “They want credit for being innovative. When you take an experimental mindset and find out what works well, you can use the key learning lessons in a second experiment.”

In reality, the five-day workweek has simply been a 100-year experiment, and perhaps its time has come.

“The Babylonians gave us the seven-day week, the Egyptians had an eight-day week and the Romans had 10,” says Sanok. “It’s all completely made up. Henry Ford gave us the 40-hour week so he could sell more cars to workers who now had more leisure time. It’s no longer the Industrial Era, and we don’t have to think of people as robots and machines. The post-pandemic generation gets to decide what we want to do moving forward. Doing something different could actually make a difference.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Vozza is a freelance writer who covers productivity, careers, and leadership. She's written for Fast Company since 2014 and has penned nearly 1,000 articles for the site’s Work Life vertical   More

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Four-Day Work Weeks Are Good for Your Health, a Large Study Finds

A four-day work week improves employees’ health in numerous ways, from reducing anxiety and stress to enabling better sleep and more time for exercise, according to a large new report .

“It genuinely has, even with our academic skepticism, been a really positive outcome,” says report co-author Brendan Burchell, a social sciences professor at the U.K.’s University of Cambridge who studies work’s effects on psychological well-being.

The report builds upon previous studies on the lifestyle and health benefits of working less by summarizing the experiences of 61 companies—and a total of about 2,900 employees—that piloted shorter work weeks from June to December 2022. Companies were recruited to join the study by advocacy groups 4 Day Week Global and 4 Day Week Campaign and workplace research group Autonomy, and researchers from Boston College and the University of Cambridge, including Burchell, oversaw participant interviews, data collection, and analysis.

Companies in the study, most of which were based in the U.K., were free to set their schedules however they wanted, as long as they “meaningfully” reduced working hours without docking pay. More than half of the companies that completed the researchers’ surveys gave all employees either Monday or Friday off, while others tried solutions like staggered schedules or shorter days throughout the week. Over the course of the six-month pilot period, employees’ average weekly working hours fell from 38 to 34—a bit shy of the target 32, which suggests some people either worked more on the days they were in the office or worked some on days off. Still, 71% of respondents said they were working less after the trial ended than before.

For many workers, a four-day week translated to better health. About 40% of respondents said they experienced less work-related stress, and 71% reported lower levels of burnout . More than 40% of employees said their mental health had improved, with significant portions of the group reporting decreases in anxiety and negative emotions.

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Almost 40% of employees also said their physical health got better during the pilot period, perhaps because they had more time for hobbies, exercise, cooking, family time, and other leisure activities. Nearly half of workers also said they weren’t as tired as they were before the experiment, and 40% said it was easier to get to sleep.

Burchell feared that shorter weeks would force people to work at a higher pace or intensity when they were on the clock, which could have been stressful enough to negate the wellness benefits of having extra time off. But, he says, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. “People found all sorts of ways of working more efficiently, cutting out lots of the time they were wasting,” he says.

In the end, 96% of employees said they preferred four-day schedules.

The shift was positive for employers, too. Among companies in the study, revenue increased by an average of about 1% during the pilot period, and employee turnover and absenteeism went down. Almost all of the businesses in the program said they planned to continue the four-day work week experiment, in some cases indefinitely.

That’s a good thing, because most employees said they’d need a significant pay bump to go back to working five full days per week, and 15% said no amount of money would convince them to go back.

Researcher Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who studies working hours, says she’s optimistic that other companies, including those in the U.S., are waking up to the benefits of shorter work weeks. The growing trend of “summer Fridays” and periodic days off throughout the year, she says, points to a growing acceptance of working less—one that may culminate in four-day work weeks adopted at a wider scale.

The pandemic also made people reimagine what the workplace can look like , Burchell adds.

“When I told people I was looking at work time reductions three years ago, people thought I was a bit utopian, a bit of a dreamer,” he says. “Now, everyone’s talking about it like, ‘This is happening.’”

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Four-day work week is a necessary part of human progress – here’s a plan to make it happen

Professor of Economics and Political Economy, University of Leeds

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“We should work to live, not live to work”, declared John McDonnell in his speech to Britain’s Labour Party Conference . He followed this up with a commitment to the goal of a 32-hour, four-day work week. The goal, McDonnell said, was to be achieved within ten years and, importantly, was to be realised with no loss of pay.

The reduction of the working week to four days would be truly transformative. It would represent a radical break with the dominant work culture that exists in our contemporary capitalist society.

Yet its radicalism also presents challenges. Will business accept a cut in the working week? What kind of legislation will be required to achieve the cut? Ultimately, can capitalism be adapted to accommodate a four-day week or will it require us to imagine – and create – a future beyond capitalism?

The case for working less

The arguments for working less are compelling. Shorter work hours would free up time for us to do and be things outside of work. It would enable us to live better lives.

Evidence shows how longer work hours are associated with various forms of sickness – both physical and mental . The reduction of work hours, in this case, could help to raise the health and well-being of workers.

Beyond personal benefits, we could mitigate the effects of climate change by working less. The work-spend treadmill has an environmental cost that we could resolve by curbing the time we devote to work.

Less work could also pay for itself by giving rise to higher productivity . Rested bodies and minds make for more productive hours and offer the opportunity to produce what we need with more free time.

Finally, we might also work better . If we eliminate hours of drudgery, we could leave more time for us to enjoy more rewarding work. Reducing working hours is as much about enhancing the quality of work as about reducing its burden.

Work’s persistence

But the system in which we live keeps on pressing us to work more. It was once assumed that capitalism would develop in ways that would deliver shorter work hours. Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously dreamed of a 15-hour work week by 2030 . He thought this would be achieved through no fundamental reform of capitalism.

In reality, however, hours of work in capitalist economies have remained stubbornly high and have even shown signs of increase ( especially since the global financial crisis ). Large differences in work hours exist between countries, to be sure. German workers enjoy shorter work hours than their US counterparts , for example.

But no country stands anywhere close to achieving a 15- or even 30-hour work week in the next ten years. On current trends, most capitalist economies look set to have average working weeks more than double Keynes’s prediction.

The reasons for this stagnation in work hours are varied. On the one hand, there is the issue of power. Workers cannot hope to secure shorter hours if they lack the bargaining power to realise them. The decline of unions and shift towards the “shareholder value model” of management , which measures a company’s success by the return it brings to shareholders, has resulted in many people working longer, or the same hours, for lower pay.

On the other hand, the continued force of consumerism has acted as a prop to the work ethic. Advertising and product innovation have created a culture where longer hours have been accepted as normal, even while they have inhibited the freedom of workers to live well.

Making it happen

The challenge for any political party that is committed to the goal of working less is to overcome the above obstacles. Notably, the Labour Party has rejected an economy-wide curb on work time. Instead, it favours a sector-by-sector approach, via a renewed system of collective bargaining.

McDonnell has suggested that working hours (along with wage rates and conditions) could be agreed at a sector level through negotiation between employers and trade unions. Any agreements brokered on reduced working hours could then become legally binding. This approach, in some ways, follows the lead of collective bargaining arrangements in Germany , where employers and trade unions have agreed on shorter working weeks.

The problem here will be reviving collective bargaining at a time of low union membership . Some service sectors, such as the retail and care sectors, have a very limited union presence and curbing work hours may be difficult to achieve under this policy.

McDonnell also proposed a “Working Time Commission” with the power to recommend the government increases statutory leave entitlements as quickly as possible without increasing unemployment. This is more promising in that it aims to create a new debate – and ideally a new consensus – around the case for shortening work time across the economy as a whole. One effect of this commission might be the recommendation and implementation of a four-day work week in all sectors.

A wider policy agenda for shorter work hours is outlined in a new report written by Lord Skidelsky , which was commissioned by McDonnell. While there are areas to disagree on , the report itself – and Labour’s commitment to this policy – mark a significant step forward in the discussion of reducing work time. Generally, there now seems greater pressure to secure a four-day or even three-day work week .

Still, the barriers to change remain formidable. As seen in the reception by industry groups to Labour’s announcement , business will take some convincing about the merits of a shorter working week.

But the scepticism of business only shows how far we need to rethink the economy and life more generally. If we continue to work as long as we do, we will not just keep on damaging ourselves, but also our planet. Working less, in short, is not some luxury, but a necessary part of our progress as human beings.

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Want a four-day workweek? How to convince your boss to test it out

It’s no surprise that many people like the idea of a four-day workweek.

Convincing your employer to test it out, on the other hand, may not be an easy task.

Only a relatively small number of employers offer a four-day policy, However, 40 companies in the U.S. and Canada are currently checking it out in a pilot program run by 4 Day Week Global .

And on Monday, 70 businesses with a total of 3,300 workers in the U.K. began their own six-month pilots. Later this year, the organization expects to launch a second North American program.

The idea is simple: employees work 80 percent of the time but maintain 100 percent productivity for 100 percent of the pay. It doesn’t mean less work, but rather employees work more efficiently on the job, including cutting back on unnecessary meetings.

What’s more, intense interest from employees seeking the change, has stirred 4 Day Week Global to begin offering workshops on how to persuade employers to give four-day weeks a try.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, global programs and development manager for 4 Day Week Global, believes companies can be persuaded to see the benefits of the change.

“My sense is the resistance is not around ,‘Is it possible to work a four-day week?’ ” he said. “The resistance comes around, ‘Is it possible in our company? Is it possible given our market?’ ”

“It is more a conversation around strategy and tactics and not philosophy.”

To be sure, a four-day workweek won’t be a good fit for every business or every industry.

Here’s what you should know before you approach your employer about the shortened workweek, according to Pang.

1. Address real issues

Don’t just make an appeal based on your desire to work fewer days. Instead, you should address everyday challenges the company is facing, said Pang, who will be leading the workshops.

“It should be presented as a solution to challenges of recruitment and retention and burnout and work/life balance sustainability,” Pang advised.

