Pennsylvania Democrats want to pay companies to move to 4-day work week

Pennsylvania Democrats are launching their own effort to move to a four-day work week with a proposal offering to pay companies who voluntarily reduce employees’ working hours without a commensurate reduction in pay or benefits.

Sponsored by Harrisburg Democrat David Madsen, House Bill 1065 would pay companies a fixed dollar amount of up to $250,000 or $5,000 in tax credits per employee for any company willing to participate in a one-year pilot program to move to a shortened work week.

Though the proposal has yet to receive a hearing, the bill would make the state the sixth in the U.S. to consider similar legislation in the last three years, adding to what has become a growing international movement to improve peoples’ work-life balance.

Onetime presidential candidate Andrew Yang made it part of his platform during his 2020 campaign for President.

In Congress, California Democrat Mark Takano introduced a bill out there proposing to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to shorten the standard workweek by eight hours for non-overtime exempt employees, seeking either to compel companies to shorten their work weeks or give employees access to overtime pay for every hour they work past the new federal standard of 32 working hours per week.

“Workers across the nation are collectively reimagining their relationship to labor—and our laws need to follow suit,” Takano said in a statement announcing the bill in March.

In Massachusetts, lawmakers filed their own bill last month to create a two-year pilot program for a four-day workweek with an incentive structure similar to Pennsylvania’s, though they don’t yet have a specific dollar figure for their credits.

Other states—California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Washington—have also proposed legislation on this front with varying incentives attached for companies who cut hours without cutting pay or benefits. Maryland’s proposal, for example, would offer a one-time tax credit of up to $750,000 to participating companies, with all participants required to share data with the state Department of Labor so the impact of the shift can be studied.

Early research in other countries has been promising, however.

A recent six-month trial of more than 3,300 workers in the United Kingdom found that a four-day workweek resulted in a bevy of benefits for employees’ sleep, stress levels and mental health, while revenues for companies rose by more than a third compared to a similar period from previous years.

Resignations also decreased, leading a majority of companies involved in the study—92 percent—to commit to remaining on a four-day workweek permanently. Other experiments in Belgium, Spain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand have produced similar results.

Still, there are some challenges. Some industries like healthcare and manufacturing could have challenges implementing those schedules, according to some experts.

While untested in the U.S., polling shows there is an appetite for change. According to a Newsweek poll conducted in March, some 71 percent of Americans say they support the concept of a four-day workweek, while 83 percent said they believed they could complete their weekly workload in four days.

Newsweek has reached out to Madsen’s office via email for comment.