Juliet Schor: System Change in the Workplace

In this episode of SystemShift, Juliet Schor explores the urgent need to address the ecological crisis by fundamentally shifting our economic focus from growth to sustainability. Schor sheds light on the relationship between extreme inequality and climate breakdown, highlighting how unequal power structures prevent climate action. Drawing from her research, Schor argues for reduced work hours, increased leisure time, and a focus on community well-being as a practical and realistic alternative to the unsustainable growth-driven model of capitalism. Discover how a shorter working week can significantly benefit well-being, productivity, and the environment by reducing global carbon emissions. Tune in to learn how you can work less, relax more, and contribute to saving the planet.

Carl Schlyter: 
Welcome to Greenpeace Podcast SystemShift that explores new ideas and thinking for a sustainable economic future that puts both people and the planet at its center. The current economic system is failing. It’s pushing the Earth way beyond its ability to support humankind, and we know something needs to change. In today’s episode, we are thrilled to have Juliet Schor, an economist and sociology professor at Boston College. Juliet is a renowned expert on environmental sustainability and economic prosperity.

In this episode, she will share her insights on the urgent need to address the ecological crisis by fundamentally changing our economic focus from growth to sustainability. Juliet sheds light on the relationship between extreme inequality and climate breakdown and argues for reduced work hours, increased leisure time, and a focus on community well-being as a practical and realistic alternative to the unsustainable, growth driven model of capitalism.

Juliet serves in the Academic Board of 4 Day Week Global, a non-profit that helps companies and organizations to implement a four-day working week, and all this without a reduction in pay. Drawing from her research, Juliet highlights how a shorter working week can significantly benefit well-being, productivity and the environment, while reducing global carbon emissions.

So sit back, learn how you can work less, relax more and contribute to saving the planet all at the same time. That’s what I call a win-win solution. So without further ado, Juliet Schor a warm welcome to you. So nice to have you here.

Juliet Schor:
Thank you.

Link between Capitalism and Environmental Destruction

Carl Schlyter: 
A recent study said that 56% of the population globally thinks that the current capitalistic system actually does more harm than good. If I recall correctly. But when people talk about harm here, how well understood is the link between the current economic system and environmental destruction and how much is based on social destruction? Where do you see the main thrust of your criticism against the system comes from today?

Juliet Schor:
Well, it’s interesting because as someone who early in her career was focusing more on issues of inequality, inequalities of income, wealth and power and sort of a narrower economic view, not thinking necessarily about the biosphere. I got into that, you know, fairly early in my career. So there’s on the one hand, sort of how the economy is functioning and then there’s how the planet is functioning. I would say that today, more than ever before, people are developing a much more integrated understanding, and the reason I think that is that we’ve got these twin issues. One is extreme inequality and the way the capitalist system is functioning to concentrate income and wealth at the very top. That’s happening all around the world for the most part with, you know, with a few exceptions. Then we’ve got the breakdown of our ecosystems, the climate system, biodiversity and a variety of other planetary boundaries being breached, etc.. But what I see now, is more and more understanding that these are the part of the same processes. That extreme inequality is at the core of understanding climate breakdown. I’ve done some work on this myself and not just in the direction of climate impacts exacerbate inequality, which of course they do. And that’s the more well-known understanding, the idea that, it’s the global north that are the legacy polluters, carbon polluters. Where Global North is responsible for the vast majority of carbon pollution in the atmosphere, but it’s populations in the Global South or poor populations of colour in the Global North who are most vulnerable to climate breakdown, then will have the most impacts and so forth. But also in the other direction, which is that the structure of inequality itself is the thing which actually is key to understanding why climate breakdown is happening. It’s at the core of the causes of climate breakdown, not just a consequence of it. And more and more, that understanding that it’s those the structures of unequal power, influence, wealth, etc., that are why we are in the predicament that we’re in, that that’s what is preventing climate action, for example, whether it’s concentrated wealth within countries that forestalls action or the concentration of wealth globally in the Global North, and power and the limited wealth and power of the Global South. 

The rise in inequality

Carl Schlyter: 
It is interesting so far in this podcast, every single guest I have; we come back to this, that inequality is bad from so many aspects. It’s always recurring topic here, whether it be within the country between races or between sexes or between countries or between Global South and North and so on. This kind of constant inequality, and its negative effects. But I think it’s also that in that sense is strange that why has that not been addressed then earlier?