In addition, many experts believe the adoption of four-day workweeks could help employers attract and retain talent .

“Offering shortened workweeks certainly gives employers an edge in hiring,” said Dave Fisch, CEO of career website Ladders.

“For employers unwilling to adjust their policies to reflect the demand for flexibility, they are at risk of losing talented people and could struggle to replace them,” he added.

2. Do your homework

Before you make your case, do some digging to figure out how a shortened week can work in your company. Perhaps you can identify a division or segment of the company that can test it out first, Pang suggested.

If possible, you can try to identify what can be eliminated during the workday to improve efficiency, such as excess meetings, or perhaps what can be automated or outsourced.

“Studies tell us that office workers lose about two to three hours of productive time every day to overly long meetings, to technology distractions, to interruptions in the office,” Pang said.

“What that tells us is the four-day week is already here; it is just buried under outmoded ways of working,” he said.

3. Establish benchmarks

It is best to come armed with suggestions of what benchmarks need to be met in order for the trial to be deemed a success.

“The last thing you want is to have a trial where you feel everyone feels it went well but then the CEO says we’re going back to five days because of these reasons,” Pang said.

4. Ask questions

If you face resistance after you make the pitch, ask company leaders what evidence would clarify the decision for them.

Perhaps that evidence would be more data from a similar or competing organization or something else that can show how it may work.

5. Cast the leader as the protagonist

Emphasize the positive role the CEO or leader can play in helping workers and easing workplace challenges by enacting a four-day workweek, Pang said.

By doing that, and also highlighting the positive outcome on their own lives, you are more likely to turn them from skeptics to enthusiasts, he explained.

“This is the kind of story that every CEO would love to be able to tell about themselves,” Pang said. “In a sense what you’re doing is giving them the chance to be the center of that story.”

This article originally appeared on Invest in You: Ready. Set. Grow. , a CNBC multiplatform financial wellness and education initiative, in partnership with Acorns .

Disclosure: Invest in You: Ready. Set. Grow. is a financial wellness and education initiative from CNBC and Acorns, the micro-investing app. NBCUniversal and Comcast Ventures are investors in Acorns .

How to negotiate a four-day work week

For many who work full time, a four-day work week is the ultimate perk. Most of us get this only occasionally, when we take a day off or have a long holiday weekend , but not on a regular basis. In fact, a recent report from the Society for Human Resource Management notes that only 15 percent of companies in the U.S. offer it (that is, 32 hours per week or less).

This is slowly changing, though, as more companies recognize the benefits of a four-day week: happier and healthier employees who are just as productive — if not more so — as those working five days.

In some cases, companies and organizations that get this, and are able to offer a four-day work week (although not all can), have adopted it across the board. In others, they’ve become more receptive to those who request it, and who can make the case for why it would work.

Where to start

But how do you make that case? If you’re among those whose company doesn’t offer this, but think it could work for you and them, how do you proceed?

First, you do your homework says Stew Friedman , Wharton’s practice professor of management emeritus, founder of its Leadership Program and Work/Life Integration Project, and bestselling author (whose next book, " Parents Who Lead ", comes out in March).

“You can’t just walk in and say, ‘I need a four-day work week,’” he said, “unless you’re a very highly prized employee that has six different options to go across the street or elsewhere and you’re ready to quit at a moment’s notice …. then you can ask for whatever you want.”

“What I would recommend is that you think through how this change in your schedule is going to benefit your employer. You already know how it’s going to benefit you, and your family probably, maybe your community too. What you want to do is approach this as something that you’re doing to make things better for your boss.”

Create a proposal

Once you’ve thought things through, experts recommend that you then come up with a written proposal which outlines how you’ll complete your tasks, communicate (with your boss, clients, customers and co-workers), and maintain or improve your productivity.

If you’re in sales, for example, you might say you’ll be able to make more calls, and that there will be a higher yield, Friedman says. You might also propose certain changes, like more streamlined meetings and chat vs. email, and come up with strategies for minimizing distractions (which studies show are the biggest time suck of all). Beyond this, you can suggest using certain technologies to help streamline processes, if your company hasn’t yet adopted them. Examples include cloud platforms for video conferencing and collaboration (some of which are free), shared calendars, online and interactive whiteboards, etc.

Next, you set up a meeting with your boss . This should be at a time when he or she isn’t too swamped or stressed out (and ideally after you’ve accomplished something of value), where you further discuss your proposal.

Give examples

When making your case, it can also help to note how a shortened work week has helped other companies.

One of the most well-known examples, which made headlines last year when it trialed and then implemented this, is Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand estate planning firm. The company’s founder, Andrew Barnes, opted to go the four-day route after reading about a survey that showed a significant lack of productivity among UK employees.

The survey, which polled nearly 2,000 office workers, found that few actually worked a full day. Even though they were physically at the office, they only worked for an average of two hours and fifty three minutes. The rest of the time, like millions of others tethered to a desk, they did other things, like reading the news, checking social media, and calling friends. Some even looked for other jobs.

Based on this, Barnes decided to let his 200+ employees work four days a week, without changing their salaries or making them work longer hours, to see if they’d be just as productive. And they were, he said in a recent TED talk . “Productivity actually stayed the same overall.”

“But It was the other scores that absolutely blew us away,” he added. “Engagement scores went up between 30 and 40 percent … stress levels dropped 15 percent. But the one that really got us was people said ‘We’re better able to handle our workload working four days, not five.’”

Another widely publicized example, and more recent, comes from Microsoft Japan . This past summer it trialed a shortened work week and found, among other things, that productivity increased by nearly 40 percent.

Anticipate challenges

Although sharing these stats may help persuade your boss, as will noting how he or she and the company will benefit, it’s also important to anticipate any challenges that might arise. Then, before you meet, consider how you’d resolve these says Jessica DeGroot, founder and president of the ThirdPath Institute , a nonprofit organization that helps people find new ways to redesign work and family.

“You have some talking points and you think ahead …. what are they going to be worried about? What if someone needs to get a hold of you on the day that you’re not working? You’ve thought that through, how do you handle that? How are you gonna go from the amount of work you currently handle to 80 percent work?”

When making your case for a reduced workweek, you’ve also got to be clear about what you want, and what you don’t, especially when it comes to how the week could be structured. Companies have done this in several ways, so what you have in mind and what your company might allow could be completely different. Some wouldn’t actually cut hours, for example, but would compress them, typically into four 10-hour days. Others may want to alternate four and five-day weeks, and/or require that you work specific days, depending upon business needs.

Consider your budget

There’s also the issue of pay. Would you expect to continue at your current salary or be willing to have your pay prorated?

If the latter is doable, it could be yet another way to make your case, since you’d be saving the company money. In this instance, though, it’s important to be sure you can really afford it.

This was a particularly big concern for Shimul Bhuva and Roger Trombley of Ann Arbor, Michigan, two Ford engineers who were married and wanted to have children, and raise them themselves without leaving their jobs. Their hope, Bhuva said, was that each could switch to a reduced schedule, which Ford allows, so that between days off and part-time telecommuting, one parent could always be home with the kids. It would, however, mean less income, since both salaries would be prorated.

“We spent about a year before having kids, and before deciding to do this schedule, tracking our finances and really getting a hold of what’s coming in and where is it all going,” Bhuva said. “We were tracking everything down to the dollar … just to see what things would look like for us … That was a very very careful part of our decision making.”

And it ultimately worked out well. By cutting costs in certain areas, and generally spending less, they were able to sustain their revised work schedules, which they hope to maintain for the rest of their careers.

“The tradeoffs financially were a very small price to pay for what we’ve gotten in return, which is a very fulfilling and balanced life,” Bhuva said. “Both at home and at work, we’re able to keep one foot in each corner and really just take care of all pieces of ourselves without being too stressed out.”

Suggest a trial period

To further make your case, it’s often helpful to suggest a trial run.

“You pitch it as an experiment,” Friedman said, “which means time limited — let’s just try this, this is not forever — and let’s see if it works for us … and if it doesn’t work out, well then we’ll go back to the way it was or we’ll try something different.”

If you still get a no, though, don’t give up say experts. Keep doing your best work and ask if you can revisit your proposal at another time. As four-day work weeks become more common, things could change, and your boss, and company, just might come around.

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How to Ask Your Boss For a 4-Day Workweek

The “nine-to-five job” is based on a model less than 100 years old, and it’s about time we rethink it. by Joe Sanok

Summary .   

Companies around the world are experimenting with a four-day workweek, and participants are reporting feeling less burned out, more productive, and happier. Early in his career, author Joe Sanok was able to negotiate a four-day workweek himself. In this article, he suggests some tips around how you can do the same:

• First, run your own trial period. Use vacation or flex time to experiment with working four days a week at least once a month. Document your productivity, including any obstacles you faced, as well as what worked well for you versus what didn’t.
• Think about the impact a shorter week will have on your colleagues. Would the shorter week require you to brainstorm new ways of collaborating or reschedule certain meetings? These are all questions you should be able to answer before approaching your boss.
• Have a conversation with your manager. Be straightforward, propose a more formal experiment, and leave time to hear their feedback.
• Test your experiment. You may find it useful to set up a recurring team meeting at the end of each week during which you can reflect on how people are feeling and being impacted by this trial period.

Imagine living in a world of forever, three-day weekends.

Partner Center

6 Arguments For A Shorter Workweek

The economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that in 100 years time, technological advances would allow people to work as few as 15 hours a week.

It's not 2030 just yet, but it seems that Keynes' prediction is unlikely to hold true. In the U.S., the five-day, 40-hour work has held sway for at least the past half century.

In honor of Labor Day, here are six reasons we should consider a shorter workweek:

1. It would make people healthier.

In July, the president of the U.K.'s leading public health industry group  declared that the five-day workweek is causing people too much stress  and that Britain should instead switch to a four-day workweek.

