The Original Oyster House, billed as Pittsburgh’s oldest restaurant, found itself in crisis during the pandemic. Down to seven employees — including owner Jen Grippo and her mother — the staff worked six or seven days a week to keep up with orders. Grippo closed the Oyster House entirely in January 2021, determined to give herself and her staff a much-needed pause.
Jen Grippo owns the Original Oyster House in Pittsburgh. The restaurant now opens from Wednesday to Saturday, and full-time employees work only 32 hours a week.
But when they returned to work, the workers’ stressors remained. Enter a radical — and increasingly popular — solution: the four-day work schedule.
The restaurant now opens from Wednesday to Saturday, and full-time employees work only 32 hours unless they choose to pick up extra shifts. Grippo pays employees for their extra time off. She also saves money on food and utilities, and everyone’s happier for it.
One staff member, who has worked at the restaurant for 23 years, used his first three-day weekend to finally see a Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game, Grippo recalled.
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“It’s a beautiful thing,” Grippo said. “They’re all significantly more well-rested — and quite frankly, more productive.”
As lawmakers and businesses across the country reconsider the future of post-pandemic work, experiences like that of the Original Oyster House may serve as promising examples.
In the past three years, at least six states — California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington — have considered bills to mandate, incentivize or allow the switch to a four-day week. This month, U.S. Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, also introduced a federal bill that would cap the week at 32 hours for hourly workers, requiring businesses to pay overtime above that threshold.
Bolstered by a recent, large-scale trial in the United Kingdom, proponents argue that shorter workweeks benefit both employees and employers. Workers are happier and more efficient when given rest time, those studies found. That in turn improves businesses’ culture, retention and recruitment efforts.
But despite decades of debate, dating back to before the standardization of the 40-hour week in 1938, U.S. legislative proposals to shift schedules en masse have largely stalled. Few Republicans have signed on to the idea, arguing the switch would be unfriendly to businesses. Skeptics also question how a shorter week would function in industries as disparate as farming and health care, and how much the switch might cost.
“This idea of ‘let’s incentivize experimentation’ — I quite like that,” said Matthew Bidwell, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “But I can’t see the idea of mandating [a four-day workweek] going anywhere.”
While the concept of a four-day week may seem like a radical shift for full-time American workers — 84% of whom clock in five days a week — U.S. lawmakers have floated the idea of a shorter schedule since at least 1933.
In 1956, then-Vice President Richard Nixon predicted that a universal four-day week would arrive in “the not-too-distant future.” And in the decades since, worker surveys consistently have shown that the vast majority of American workers would prefer a shorter workweek, said Kate Lister, the president of Global Workplace Analytics, a consulting firm that helps businesses navigate the future of work.
Employees have never had the power to demand those types of schedule changes, however — a dynamic that reversed somewhat during the widespread upheaval and labor shortages of the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 45% of people who left a job the previous year considered a lack of flexibility around “when to put in hours” a major factor in their decision to quit. (The Pew Research Center, like Stateline, is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.)
“We’re having a serious problem attracting employees, because no one wants to work on a traditional schedule here,” said Hawaii state Sen. Chris Lee, a Democrat, who co-sponsored a bill that would create a task force to study four-day weeks for public employees.
“But the intent,” he added, “is to facilitate the evolution of … both the public and private sectors.”
At the same time, the four-day workweek has gained momentum in other countries, providing a new model for the United States. Belgium, Scotland and Spain have embraced versions of the four-day week during the COVID-19 pandemic; so too have divisions of major corporations Canon and Unilever, as well as smaller companies such as Kickstarter and Bolt in the U.S.
Earlier this month, the world’s largest trial run of the four-day workweek — which tracked 61 British companies and nearly 3,000 employees over six months in 2022 — found that a vast majority of both employers and employees preferred the shortened schedule, with all but five firms electing to keep the change beyond the study period.
The pilot, organized by the advocacy group 4 Day Week Global in collaboration with academic and independent researchers, required that participating companies continue to pay their employees’ full, 40-hour salaries after making the switch.
“I read that study and thought, ‘Man, this type of experiment could really be a win-win-win scenario,’” said Maryland state Del. Vaughn Stewart, a Democrat, who worked with 4 Day Week Global on legislation proposing that his state try a four-day week incentive program of its own. The program would have allowed companies to claim a tax credit if they moved at least 30 employees from five- to four-day workweeks.
“It makes employees’ lives richer, it makes employers’ profits fatter, and it makes society as a whole more engaged and civic-minded.”