Juliet Schor:
It is very interesting. So the people I worked with when I was a young scholar, so this is the 1970s and eighties were already beginning to document the rise in inequality in the U.S. It happens later in other OECD countries. The U.S starts very early on a path of reversing the post-World War II period that that period saw declining inequality. The building of middle classes, the taxing of the wealthy welfare state policies to bring the poor up. So you get this compression of income and wealth. You know, slightly different in every country. Of course, you’re from Sweden, famously a country with a fairly equal distribution of income, but a very unequal distribution of wealth.

Carl Schlyter: 
No, no, do not worry. We are catching up on you because the average CEO of the bigger companies in Sweden in 1980, they had nine workers salaries and today there are over 60. So we are catching up also there, don’t worry about it.

Juliet Schor:
Yeah, well, it is happening everywhere. You know, no country is an Island, right? Influences flow. But that period was a period of compression of inequalities and I think quite wrongly understood by many people, as a few decades ago to be the norm. When it turns out that post-World War II period is very much an anomaly in many, many ways. That anomaly came about because of World War II and the impacts that it had and so forth. But I think that’s why it took quite a while for analysts and scholars and so forth to catch on to that fundamental role of inequality. It really wasn’t until the 2000’s when you start to see the runaway inequality of the top 1%, that the understanding really spread. Because in the eighties and nineties, it was much more a story of the 20% of the 80%. And frankly, almost all of the people studying this were in the 20%. So, you know, maybe there was some bias there in what people are willing to see. I don’t know. But yes, it’s taken a while, it’s taken a while to catch up. 

Carl Schlyter: 
During this time, you are talking about now the richest 5% actually caused 37% of the emission increase. So this kind of extreme concentration of not only wealth but also emissions in the top  is new.

Juliet Schor:
It goes with their wealth; it goes with income and wealth. So the more concentrated you get, the more concentrated the emissions profile you have. That you know what I’ve called competitive consumption, in which the lifestyles and the consumption patterns of the very wealthy just keep intensifying in terms of how luxurious they are and how, out of control their conspicuous consumption is and their status seeking and so forth. The more unequal you get, the more outrageous and really, I’d have to say immoral the consumption patterns of the very elite become.

Why has it taken so long?

Carl Schlyter: 
No we can’t afford to burn anything, neither biofuels nor fossils if we’re going to rapidly reduce the carbon emissions, we need to get rid of the burn economy, so to speak. Speaking about that actually, how come that we have an economic system that was developed by many experts that did not even consider ecological limits? How is that even possible?

Juliet Schor:
Well, it’s a great question. The ecological economist Herman Daly described it in terms of full an empty world when human beings were relatively small on the planet. When you have a shift to a fossil fuel economy, which happens in the West with the Industrial Revolution, human beings weren’t large enough. Our impact wasn’t large enough to affect planetary ecosystems. We were affecting local ecosystems. But it’s only, you know, later that we come to realize this. Of course we do realize it in the 19th century. So I think the question might be why has it taken us so long to actually do something about it? I don’t accept the standard arguments from let’s call them psychologists. It’s not only psychologists and economists for inaction. I mean, psychologists think it has to do with the way our brains are wired, which I really disagree with, because one of the things we can see is that people in many parts of the world got it right away and began seriously trying to do something to stop climate breakdown, and people in other parts of the world didn’t. So we all had the same brains. I don’t think it’s the inability to understand what’s happening or the fact that we can’t address threats unless they’re right in front of us or they’re visible. They have a whole range of theories about the way our brains work that are not really supported by the evidence of the variation in responses across the globe. But what does tell you a lot is the power of fossil fuel industries, and that is the most explanatory variable. The countries with powerful fossil fuel industries have been the least able to respond. Those that don’t have fossil fuel industries, have had a much easier time stepping up and saying, let’s deal with this. Let’s do something serious.

Carl Schlyter: 
I feel a worry here because my next question would be like, what can we learn from the U.S. to avoid similar mistakes. But I think this thing about many right-wing parties actually picking up the U.S. Republican narrative and this kind of old-fashioned environment hate, I mean, 80-90 years ago it was often right-wing politicians who took initiatives for nature protection areas and so on. But this mentality has also shifted in countries where the fossil industry is less strong. How come you had this contamination effect and what can we do against it?