In  an interview with The Guardian , professor John Ashton says that the excess stress can lead people to have high blood pressure and suffer from mental health problems like anxiety and depression.

"It would mean that people might smile more and be happier, and improve general health," Ashton says.

2. It can help people focus better.

The software company 37signals institutes a four-day, 32-hour week from May through October. In a 2012 op-ed for the New York Times, cofounder Jason Fried  writes that the reduced schedule makes people more focused  on getting things done in the limited time they have.

"When you have a compressed workweek, you tend to focus on what’s important," he writes. "Constraining time encourages quality time."

3. People will be more productive because they are more empowered.

In  an article published earlier this month by The New Yorker , Maria Konnikova writes that studies show that giving people more free time makes them feel like they are more in control of their own lives.

Other studies, she says, find that workers who feel they have more autonomy are inclined to be more efficient in their work. Ergo, giving people more free time will lead them to be more productive.

"We’re creative and productive when we feel we have space to find our own way; we’re frustrated and stubborn when we don't," she writes.

4. The extra sleep will be good for people.

Konnikova  writes at The New Yorker  that a shorter workweek would give people more time to sleep, which she says would lead to "better cognition, clearer thinking, and increased productivity."

Indeed,  a 2011 study  found that when members of the Stanford University basketball team added 90 minutes of sleep to their routine for more than five weeks, they were able to sprint faster and shoot more accurately.

5. Other countries have found success working fewer hours.

While  Americans work fewer hours than people in East Asian economies  like Singapore and Korea, the U.S. is still working much harder  than most of Europe .

And many of those European economies are doing quite nicely.

As Annalyn Kurtz points out  in an article for CNN Money , the average German worker puts in 394 fewer hours — the equivalent of 49 eight-hour days — than the average American each year. And yet, the country enjoys the world's fourth largest economy despite being its 17th most populous nation.

Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway also have strong economies despite working fewer hours than the average nation.

6. It's worked here, too.

The online education company  Treehouse  has a four-day, 32-hour workweek all year round, and its cofounder Ryan Carson swears by it.

In  an op-ed published by Quartz  earlier this year, Carson explains that his company makes up for the extra day by cutting out time-wasters like company emails and excess meetings, instead choosing to put internal communication on a message board where people can respond when they have time.

The result is that employees have higher morale after an extra day off, and recruiting good people is much, much easier.

Carson writes, "One of the team told me he regularly gets emails from Facebook trying to win him over and his answer is always the same: 'Do you work a four-day week yet?'"

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50 Persuasive Speech Topics for High School Students

September 9, 2024

Throughout high school, students will be asked to write about topics and make compelling arguments for certain positions. These persuasive speeches and other writing assignments train a student's communication skills. Creating a compelling, persuasive speech is a powerful skill that will help students in all aspects of their careers, not just in writing courses. The ability to write persuasively will especially have a huge effect on your admissions results when writing your personal statements and essays for college. 

With a powerful speech, students can express their opinions, influence others, and develop critical communication skills for school and the workplace. Choosing the right topic for a speech is often as important as how well it's written. To help you find the right topics for your audience, here are 50 persuasive speech topics you can use to help you get started with your writing. 

Want an expert's opinion on your college applications? Book a free strategy call and begin your admissions journey today! 

What Makes a Good Persuasive Speech Topic?

Compelling persuasive speech topics are relatable, debatable, and relevant. Students should investigate a topic they're passionate about and will intrigue an audience. Don't just take an easy position everyone can agree with—audiences are interested in ideas they may have never heard before, expressed enthusiastically by a passionate speaker. 

When ideating a topic, find something with clear, opposing viewpoints. Research the available arguments and present your speech in a way that promotes a meaningful discussion. For example, topics regarding the use of social media, the right to freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court are general and can engage a wide audience. 

Topics that everyone agrees with, have no opposing viewpoints, and require no research will not make for interesting speeches. Choose a topic that will challenge you and your audience, but avoid being offensive or controversial for its own sake. A topic you're genuinely interested in—like renewable energy for engineering students or social media platforms for communications students will make writing a compelling speech much more natural. With additional research and effective writing techniques, you can craft a speech to captivate an audience. 

How to Choose the Right Persuasive Speech Topic for Your Audience

Choosing the right topic starts with knowing your target audience. While ideating, consider:

• Who are you targeting? 
• What do you want to convince them? 
• What counter-arguments may they have? 

Think about those who would agree with you, be on the fence with you, and who would directly oppose your viewpoint. Writing persuasively is not just about presenting facts and hoping others agree. It's about making an emotional connection with your audience and using that impression to shift their thinking. 

Once you've given careful thought to those you'd be presenting to, brainstorm persuasive speech topic ideas that may resonate with them. Make a list of potential ideas and interrogate their merit. Consider current events, personal experiences, and issues others may relate to. Then, narrow down your list to the persuasive topics you would be most interested in—as an audience member and a researcher. 

Once you've landed on a few interesting topics, don't rest on them. Ask for feedback and get insights from family, friends, and teachers. Outside perspectives are important; others may have experiences that could provide you with valuable knowledge to use when refining your topic. 

50 Persuasive Speech Topic Ideas

School topics.

• The Benefits and Drawbacks of Mandatory School Uniforms
• How Effective is the School Grading System?
• How Students can Shape their Curriculum
• Is Homework Beneficial or Harmful?
• How Would Schools Handle a Four-Day Week?

Art and Humanities Topics

• Art or Vandalism: The History of Graffiti
• Art vs STEM: What Should Schools Prioritize?
• AI-Generated Media: How Do Humans Value Art?
• The Correlation Between Art and Mental Health
• Are Video Games the Ultimate Artform?

Social Issues Topics

• The Right to Protest: Traditional Movements vs Digital Activism
• Why do Wealthy Countries have Declining Birth Rates?
• Should For-Profit Prisons be Permanently Abolished?
• Is Healthcare a Human Right?

Environmental Issues

• Why Corporations Need Stricter Plastics Regulation
• Environmental Ethics: Human Development vs Species Preservation
• The Benefits and Drawbacks of Fully Electric Vehicles
• History of Geo-Engineering: Can Society Reverse Climate Change?
• What is Dark Oxygen? The Effect of Deep Sea Mining

Technology and Media Topics

• Should the Government Regulate the Coming AI revolution?
• Where Does Online Misinformation Come From?
• Why Does Social Media Affect Self-Image?
• The Right to Privacy: How Online anonymity affects people's behavior
• Why All Messaging Apps Should Have End-to-End Encryption
• Should Artificial Intelligence be Used in Creative Works?
• Should Social Media Platforms be Accountable for their Users?

Politics and Government

• Should Voting be Compulsory?
• How Public and Private Funding Affect Political Campaigns
• What is gerrymandering? 
• Why Do Some Countries Have Mandatory Military Service?
• The benefits and drawbacks of term limits for elected officials

Sports Topics

• Should esports be officially recognized as part of the Olympic Games?
• MMA and Boxing: The Ethics of Broadcasting Violence
• Has Football Become More Dangerous?
• Should Men and Women compete in the same Leagues? 
• Restrictor Plates: Why Did NASCAR Make Racing Slower?

Economy and Finance

• Should Cryptocurrency be Regulated?
• Does a minimum wage help or hurt the economy?
• Employees vs contractors: How freelance work Affects commerce
• Is Universal Basic Income a Viable Option?
• When should the Government regulate the Market?

STEM Topics

• What are the Benefits of Mars Colonization?
• City Planning: How US Infrastructure Affects the Environment
• Why Nuclear Energy is the Cleanest, Safest, and Cheapest Option
• Why the US Hasn't Returned to the Moon Yet
• Where will Technological Implants take Human Evolution?

Culture and Entertainment Industry Topics

• How Binge-Culture Has Affected Our Attention Spans
• How Streaming Services Caused the 2023 Writers Strike
• Why are actors paid so highly? Hollywood's income inequality
• Should IP Copyright be abolished? 

Enhance Your Academic Profile With InGenius Prep

Crafting a persuasive speech isn’t just about presenting facts—it’s about connecting with your audience, understanding their perspectives, and sparking meaningful conversations. These skills are especially important in the college admissions process, where every aspect of your college application is trying to convince an Admissions Officer you're worthy of acceptance. 

For more on college applications, InGenius Prep's counseling services are designed to guide high school students through every step of the admissions process. With a focus on story-telling, candidacy building, and highlighting the most impactful aspect of your student profile, we’ll help you capture the attention of your admissions officers. 

Ready to take the next step? Book a free strategy call with an advisor today to start your admissions journey.

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Michelle Cottle

Opinion Writer

The Week in Bad Political Behavior

With less than two months to go until Election Day, it is impossible to keep track of all the political madness afoot. So much bad behavior. So much weirdness. But for the remainder of this campaign season, I pledge to keep an extra close eye on things for you and, every Friday, spotlight a smattering of the week’s more colorful developments, including obscure bits you easily might have missed.

This week brought us some brutal MAGA-on-MAGA combat, compliments of Laura Loomer, the right-wing influencer who has been kicking it with Donald Trump on the campaign trail of late. Loomer started things off by snarking on X that if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Get it? Because Harris is half Indian.

The smear wasn’t clever or funny and, in fact, was so thuddingly racist it prompted a public scolding from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (yep, you read that right: Marjorie. Taylor. Greene), who denounced Loomer’s post as “ appalling and extremely racist ” and later told CNN that Loomer lacked “ the right mentality ” to advise a presidential campaign. Loomer responded by slamming Greene as the real racist — and, oh, yes, also “ gutter trash .”

But wait! There’s more. One of the Senate’s top Trump toadies, Lindsey Graham, also publicly warned his MAGA king against associating with the “toxic” Loomer, prompting Loomer to go hard at Graham, with an attack on the senator’s loyalty to Trump and on his sexual orientation.

