For more than 80 years, the five-day, 40-hour workweek has been the standard for Americans.

Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., is looking to change that. His 32 Hour Work Week Act would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to ensure that non-exempt employees would receive overtime pay after putting in 32 hours of work.

The bill wouldn’t make changes to or limit the number of hours that an employee may work in a standard workweek, but it would amend the definition of the workweek, as well as the maximum hours worked before crossing the overtime threshold.

Takano first introduced the bill during the last Congressional session, but it stalled in committee. Businesses in his district, he said, inspired him to bring it back for the 118th Congress.

“I'm hearing from other employers in my district, that they're getting questions from prospective employees like well, will they be able to work from home how many days we'll be able to work from home?” Takano told Spectrum News. “And these are all sort of related to I think, what Americans started to experience during the pandemic.”

Experts say that lockdown-era work-from-home mandates changed attitudes among workers toward the standard workday.

“I think they started to realize, why am I going to go back? Why should I go back to the old ways of working that are not really beneficial for my productivity, they're not beneficial for my well being?” said Laura Giurge, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “So I think a lot of people, having seen the benefits that they've experienced, started to push back on conditions of working that they're willing to accept nowadays.”

Congress first codified an eight-hour workday, with extra pay for overtime, for interstate railroad workers with the Adamson Act of 1916 — a law designed to avert a potentially costly strike during World War I.

After the Supreme Court ruled the Adamson Act to be constitutional, in the case of Wilson v. New, Congress would eventually establish the 1938 Fair Labor and Standards Act — the backbone of American labor law — amid President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Great Depression-era statutes included in the New Deal.

In the meantime, in 1926, Henry Ford established a five-day, 40-hour workweek for all of his factory workers, down from a six-day, 48-hour week. His workers, he said, were more productive.

“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege,” Ford said.

The bill, Takano said, can help rewrite the existing rules of the American economy to bridge the growing gap between the wealthiest Americans and the other 98% of the workforce.

“You can do this by raising the minimum wage, the old 'Fight for $15.' Or you can look at other kinds of strategies, and one of them is to deal with the length of the workweek, making people eligible for overtime pay at 32 hours instead of 40 hours.”

The 32-hour workweek, he said, would force employers to think differently about how they deploy their workforce. Do they hire another person to cover the fifth day of the week, or do they pay overtime to their current workforce? It’s then up to discussion between workers and management.

“In a time when we are experiencing worker shortages, this is actually a very opportune time to do this, because it gives employees more bargaining power,” particularly for skilled employees who work in specialized fields, Takano said. 

“And I’m hearing from other employers in my district that they’re getting questions from prospective employees like, will they be able to work from home, how many days will we be able to work from home,” he added.

In her research, Giurge has found that workers realized that companies that don’t adapt to these worker demands could lose the top talent they’re seeking, she said. 

“I think, on some level, there’s the push of realizing that I don’t need to be working so many long hours. There’s a bit of a redefinition between ourselves and our work, where we would look at work instead of long hours and high status, and that was the norm,” Giurge said. “And people are realizing that’s not what they want to do anymore.”

An increasing number of employers have adopted the four-day workweek, including electronics giant Panasonic – which did so after Japan released economic guidance in favor of the reduced hours – crowdfunding platform Kickstarter – which said the shift has enabled workers to live "brighter, fuller lives") – San Francisco-based cloud database firm bit.io – "Our team is just as productive in four days as they were in five, and have time to spend time with their families, company founder Jonathan Mortensen said in a blog post – and even the Boulder County, Colo., Clerk and Recorder office, though they're on a 4 day, 10 hour week.

“We started it as a pilot here in Boulder County, as we wanted to then gauge our public and staff response to the new days and hours of operation. After two months in, we surveyed staff and the response was overwhelmingly in support of continuing the new schedule. Additionally, the public response has been substantially more positive than negative," Molly Fitzpatrick, Boulder County Clerk and Recorder, said in a 2021 news release. "The main feedback we’ve heard from residents is how they can now get to our office for quick trips before going to work themselves.”

But the odds are stacked against the bill. Takano’s bill stalled when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate last session, so it seems less likely that its chances have improved now that Republicans have the majority in the House.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, the chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workplace, did not respond to a request for comment.