Juliet Schor:
Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, it’s relatively recent, which is that it’s the globalization of politics. So you have now the spread of influence of these authoritarian/fascist right wing populist movements around the world because we now have a more globalized world in which they are connected to each other, they’re consuming the same media and so forth. What happened in the United States, I think it may be similar to what you’re referring to in in other parts of the world, you would know better, is that in the 1970s you had a bipartisan pro-environmental movement in the U.S. that had many landmark laws. Richard Nixon, Republican presidents signed a number of them into law. But then by the late 1980s, you start to get this countermovement against environmentalism. The corporations weren’t happy because one of the things that addressing the environment means is you need to regulate what they’re doing. You need to regulate pollution, at least until you develop alternatives to polluting technologies. They began the countermovement, and I think quite cleverly and quite insidiously, they decided to go at it on the cultural front. To pull the environment into what came to be known as the culture wars, which in those days were not nearly as intense as they are today. They began to caricature environmentalists, as you know, people wearing Birkenstocks and eating granola and hippies and sort of portray a very negative view of what an environmentalist is, certainly not someone conservative. They succeeded very well in this country in that. So what’s happened, the dynamic now is it like everything else, they’re holing these issues into the “culture wars” and this has to do with people’s sense of identity. In the US, there is a right wing pro-environmental identity and many right wingers driving their Hummers or, you know, their big gas guzzling cars and so on and so forth, will tell you what big environmentalist they are. But for them, it doesn’t include climate. It’s I love to be in the woods, I love to hunt, I love to fish, I take care of the woods, I go out on the weekend to build trails for hiking and so forth. But I’m still going to drive that SUV and I’m going to vote for right wing politicians, and I’m going to stop effective climate action. Because they don’t they don’t want to give up what is clearly a very important sense of morality, which is protecting the earth. I mean, everybody wants a piece of that.

Tradeoff between environment and production

Carl Schlyter: 
One thing you said now was also like, okay, the companies were against this regulation. But I think you mentioned in one of your speeches that this false narrative of trade off, trade off between different interests might be true on a local level. But you had a critique against the logic of trade off on global environmental problems. I think that’s an interesting thing you could talk a little bit about.

Juliet Schor:
Yes. I think, and this gets us to economists and the ways in which economists have, I think really missed the boat on understanding what’s going on with the ecosystems and planetary environment etc. The foundation of the economists’ thinking is a trade off between protecting the environment and producing goods. You can think about it making sense in a very local sense, like, oh, you could you could take some land and use it for conservation, or you could, put a factory on it and produce things or you could, use it for a mine or whatever. But the planetary environment, our air and our water are actually the foundation of production we can’t survive without them. So the idea that in The Economist’s model, you could choose all production and consumption and no environment, for example, that’s the way they sort of construct the model. It’s not possible. We can’t destroy the planetary environment and still survive. So the false trade-off has to do with failing to see the environment as the basis of production and consumption. Now, that’s at its most basic level, and then there’s another piece to this, which I think is the better known one, which is that more stuff doesn’t necessarily make us better off once you’re out of poverty. Many in the West especially the U.S, has especially gotten sort of caught in what I call this cycle of work and spend, in which we are undermining this the true sources of well-being in a dysfunctional kind of rat race of more and more stuff that isn’t necessarily giving people well-being. So people are running harder and harder. They’re staying in place and they’re undermining the things which do give well-being, which have to do with primarily social relationships, meaning physical health, which is connected to social relationships and meaning, and of course, environments that are not so toxic that that they’re destroying our health and we’ve got plenty of those that are so toxic. And it’s primarily black and brown people who are located in those toxic environments. But increasingly, it’s everyone who is subjected to the toxicity of pollution. 

Work time reduction and climate

Carl Schlyter: 
And for listeners who are interested in this topic, actually two other episodes in this series with Eva von Redecker and Indy Johar talks a lot about this property logic and ownership logic and its negative impact on inter-human relations and our society. So we have more episodes on this topic in this podcast. Juliet I would really love to talk about the research that you made that I first discovered that you were doing at least, maybe you did a lot of things that I didn’t see, but what triggered my interest really was this link between, okay, let’s say you have a productivity gain and you mentioned before capital is logic is growth and you use it for that. But there is another way to use productivity gains and even to create them sometimes, and that is work time reduction. I think we should talk a little bit about the work time reduction and its impact on climate and environment in general.