I guess this is what happens when you build a political movement on the idea that nastiness and pugilism are signs of courage and integrity.

It looks as though Mayor Eric Adams of New York may have a Trumpian predilection for surrounding himself with questionable characters. Various aides have been swept into multiple federal investigations of possible corruption at City Hall and the Police Department. The mayor, a Democrat, has had his phone seized and his judgment questioned, since many of those under investigation were his direct appointees, including the police commissioner, who resigned on Thursday .

How is Adams responding to the gathering storm? By explaining to New Yorkers what’s going on or by vowing to clean up his administration? Don’t be silly. He is instead cloaking himself in the good book by comparing himself to Job , the biblical innocent whose suffering was imposed by God as part of a divine test.

“I wish I could tell you that I had one moment in my life that was a Job moment,” he said at an evangelical Black church in Brooklyn on Sunday. “But I did not have one. I had many.”

Lord, deliver us from this shameless posturing.

Just when you thought Trump’s migrants-munching-pets hullabaloo couldn’t get any more delicious, up pops Marianne Williamson, the erstwhile Democratic presidential hopeful, with this spiritually themed warning on X:

“Continuing to dump on Trump because of the ‘eating cats’ issue will create blowback on Nov. 5. Haitian voodoo is in fact real, and to dismiss the story out-of-hand rather than listen to the citizens of Springfield, Ohio confirms in the minds of many voters the stereotype of Democrats as smug elite jerks who think they’re too smart to listen to anyone outside their own silo.”

I’m just going to leave this here for you to unpack on your own.

Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

Worried About Kamala Harris? ‘That’s Tomorrow’s Problem.’

For those for whom the presidential election offers an obvious and decisive choice, there is nothing more baffling than undecided voters.

What could they possibly be waiting for?

Donald Trump has made it endlessly clear who he is. Those who count themselves as his fans somehow look at this whiny, wounded figure and see a tough guy and strongman who will stand up for people like them or at least someone who will serve their interests. As for JD Vance, the more he seems to explore who he is, the more he seems to alienate everyone else.

People who say they don’t know enough about Kamala Harris, on the other hand, have a point. Harris’s strategy is to stay vague, and it’s an astute one: It enables her to capture Never Trumpers, independents, moderates and liberals without alienating the progressive wing, third-party flirters and potential abstainers. This may frustrate those keen on more detail, but her campaign knows too well that every detail risks turning off potential voters.

Like many people in the broad Harris coalition, I am sure I will dislike some of Harris’s policy decisions and actions. That’s beside the point.

Or, as the conservative journalist David Frum put it on the “Bulwark” podcast last week, “That’s tomorrow’s problem.” Frum has his own reasons to foresee disagreement with a Harris administration. But, he explained, “today’s problem is you have to save the Constitution, save NATO, save trade, save American leadership in the world.”

It’s a simple point, but it offers a clarifying framework. For those who are still wavering, consider not only the stakes but also the timeline. If you are at all concerned about those larger issues, you can sweat the smaller ones later. Regardless of any disagreements — petty or significant, ideological or practical — you may have with her, Harris is an intelligent, capable and healthy individual who will be subject to ordinary checks and balances.

You might say that’s a low bar. But remember, that is the bar.

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Jesse Wegman

Editorial Board Member

Where Was Merrick Garland When Justice Needed Him?

Attorney General Merrick Garland gave an important and sadly necessary speech on Thursday, thanking the 115,000 employees of the Justice Department for their efforts and steeling them for the difficult months ahead.

The purpose of this pep talk was to defend against right-wing charges of politicized prosecutions and to warn of the dangers of assaulting federal law enforcement.

“Over the past three and a half years, there has been an escalation of attacks on the Justice Department’s career lawyers, agents and other personnel that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism and legitimate and necessary oversight of our work,” Garland said, noting the “conspiracy theories, dangerous falsehoods, efforts to bully and intimidate career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out and threats of actual violence.”

Those are all important points, and it’s a frightening reminder of where we are that he felt he had to make them at all. No previous attorney general has had to say these things, because no previous attorney general has been faced with a presidential nominee who has openly promised to politicize the Justice Department if elected (and who took clear steps in that direction when he was last in office).

That’s the fine line Garland has to walk. He conspicuously did not utter Donald Trump’s name on Thursday, no doubt out of respect for the department’s rule against getting involved in electoral politics, but the hard truth remains: Those conspiracy theories, the threats of violence, the undermining of law enforcement — they are inspired and even promoted by one man, a man who is the single biggest threat to independent justice and the rule of law in America.

And, unfortunately, a man whom Garland tried his best to ignore until it was too late.

“There is not one rule for friends and another for foes, one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless, one rule for the rich and another for the poor, one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans,” Garland said in his speech.

The right words, for sure, but not really true. By delaying any investigation or prosecution of Trump until almost two years after he became attorney general, Garland hamstrung Jack Smith, the dogged and beleaguered special counsel, leaving little time for the predictable unpredictabilities of two high-stakes prosecutions. Both were as solid as federal cases get, and now neither has any chance of being completed before the election, leaving voters without clear legal conclusions about Trump’s responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot and the highly classified documents he took from the White House.

In short, for Donald Trump there was, and always is, a separate rule. Contrary to the bogus complaints of “lawfare,” the Justice Department has treated Trump better, not worse, than everyone else. If Trump wins in November and orders Justice to drop the prosecutions against him, that will be a lasting tarnish of Garland’s legacy.

Farah Stockman

Editorial Board Member, reporting from Boston

The Dirtiest Trick Whitey Bulger Ever Played on Boston

To mark the 50th anniversary of court-ordered school desegregation in Boston on Thursday, a yellow school bus drove reporters and educators on a pilgrimage around the city to sites that played a key role in that notoriously divisive period in Boston’s civic life.

The tour went to City Hall, where a mob of busing opponents turned on Senator Ted Kennedy, shattering the windows of the building where he took refuge. It stopped at South Boston High School, where white parents threw stones and insults at Black children from Roxbury who were arriving for their first day of class. It made its way to Freedom House in Roxbury, where Black parents, educators and activists strategized about how to keep children safe and continue their struggle for more equitable education.

On the bus, Ira Jackson — chief of staff to Kevin White, who was mayor of Boston in those fateful days in 1974 — took the microphone and told the incredible story about how the mayor learned on the eve of that first day of school that Whitey Bulger, the notorious Irish American mobster, was planning to kill Black children on those buses. The city was already a tinderbox. An evil act like that would have set it ablaze.

Mayor White begged Washington for federal marshals, but President Gerald Ford refused. The mayor ended that night at the home of Whitey Bulger’s brother, William, a powerful politician at the time, warning him to dissuade his brother. City Hall then did what it could to beef up the police presence on the streets.

So while the nation watched in horror that day as a bastion of liberalism revealed its inner Selma, Ira Jackson called the mayor and reported the good news: Nobody had died.

But if you look back, no one benefited more from the chaos and disorder of those years than Whitey Bulger. Police officers lost their credibility, because they were enforcing an unpopular order. South Boston “became a no man’s land,” Jackson said. Amid the chaos and violence, white students dropped out of South Boston High in droves and never went back. Bulger recruited them to sell drugs.

That’s the irony: Bulger, who portrayed himself as protecting his white Irish community from dangerous Black people, proved to be his own people’s deadliest scourge, as Michael Patrick MacDonald points out in his memoir, “All Souls: A Family Story From Southie.”

Standing in the auditorium of South Boston High, MacDonald read from his book for the people on the bus tour and noted how much the people of South Boston and Roxbury had in common then, and now. They were poor and getting a substandard education. And today, they are priced out of the neighborhoods where they were born.

“What kills me is how easy it is to bring them together,” he told me, of his community organizing work. “When I am working with Black moms and white moms who have lost kids to incarceration or drugs, they see themselves in each other.”

Editorial Board Member, reporting from Charlotte, N.C.

Even Harris’s Strongest Supporters Long for More Details

Kamala Harris’s buoyant rally in Charlotte, N.C., on Thursday — her first rally since her successful trouncing of Donald Trump at their debate on Tuesday — was full of some of her most faithful supporters. But even here, several voters said they wanted to hear more details about what she intends to do in office.

“I’d like to see her talk a little more about immigration,” Terra Barnhill, 51, told me after the rally in this battleground state. “A lot of my friends who are on the fence are concerned about that,” Barnhill said.

Even fully decided voters still had questions about how Harris planned to make their lives better. Muriel Harley, 66, an accountant from Raleigh, said the rally had been thrilling.

“To me it was emotional, just as a Black woman,” Harley, 66, told me outside the Bojangles Coliseum afterward. Even so, Harley, who wore a shirt with an image of Harris as a child, said she had at least one issue in mind she hoped the candidate would directly address.

“She needs to talk about student loan forgiveness,” Harley said. “I went back to grad school,” she explained, shaking her head about the loan debt she faced.

Polls have consistently shown Trump with an edge among voters concerned about the economy, and that concern was reflected even among Democrats who told me they want to hear more from Harris about what can be done to help Americans grappling with the higher prices they’ve experienced under President Biden, especially at the grocery store.

At the rally, attended by more than 8,000 very excited supporters, Harris seemed to lean harder into those concerns. She reminded voters of her middle-class upbringing and said she wanted a country where “every American has an opportunity to own a home, to build wealth, to start a business.”

Harris also repeated her promise of a tax cut for small businesses. “I know they are the backbone of America’s economy,” she said.

But while Harris has said she would expand the child tax credit and give a tax break to small businesses, she has yet to offer many specifics on what she would do as president to lower prices. She did, however, bring up her plan to offer $25,000 in aid to first-time home buyers — a good idea that would provide direct relief to Americans (though it would certainly require building more housing, something Harris has said she would support).

Addressing the higher costs Americans are grappling with is thorny: The causes of these economic pressures are complex, and the president’s role in driving down costs is somewhat constrained. Harris will have to find a way to give Americans more specifics anyway. Doing so could be crucial to making sure voters don’t look for relief anywhere else.

David Wallace-Wells

Hurricane Francine Tells Us a Lot About Storm Seasons to Come

A week ago, the much-hyped hurricane season was looking like a fascinating dud. Forecasters had projected an incredibly busy summer and fall, with many predicting the worst season in modern history. But after an early encounter with Hurricane Beryl, which made an unusual June landfall in Grenada as a Category 4 storm, there has been hardly any activity at all in the Atlantic basin, leading meteorologists and climate scientists alike to wonder what happened and why the terrifying-seeming season fizzled out so spectacularly.

The waters of the Atlantic remained astonishingly high, meaning that any storm to pass through the waters of the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico was likely to become a powerhouse. Nonetheless, weather patterns farther offshore seem to have shifted the geography of storm formation. Tropical cyclones were not appearing off the coast of Africa, where they typically begin their trip westward, but over the continent instead, producing pretty much unheard-of meteorological activity and delivering historic amounts of rainfall to the Sahara.

Hurricane Francine, which made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 2 on Wednesday, isn’t exactly a historic storm, though it has produced widespread flooding and power outages for hundreds of thousands all along the Gulf Coast. But as a sort of “tweener” weather event, it does illustrate several features of the new phase of climate history we are all now living through, having left behind the window of global temperatures that enclose all of human history — and all of our previous experiences of hurricanes.

First, even quiet seasons and unexceptional storms can generate an awful lot of damage and disruption. Some of that reflects the increasing level of valuable stuff we keep building blithely in harm’s way. But it also means that even relatively small increases in the actual intensity of extreme events can produce enormous increases in weather damage. Increasingly in the United States, “normal” seeming meteorological events are imposing costs in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

Second, though many people assume that warming will increase the number of hurricanes, in fact, climate science is much more confident that it will make a larger share of them high intensity storms (perhaps even necessitating the creation of new levels on the category scale).

And third, the behavior of individual storms is itself being changed by warming, which seems particularly effective at getting them to intensify much more rapidly (as Hurricane Otis did last year in Acapulco , Mexico, growing from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in barely one day). Warming can also make them slow down or even stall right at landfall, often producing more damage in a single place.

At the moment, Francine feels like a book end to a surprisingly quiet season, but there may well be more to come, given that roughly half of the season lies still ahead of us. In the further future, the pattern is even more forbidding, with one recent paper suggesting that without rapid emissions reductions, nearly three-quarters of the planet could experience unprecedented weather events over just the next 20 years.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

Something Important Is Happening With JD Vance, Laura Loomer, Project 2025 and Donald Trump

Right-wing absurdities — Donald Trump’s comments about Haitian migrants eating pets, JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” (among other things), Project 2025’s ideas, the conspiracist Laura Loomer being in Trump’s inner circle — are breaking through to regular Americans and undecided voters to a degree that undermines the Trump campaign’s goal of positioning the former president as the more moderate, change-oriented candidate in the race. To me, this is the biggest political dynamic coming out of Tuesday’s debate.

On Wednesday night, I spent a couple of hours with our Times Opinion panel of 14 undecided young voters — a group we are talking to weekly this fall — and I asked them to tell me something they had changed their minds about since our first conversation in mid-August . Two of them quickly brought up how much they had soured on Vance. Another young person had heard about Fred Trump’s assertions about Donald Trump and disabled people and felt disgusted with the former president. While many of them still have reservations about Harris after Tuesday’s debate, they were more dismayed with Trump’s behavior and remarks. Some were disgusted by his false allegations about migrants eating pets in Ohio. Two others brought up the images of Loomer and Trump.

Mark, a 24-year-old chef from California who remains undecided in the race, reflected the sentiments of several in the group when he said of Trump:

He doesn’t necessarily scare me. I think he’s incompetent. What scares me is the people he’s surrounded himself with and how they can use him. Laura Loomer was on the plane with them. The Heritage Foundation and all the plans they have. It just seems like he’s a vessel for other people who are way more competent and have way more plans to do stuff that I personally don’t agree with. I feel like they’re going to use him and get policies enacted that I personally don’t agree with.

A lot of regular people are starting to tune into the presidential race. After the debate, when they looked on TikTok, they saw wacky, unsubstantiated comments about people eating cats on one side and an endorsement from Taylor Swift on the other. Trump and his campaign have tried to position him as the more moderate candidate who would change the economy for the better. Some polls indicate people see him that way. But the more the wacky stuff breaks through to regular people — and it is breaking through — the worse it will be for Trump.

He won in 2016 by being someone people felt they could take a chance on. Listening to our undecided young voters, I didn’t expect to hear such disgust over Vance, Loomer and Project 2025. That stuff is catching on. It’s not hard to imagine many Americans deciding in late October to take a chance on Harris (like they did in 2016 with Trump) rather than see a candidate they don’t like take the White House.

Paul Krugman

What Harris Shouldn’t Say About the Economy

When Kamala Harris talks about economic policy, she talks a lot about the present and the future — about how we currently have low inflation and unemployment, and about things she will do to raise incomes and hold down prices. I’ve seen a number of commentators, however, saying that this isn’t enough, that she also needs to look back, to do more to defend the economic record of the administration in which she has been serving.

That’s a terrible idea. And I say that as someone who believes that the Biden administration did an excellent job coping with the aftermath of the pandemic. The trouble is that making the case for that record takes a fair bit of explaining. And as the old political saying goes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Of course, this dictum applies to politicians, not policy wonks. So let me use two charts to do the explaining Harris shouldn’t, then talk about why none of this should be in her speeches.

First, here’s the evolution of prices and wages since just before the pandemic:

Why start there, rather than from the month Biden took office? Because economic numbers during the pandemic slump were deeply weird. Oil prices crashed, even going negative at one point; average wage data were distorted by the fact that many low-wage workers were laid off; and so on. So better to start in February 2020.

What you can see right away is that inflation surged in 2021-22 but that the surge was temporary: Over the past year consumer prices have risen only 2.5 percent, and even that number largely reflects a price nobody pays — “owners’ equivalent rent,” an estimate of what homeowners would be paying if they were renters. A measure that corresponds to the practice in many other countries, which don’t include that rent equivalent in their inflation numbers, is up only 1.3 percent over the past year.

Why did we have that temporary inflation surge? The best explanation is that it reflected pandemic-related disruptions. One strong piece of evidence for this proposition is that cumulative inflation since the beginning of the pandemic, using comparable measures, has been similar in many wealthy countries:

Still, prices are considerably higher than they were four and a half years ago. But going back to that first chart, so are wages, which for most workers have risen substantially more than prices.

This is, objectively, a pretty good story. We had a one-time jump in prices, which was probably unavoidable given the effects of the pandemic, or at any rate could have been avoided only at the cost of a severe recession; but inflation is back under control, and workers’ purchasing power is higher than ever.

But Americans in general are unhappy with the fact that things cost more than they used to and aren’t mollified by the fact that wages have gone up even more.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s a longstanding result that everyday people don’t think about inflation the way economists do. At times when both prices and wages are rising, people tend to believe that higher prices are taking away their hard-earned wage gains, rather than seeing rising wages and rising prices as two sides of the same coin.

So should Harris be giving lectures on Econ 101, telling voters, “Look, you just don’t understand”? Any adviser suggesting such a thing should be fired on the spot.

No, leave it to people like me to argue that Biden was right to allow a temporary spike in inflation — no matter how big the avalanche of hate mail it inevitably produces. I don’t pretend to be an expert on political strategy, but everything I see says that on economics, Harris is right to focus on what can be, unburdened by what has been.

One of Trump’s Insidious Lies on Abortion Is Grounded in an Old Truth

As the debate over the Debate rages a day later, it’s tempting to try to catalog all of the lies Donald Trump told to an audience of tens of millions of Americans. But more interesting than the fact of his lies is how he lies.

Take a look at the former president’s rambling answer on abortion and reproductive rights. Linsey Davis of ABC News corrected Trump when he claimed, falsely, that Democratic-led states allow “execution after birth.” But he followed that one up with another lie, more insidious and, in its way, more Trumpian.

“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote,” he said.

Let’s stop right there. The first part — “every legal scholar,” whether liberal or conservative — is not only untrue but obviously so. Just look at the briefs filed at the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade. You will find an overwhelming number of liberal scholars weighing in on the side of preserving the constitutional right to an abortion.

But as with so many of Trump’s lies, it is wrapped around a grain of truth. In this case, the grain is that some high-profile liberals once criticized Roe v. Wade. Famously, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did so before she became a Supreme Court justice, arguing that Roe was decided too quickly and too broadly.

Of course, anyone who listened to her reasoning would learn that she did not want Roe overturned. Rather she wanted it to be grounded more explicitly in the Constitution , on equal protection grounds, rather than on the right to privacy. In the 1970s, the liberal law professor John Hart Ely strongly denounced Roe , but by 2022, when Justice Samuel Alito quoted Ely in his decision overturning Roe, attitudes like that were near impossible to find on the left.

This was all part of the political and legal evolution of the debate over abortion rights, but Trump doesn’t do nuance. So he ignored the inconvenient parts of the story and never explained the nature of the objections to Roe. And he changed “some” scholars to “all,” as though through sheer maximalism — the biggest building, the smartest guy, the perfect phone call — he could lull voters into his simplistic, zero-sum view of the world.

It’s also worth noting that, contrary to Trump’s claim, I have yet to meet anyone who actually wants abortion to be decided on a state-by-state basis. Why would they? No matter where you stand on the issue, it involves profound matters of life and death, bodily autonomy and human equality. What abortion opponent is fine with a rule that lets unborn babies be killed in California but not in Kentucky? What abortion rights supporter is content with protecting women from forced birth in New York but not in Texas?

This is why we have a federal Constitution that is supreme over the states — it’s how we protect and defend the fundamental rights of all Americans, regardless of where they happen to live. One of those rights — which Americans continue to support by at least a 2-to-1 majority , even after Roe was struck down — is a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.

If Football Were Treated Like Inflation

Imagine you’re listening to a football game on the radio and the play-by-play guy says: “Patrick Mahomes takes the snap, throws … and that’s 71 yards gained over the last 12 plays!”

Ridiculous, right? But that’s exactly what journalists and economists do every month when the inflation numbers come out. Instead of saying what happened in the latest month — the latest “play” — we usually focus on what happened to prices over the past 12 months.

Can’t blame the government for this. The headline on the news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that came out on Wednesday was this: “ C.P.I. for All Items Rises 0.2% in August; Shelter Up .” That’s the one-month change in the Consumer Price Index. It’s the equivalent of telling people what happened on the latest play from the line of scrimmage.

But reports about that announcement said things like this: “Inflation fell in August to 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent in July.” Summing up the price change over the past 12 months through August is the equivalent of summing up the total yardage over the past 12 plays.

The justification for focusing on the price change over the past year is that the monthly numbers are volatile. Looking over an entire year smooths out those ups and downs.

The problem is that the fresh news gets swamped by stuff that happened in the past. If the Kansas City Chiefs happened to gain 98 yards on a kickoff runback a few plays ago, that will “inflate” the total yardage gained over the past 12 plays. Economists call that a base effect. As time goes on, the 98-yard gain will fall out of the 12-play total and suddenly yardage gained — like measured inflation — will abruptly fall.

I’m not against measuring the year-over-year change in prices, but I’d like to see more attention on the latest monthly change, which is really the only new thing. What did happen on that Mahomes pass play?

Actually, Europe Is Doing a Lot for Ukraine

It wasn’t the biggest whopper of the night, but during the debate, Donald Trump — who refused to say that Ukraine should win its war — said some false things about the role our allies are playing. Again, let me give you the full statement, with no sanewashing :

“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting, which are fake numbers. Look, we’re in for $250 billion or more because they don’t ask Europe, which is a much bigger beneficiary to getting this thing done than we are. They’re in for $150 billion less because Biden and you don’t have the courage to ask Europe like I did with NATO. They paid billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars when I said either you pay up or we’re not going to protect you anymore. So that may be one of the reasons they don’t like me as much as they like weak people. But you take a look at what’s happening. We’re in for $250 to $275 billion. They’re into $100 to $150. They should be forced to equalize.”

I’m not sure why he thinks it necessary to claim that the casualty numbers are fake. But I do know that he loves to claim that our allies aren’t paying their share. Except that’s completely wrong. I wrote about this a few months ago : Europe is spending considerably more on Ukraine than we are:

It’s true that America, with its much bigger defense industry, is supplying most of the weapons. But we are not bearing most of the monetary burden.

For Trump, of course, the claim that Europe isn’t helping serves the purpose of portraying the Biden-Harris administration as weak. But it just isn’t true.

Kathleen Kingsbury

Opinion Editor

The Question Kamala Harris Couldn’t Answer

Even before Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, it was clearly the vice president’s night. In more than 90 minutes of contentious debate, Harris continued to prosecute the case against a second Donald Trump presidency more effectively than perhaps any of his other rivals has since 2015. But was it enough to satisfy those voters who say they still need to know more about her in order to cast a ballot in her favor this November?

Over the weekend, a survey by The New York Times and Siena College found that 60 percent of likely voters said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction, and many reported that they didn’t know enough about where Harris stands on several key issues. Any poll is just a snapshot in time, and it is admittedly hard to interpret exactly what those respondents are looking for from her. Do they want a better understanding of how she plans to govern from the Oval Office in terms of policy? Or are they more interested in her character and what type of leader she would be?

For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed. According to the Times tracker, the vice president spent nearly half of her speaking time attacking Trump. She rightfully called out his lies and his dangerous embrace of dictators. She was also strong in defending reproductive rights, as well as President Biden’s record on foreign and domestic policy. And she mentioned a handful of plans she’d pursue if she won the White House.

Yet we learned very few new details about those plans. On the economy, which voters often rank as the issue of most importance to them, she only scratched the surface in discussing how she’d enact tax cuts, build more affordable housing and help parents of young children. On foreign policy, she committed herself to a two-state solution in the Middle East and to supporting Ukraine in victory over Russia, but she didn’t expand on how she’d seek to achieve either goal. She pledged not to ban fracking but said little on how she would plan to invest in climate solutions. She also continued to dodge questions about why she recently distanced herself from positions that she took in her quest to be the Democratic nominee in 2020.

Most important, she did very little to distinguish her plans from Biden’s in an election in which the electorate seems hungry for change.

To be clear, Trump utterly failed to present or defend his policy goals. In many ways, the former president confirmed what has been obvious for years: His main aim, should he win another term, would be to do whatever is best for Donald Trump. He is not fit to serve .

But on a night when Harris set traps every which way for Trump (and he took the bait essentially every time), the one moment those tables were turned was when the former president asked her what she would do differently from the past three and a half years. Some voters may still be left looking for that answer.

Jessica Bennett

Contributing Opinion Editor

How to Diminish a Former President

She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t complain about having less time to speak .

But “she” — she being Kamala Harris, to use Donald Trump’s preferred name for her — managed to undermine him, provoking him into shouting, finger-pointing and sputtering, ranting about eating dogs and nuclear weapons with sweat on his upper lip. She remained calm and collected, emasculating him one subtle jab at a time.

I came into the debate prepared to watch for the subtleties of Trump’s sexism . He wouldn’t look at her. He refused to speak her name. He kept referring to “her boss”(President Biden), diminishing her power. But by the end of the debate, I was tallying the ways that Harris had done the reverse: picking at his brittle ego, cracking the fragile facade of his blustering machismo.

She dismissed the size of his rallies. She mocked his “love letters to Kim Jong-un.” She called him “weak,” referred to him as “this fella” and said Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch.” She talked about his multiple bankruptcies (code for him failing as a man and a provider) and noted that he had been “fired by 81 million people” and was clearly “having a hard time processing that,” like a gentle mother, patting her tantruming child on the head.

And she managed to do it without being shrill or angry or coming off as petty. Worst of all, she laughed at him. It wasn’t a forced or controlled or premeditated laugh. It was a real laugh. A big laugh. The sort of laugh she couldn’t hold in and made those of us watching laugh along with her.

“Talk about extreme,” she said, as he stared dead-eyed into the distance. She immediately hammered home all of the former generals and advisers who had declared him unfit for office. He could only fidget uncomfortably in response.

Eight years ago, the same man, perhaps less sleepy but no less angry, hulked over Hillary Clinton as she tried to ignore him and keep speaking. Now the woman running for this country’s highest office was no longer turning the other cheek. Instead, she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood and asserted her own power, competence and confidence in the face of it. In the end, only a woman could do that for us.

David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Over 90 Minutes, Trump Descended to His True Self

For the first 10 minutes or so of Tuesday night’s debate, it looked as though the restrained version of Donald Trump might have shown up in Philadelphia, the one who learned his lesson from his failure to curb his impulses in the 2020 debates with Joe Biden. He stayed silent while Kamala Harris ripped up his economic plan, which she correctly noted was based on a tax cut for the wealthy and a sales tax on all imported goods. When it was his turn to respond, he accurately pointed out that the Biden administration had made no attempt to end the tariffs he imposed on China.

But it didn’t last, and no one who has watched Trump over the past decade thought it could. Within minutes, he descended from a discussion of tariffs into a description of immigrants — one he returned to over and over again during the evening — that could only be described as a form of nativist hysteria.

“They are taking over the towns,” he said. “They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They are dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”

This was the level of delusion that Harris and her campaign had clearly hoped Trump would demonstrate to voters, and it just got worse from there. “They’re eating the dogs,” he said, referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — a particularly heinous calumny that began on social media and was spread by his running mate, JD Vance. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” When the moderator David Muir pointed out that local officials had seen nothing of the kind, Trump said he heard about it on television.

Throughout the evening, in moments just like that, Harris was able to do something that Biden had failed to do when he was campaigning for re-election: push Trump in ways that exposed his spattering of lies and wild fantasies.

This was even true about the frightening attempt on Trump’s life. There has been no evidence that it was politically motivated, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming it was. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said, referring to his false claim that the indictments against him were evidence of “weaponizing” the justice system.

And asked about his role in undermining the democratic process, he said it was actually Harris who had done so, by usurping Biden’s role atop the ticket. “You talk about a threat to democracy — he got 14 million votes, and they threw him out of office. And you know what? I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her. But he got 14 million votes. They threw him out. She got zero votes.”

The debate was an unqualified success for Harris not just because she was able to define herself and her plans but also because she was able to push a few buttons and let Trump show off his truest self.

On Abortion, Trump Floundered in Fantasy Land

When running for office after taking away the reproductive freedoms of roughly half the American public, the best thing to do may simply be to lie about what you have done.

That was the political calculus made by Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s debate. His bald and outrageous lies about abortion and his role in overturning Roe v. Wade were fantastical, even for him. There’s lying, and then there’s the world of fairy tales, and he chose the latter.

Trump said Roe v. Wade had “torn our country apart” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative” wanted the issue to be sent back to the states.

This is a lie. A majority of Americans supported the protections for abortion under Roe and still do.

He accused Democrats of supporting killing babies. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said. This is another lie, and one of the ABC News moderators, Linsey Davis, called him on it. He accused Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, of saying “execution after birth” is “absolutely fine.” This, too, is a lie.

Trump misled those who were watching the debate, saying he believes in “exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.” Yet it is thanks to Trump that states have been able to enact abortion bans that include no such exceptions.

Vice President Kamala Harris, rightly, pointed out that a majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and pointed out the pain that has been caused so many women in Republican-led states since the Supreme Court’s decision.

Abortion bans are a losing issue for Republicans, and Trump did nothing to change that.

I’m Hearing Huge Relief From Democrats Over Harris’s Debate Performance

Within the first half-hour of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I heard from four veteran Democratic presidential campaign officials, and all of them had the same reaction to Harris: a strong and confident performance that often put Trump on the defensive, with the potential to win the face-off as he sputtered over abortion rights and students loans.

Harris went on offense from the start, as she strode across the stage to Trump’s podium and reached out, shook his hand and introduced herself. Her performance was — in pretty much every way — a total contrast to President Biden’s in the June debate, and if Trump had a playbook to win the debate, it wasn’t clear as he scrambled to fight back against her attacks over the economy, tariffs, in vitro fertilization and China.

Trump’s go-to line — “another lie” — probably pleased many in his MAGA base, but I’m skeptical it was persuasive for many undecided and swing voters. That’s because a lot of those voters have told The Times that they are tired of Trump’s complaining when they want to hear specifics about what he would do in office.

Time and again, Harris laid the bait, and Trump took it. “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said at one point. When the ABC moderators tried to ask Trump about immigration, he said, “First let me respond to the rallies.” But Harris also found ways to send Trump off on tangents, like when he pushed the lie that migrants in Ohio are killing pets for food. The moderators fact-checked him, but he wouldn’t let it go. And then Harris lowered the boom.

“Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing.

The Democratic strategists were struck by how much Harris owned Trump, who raised his voice more and more as the debate unfolded. They saw her as strong but likable and substantive on the issues. As for Republicans, one Trump ally argued that the former president spoke with confidence and strength and that many voters would still be unforgiving of Harris over the Biden-era economy.

The first 20 to 25 minutes of a debate are often the most important part: America is a country with a short attention span where first impressions count, where politicians try to set the tone and tempo of a debate from the start, and you can often tell quickly if someone will have an off night. Trump is often at his most disciplined (relatively speaking) at the start of a debate; as time goes on, he tends to meander in his answers and get snappish.

In this case, though, whatever discipline Trump had fell away pretty quickly in the face of a Harris onslaught. If she came under pressure, it was from the ABC moderators who pressed her on her changes in policy positions like on fracking. But I’m skeptical that the pressure from a moderator’s question will break through to voters like the pressure that Harris subjected Trump to on abortion and his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy.

Trump Is Provoking a Congressional Fight He Can’t Win

Donald Trump took time out from his pre-debate “ policy time ” on Tuesday to stick his out-of-joint nose into Congress’s fight over funding the government:

“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” he raved on Truth Social . “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”

Such feistiness! Love to see it. Especially since the former president must know, or at least suspect, that he is spitting into the wind — shrieking at his minions to go hard on a poison-pill measure that has less chance of becoming law this season than JD Vance has of winding up the new V.P. of the Cat Fanciers’ Association . (The poison pill is a measure to require proof of citizenship to vote, even though the law already forbids noncitizens from voting, and Republicans have never shown any evidence that this is a problem.)

Then again, it’s not totally unreasonable for Trump to expect Republican lawmakers to blindly do his bidding. I mean, earlier this year, they tanked a serious bipartisan bill on what is ostensibly one of the party’s top priorities — border security — because Trump told them that doing so was in his electoral interests. Why not then force a government shutdown in pursuit of a measure that would cast further doubt on the integrity of our election system?

I’ll tell you why not. Because a government shutdown in the final stretch of a tick-tight, high-stakes election cycle would be political madness — especially if it looked as though the shutdown occurred not because of substantive disagreements over spending but because Trump was bullying his congressional team into indulging his delusions about election fraud. Again.

MAGA die-hards might be jazzed. The rest of the electorate, not so much.

Republican lawmakers may be loath to upset their nominee, but they value nothing above their own political fortunes. Most of them aren’t stupid enough to sign up for this kind of self-immolation.

Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer and Rachel Louise Snyder

3 Questions: When Women Kill Their Abusers

Alicia Wittmeyer, Opinion Special Projects Editor: You’ve written about domestic violence for years. For your latest essay , how did you end up focusing on the legal consequences for women who kill their abusers?

Rachel Louise Snyder, Contributing Opinion Writer: When I was writing my book “ No Visible Bruises ” I heard over and over how we didn’t know the number of women who were in prison for killing someone who was abusing them. I found this startling; this seemed like such a basic statistic. After I spoke about this at Stanford Law School in 2020, the executive directors of the Criminal Justice Center — Debbie Mukamal and David Sklansky — pushed for a large-scale survey of women in prison for homicide, which became the basis for the piece.

Wittmeyer: What was it like being in a prison as a proctor instead of a journalist?

Snyder: It was so humbling. Debbie made me go through training about not harming people while you’re talking with them and, honestly, I think it’s forever changed the way I interact with people. For example, when I do these incredibly intense interviews now, I never get off the phone with someone without asking what their plan is to take care of themselves. Will they call a friend? Go to church?

Doing this in person mattered. Formerly incarcerated women who were our consultants said that inmates get surveyed ad nauseam, especially through the mail: all these faceless, nameless people asking for the worst moment of their lives. Stanford ensured that clergy and/or a social worker was available on survey days so that the women would have some emotional support.

Wittmeyer: I know the researchers hope to eventually expand their survey to every state in the country. Ambitious, important — daunting! Any sense of the states that might be next on their list?

Snyder: To some extent, it depends on where we get permission — getting permission to do in-person research is a whole complicated process that, in our case, took nearly two years (in part, because of Covid).

California, Florida and Texas contain a huge percentage of the women who are incarcerated for homicide nationwide. But Texas is complicated because its facilities are smaller, and a survey would require visiting more of them, so just logistically it’s difficult. There are states with certain laws that make them potentially interesting to us, like Oklahoma and Illinois, for example. But it costs money to do this kind of research, and no one wants to fund it, honestly.

As a society, we don’t like messy victims. The anti-domestic violence advocacy world prioritized resources for victims who don’t get convicted of committing crimes. Incarcerated women simply don’t have a ton of people on the outside really advocating for them among potential donors. So, in part, the next state will depend on who is willing to fund this research.

Jamelle Bouie

JD Vance’s Outrageous Smear of Haitian Immigrants

Attracted by job opportunities around Springfield, Ohio, thousands of Haitian immigrants have migrated to the area in search of a better life. And while there have been real tensions — especially after a recent arrival caused a school bus crash that killed one child and injured 23 others — it is also true that the new Haitian community has revitalized a town that was on the path to terminal decline.

For every problem — the migrants have overwhelmed key city services — there are also opportunities for both newcomers and longtime residents. As my newsroom colleague Miriam Jordan detailed in a recent article, Springfield is a microcosm for all that is good, and difficult, about immigration.

Part of this story is a furious backlash. Some of it is ordinary and even understandable resentment, and some of it emanates from the ugliest corners of American life. Last month, for example, an armed neo-Nazi group marched through Springfield denouncing Haitian immigrants in a display reminiscent of the deadly “ Unite the Right ” riot in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

A responsible leader would use the situation in Springfield — the anger and acrimony from some, as well as the decency and generosity from others — as an opportunity to try to bring people together and come, as much as possible, to a mutual understanding. A leader would see it as a chance to do democracy, to bring people together as equals so that they can figure out how to live together.

Senator JD Vance of Ohio is not that responsible leader.

Faced with troubles and tensions that could, under the wrong circumstances, escalate into outright violence, Vance fanned the flames.

In July, during a Senate committee hearing, Vance referred to Springfield as an example of how “high illegal immigration levels under the Biden administration” have raised housing costs, a highly contested assertion that rests on the false claim that the new Haitian residents of Springfield are undocumented. (The vast majority have legal residency under the Temporary Protected Status program.)

On Monday, Vance shared the outrageously false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting and eating their neighbor’s pets. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” wrote Vance on X . “Where is our border czar?”

Vance was amplifying a lie that has its origins in a viral, and entirely fabricated, social media post spread by a Malaysia-based right-wing influencer . Springfield authorities say there are “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” The Trump campaign has not provided evidence to support the claim.

On Tuesday, Vance conceded that the smears may “turn out to be false” but urged his followers to continue spreading the lie.

Vance entered the political scene as a literary wunderkind of sorts. In highlighting this claim and spreading it to his followers on social media, he has shown that these days, he’s little more than a petty demagogue — the junior partner to another, even pettier demagogue.

The charge that a foreign people steal and eat pets is a classic attack meant to dehumanize its targets and legitimize persecution and removal. This is important to note because it comes just days after Donald Trump warned that the mass expulsion of immigrants from the United States — the centerpiece of his second-term agenda — will be a “ bloody story .”

JD Vance, it seems, is playing his part.

Kamala Harris Could Be in Trouble

In 20 years of covering presidential politics, I never saw a run of buoyant campaign rallies, boffo fund-raising, ecstatic social media and rank-and-file rapture for a candidate like Kamala Harris had in July and August, capped off by her Democratic convention speech. The next day, I sounded a note of caution about how joy is not a strategy , an argument that some readers disagreed with and some colleagues saw differently .

But a week after her speech, on Aug. 29, Harris faced her first real test — and, I’ve come to conclude, she fumbled it badly.

Her appearance that night on CNN — her first and only major interview since President Biden dropped out — was a missed opportunity: Harris gave canned or vague answers about why she had changed big positions from her 2020 campaign, she didn’t explain persuasively how she would lower the cost of living, and she responded blandly about what she would do on Day 1 as president. But most of all, I think, she didn’t leave strong positive impressions on undecided voters and lukewarm independents and Democrats.

The CNN interview looms large for me in part because Harris is running against a man who is unfit for office , who did enormous damage to the nation as president, who frequently veers into incoherence and lies in his news conferences and interviews — and yet who, for all that , is tied with Harris in leading polls .

Something seems to have happened in the past couple of weeks. As my newsroom colleague Nate Cohn wrote on Sunday: “Is Kamala Harris’s surge beginning to ebb?” CNN was one interview, not a trend, but I think it was revealing that a joy-driven campaign takes you only so far.

I checked in recently with our Times Opinion panel of young, undecided voters, which we are tracking through Election Day. Most in this group of 14 voters praised Harris’s convention speech; five said it made them more likely to vote for her . By contrast, seven said her answers on CNN made them less likely to vote for her.

“Harris did a poor job of explaining how she would ease inflation,” said Laura, a 20-year-old legal intern in Maryland, who was one of those less likely to support Harris after the interview. Lillian, a 27-year-old Virginian who gave Harris strong marks for her convention speech, could not come up with one positive takeaway from the interview.

For most in our group, Tuesday’s debate is critical in choosing a candidate. They want a better handle on who she is; they want stronger answers that build trust in her.

Big tent-pole events have an outsize impact in a tight race. The debate is one of Harris’s best chances to win over the doubters and undecideds and energize her momentum against Trump. No debate has ever felt more important.

Jeneen Interlandi

Sex Trafficking Is Not a Hoax, Even if the Conspiracies Usually Are

Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security agent who started a global anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit group that became the subject of a hit movie and made him an international superhero, is facing extremely credible charges of sexual predation and assault. His entire apparatus — Operation Underground Railroad, which claimed to conduct undercover rescue operations across the world — appears to be a grim ruse designed only to help Ballard (and possibly others) get access to and abuse women and children.

The charges, laid out in a searing New York Times investigation by Mike Baker on Monday, are as horrific as they are heartbreaking: Not only did the operation not rescue anyone, but by using loads of money to entice possible traffickers, Ballard’s scam actually helped create a market for more trafficking than might otherwise have occurred.

The revelations make Operation Underground Railroad just one more in a long roster of false heroes and false narratives to populate the national sex trafficking discourse. The sheer volume of such stories — from Somaly Mam to Pizzagate — make it tempting to assume that the entire issue is a mere boogeyman, that sex trafficking really happens only in the heads of QAnon’s most fervent loyalists.

But that would be a mistake.

Here’s a true story: By the time he was caught by a cross-border task force this past April, a Florida pharmacist, Stefan Andres Correa , had traveled to Medellín, Colombia, 45 times in two years — to rape girls as young as 9. He paid a sex trafficker $75 to procure the children and according to court records offered $75 extra plus an iPhone to at least one of the girls “if she behaved.” The case captured headlines in the United States and Colombia for its egregiousness, but officials in both countries say that it was not an anomaly.

As The Wall Street Journal has reported , the rise of work-anywhere digital nomads triggered by the pandemic and the growing perception of Medellín as a city that is finally safe for tourists have conspired to touch off a boom in child sex trafficking. The operation that led to Correa’s arrest turned up perpetrators from Florida to Ohio as well as some 250 underage victims, fewer than 100 of whom have been found and brought to safety so far.

The investigators working to track down the rest are up against dozens of crime syndicates — including an offshoot of the original Medellín cartel — and a slew of modern tools (Airbnb, digital encryption, cryptocurrency) that have made traffickers exceedingly difficult to apprehend.

They are also up against a profound blind spot. Encouraged by exploitative politicians like Donald Trump, Americans routinely work themselves up into a frenzy over the moral character of people entering their country. (Murderers! Sex traffickers! Bad hombres!) They pay considerably less attention to the havoc their countrymen bring to other nations when they leave here.

This is never more true than during election season. In the coming weeks, as anti-immigration rhetoric reaches its familiar fever pitch, voters and politicians alike will wring their hands anew over the type and number of people seeking to penetrate the United States’ southern border. They should bear in mind that an untold number of American men are flocking in the opposite direction, to commit exactly the kind of heinous acts they are most terrified of.

Editorial Board Member, reporting from Raleigh, N.C.

The Lonely Anger of Democratic Women in North Carolina

On the campaign trail here in Raleigh, N.C., Gwen Walz and Doug Emhoff turned on the charm on Monday afternoon.

Walz, in a peppy Midwestern lilt, encouraged Democrats to bake cookies for the volunteers at the phone bank for her husband, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris. “We need treats!” she said. “And the next night, go in and make the calls yourself.”

Emhoff, the second gentleman, joked that he and Harris had resorted to going for a walk on the tarmac recently to try to spend some quality time together. “Aw,” several women cooed at the event, in Raleigh’s City Market.

The crowd of some 200 Democrats — largely women — received Gwen Walz and Emhoff warmly. But many of them were also in a fighting kind of mood.

“Meow!” one woman cried out at the mention of JD Vance, a reference to his whining that “childless cat ladies” were running America. The Democrats inside the City Market roared, and their strong feelings were no surprise.

A day earlier, a secret audio tape was made public in which Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, vowed to ban abortions. They are already banned after 12 weeks in the state, thanks to the Republican supermajority that controls the General Assembly.

If only Americans considering staying home on Election Day could talk to North Carolina voters, whose lives have already been significantly affected by Trumpism.

Many Democrats here said they come from communities — and sometimes even families — in which they are far outnumbered by Republicans. “My ex-husband is voting for Trump,” Michelle Miles, 49, told me. “He’s always been controlling.”

Andrea Woodin, the secretary of the Franklin County Democrats, said she and her son, who is transgender, faced social ostracism for expressing their political views publicly.

“People yell at me from across the street,” Woodin said, adding that she home-schools her son for his safety.

In Southern battleground states like North Carolina, being a Democrat — or even just a woman — can take fortitude.

Thomas L. Friedman

The 23 Words Harris Needs to Say to Win

“Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.”

For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump — and the election.

Utter them, and she will hugely improve her chances to win more of the undecided voters in this tight race. Fail to utter them or continue to disguise her policy shifts with the incoherent statement she used in the CNN interview — that while her positions might have changed on fracking and immigration, “ my values have not changed ” — and she will struggle.

Madam V.P., if you say your positions have changed but your values haven’t, what does that even mean? And what should we expect from your presidency — your values or your actions? Our latest poll shows too many voters still don’t know.

It’s OK to say: “I learned a lot as vice president. I’m proud of our record of putting America on a sustainable path to a clean energy future. It will make us more secure and more prosperous. But I also see that we can’t get there overnight. For reasons of both economic security and national security, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy right now. So you can trust that in a Harris presidency, America will continue to lead the world in exploiting our oil and gas advantages but we will do it in the cleanest way possible while making the transition as fast as possible.”

It’s OK to say: “President Biden and I inherited a cruel Trump border policy that included separating parents from their children. Maybe, out of an excess of compassion, we rolled it back too far. But we learned from it — we learned that only comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform can give us the solution we need, controlling illegal immigration — while continuing to be a beacon for legal immigration. So our administration sat down with one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and hammered out a bipartisan immigration bill that would have done just that. And what did Trump do? He ordered Republicans to kill it, so he could keep exploiting immigration as a wedge issue. And you’re asking me if I’ve flip-flopped?”

Politicians always underestimate how much voters (and the news media) respect a leader who can say, “We didn’t get this quite right the first time, and I’m going to fix it” — something Trump can never, ever do. As James Carville recently put it in a Times Opinion guest essay, “A leader who can openly admit a change in her understanding would feel like a breath of spring air for a lot of voters.”

Katherine Miller

Opinion Writer and Editor

Which Trump Will Be on the Debate Stage With Harris?

Every Monday morning on The Point, we start the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

It’s debate week. Presidential debates are sometimes explosive and shape the terrain of elections (like the one in June, or that first Biden-Trump debate in 2020). And sometimes they are intense, but except for a single moment that becomes a shorthand for a candidate’s appeal or limitations, they fade quickly from memory. Tuesday night’s debate may be the only one between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who will meet for the first time. Will it change or harden how people view one or both of them, or will we be back where we began again this time next week?

As much as Harris’s newness and questions about her have shaped the last month, in the last week, Trump has called a news conference to revisit years-old sexual misconduct allegations against him and attack the women who lodged them, and posted at length about arresting various people if 2024 is like 2020, when he lost. That’s how Trump is, but is that how he’s going to be on the debate stage? More subdued, as he was in June, or more aggressive, as he was in 2020?

Last week, Trump’s meandering answer to a question about child-care costs wasn’t the first time he’s been asked about that in a public setting — he was basically asked the same question at the June debate and replied about something unrelated. The first debate ended up being consumed by President Biden’s awful performance and questions about his presidency, and voters’ expectations of Trump can seem fairly baked in, but not always. How he is on Tuesday could also shape the next few weeks in big ways.

On Sunday, the latest Times/Siena poll hit and, with Harris down a couple of points, there’s been some nervousness about choices her campaign has made in substance and strategy, though it’s hard to know anything certain in a race this close. On Tuesday, one of the more complex things she has to deal with is Biden’s presidency, which has often not been popular, but from which she hasn’t distanced herself too much, and can’t significantly do so anyway, since she’s a part of it.

Theoretically, the debate will force the issue a little bit, since debates tend to deal with the economic and foreign policy issues of the moment. But it’s often hard to know whether voters are looking for specific policies or a sense of command. Sounding decisive and clear about why she’s making decisions a certain way might be just as important on a debate stage as how she approaches some policy issues or broader questions.

After the debate, Harris will attend the 9/11 memorial in New York on Wednesday, and Trump may as well; Harris will spend the rest of the week in the battleground states. But even though Trump’s public persona can overwhelm everything, by the end of Tuesday night, there really might be a clear contrast between them on subjects like the courts, gun control, artificial intelligence and NATO.