Juliet Schor:
Yes. I first got interested in this at the time I was writing The Overworked American, just starting to think about working hours, in part because I was I was part of a project with an U.N. institute located in Helsinki called WIDER – World Institute for Development Economics Research. I was part of a group of macro economists who were trying to envision a new macroeconomics that really spoke to the well-being of people around the world, and especially in the Global South. And this was the mid eighties. We were already cognizant of the environmental constraints, so the ecological constraints on growth. So we said, well, if we have growth constraints, what should we do? How should we think about macroeconomics differently? My piece of that was if there’s limited ecological space and that concept of ecological space came from really pioneering ecological thinkers in Germany, Wolfgang Sachs and his colleagues at Wuppertal. The Global North needs to take up less ecological space to give the Global South more space to grow. If we only have a limited space for expanding production, because production is so ecologically degrading. What I was arguing was the North should take its productivity growth in the form of shorter hours of work, let the South expand production to bring people out of poverty. I began studying then, what is the impact of changes in working hours on carbon emissions? What I found is that countries with low working hours on average tend to have lower carbon emissions. Countries with high working hours have higher carbon emissions. Then I also looked at this across U.S. states and found that the states with higher working hours tend to have higher carbon emissions and vice versa. 

Carl Schlyter: 
And this is annual working hours then?

Juliet Schor:
Annual for the nations. We looked at weekly for the states, because of data availability, but they’re going to be pretty correlated. So there are two parts to this. One is what I call the scale effect, which is that if you use your productivity growth to expand output, so the scale of your economy goes up, you’re going to have more pollution, more carbon pollution, everything equal, because carbon emissions are still pretty tightly tied to GDP in most places. And actually in the Global South, they’re getting more tightly tied, which is that their production is getting more carbon intensive. In the Global North they’re getting less, but there’s still a pretty strong relationship there.

Global North vs Global South

Carl Schlyter: 
But also, I mean, one explanation for that difference is also that we book our emissions on the Global South using them as material production unit for our consumption. So that also has an impact on the statistics. 

Juliet Schor:
Even correcting for that, which is the difference between what we call territorial and consumption emission. Even correcting using consumption issues, which is what we typically do. Now it’s still the case. It’s because in the Global South are getting more integrated into the fossil fuel economy as they get richer and buy more fossil fuels and so anyway. Yes. The second is what I called the composition effect, which is at a household level, if you are more time stressed, you tend to have a more carbon intensive lifestyle. If you have more free time, you can do things more slowly, You can walk or bike instead of drive your car, etc., etc. Yes, so you have that correlation between working hours and carbon emissions so I have long felt that for Global North countries, the politics of climate action like how do you get to a decarbonized economy must go through work time. We know that the technological shift is essential. We have to get off fossil fuels, no question about that. But if we’re also still in a world in which we keep expanding in the Global North, in which we keep expanding our production, we will be unable to meet emissions targets because until you have a completely decarbonized energy system, you’re going to be still using some fossil fuels. So now you keep expanding when you’re trying to reduce the math doesn’t add up. Especially now when we need to be on a crash course. We need to drastically downsize energy demand. You can’t do that if you keep expanding production, never mind all of the other ecological impacts of continually expanding production. There’s some really nice models now that show that just that technological shift is not going to get us to where we need to be, which is these really double digit very, very severe levels of emission reduction by 2030, 2040. So, yes. The other thing is that, a program of reduced work time is not an austerity program. It’s not saying, oh, we’ve got to sacrifice to save the climate. It’s here’s a way to live that is going to make you better off. There a lot of really significant wellbeing impacts of shorter work time and my current research on the shift to the four-day week companies which are giving their employees for eight-hour days and not taking away income, you know, the really strong message out of that research that we know of hundreds of companies and thousands of workers is massive well-being improvements for people working 4-hour days. 

Reducing work hours

Carl Schlyter: 
What you mention here is, I think, really interesting because the early social democratic movements in Europe in the 1890s on most of those placards, they said we want eight hour working day, even if they worked Saturdays also at that time. But still, this kind of dream of reducing heavy work hours has been there for so long. In the sixties and seventies, in many countries actually we had the reduction of working time. But this kind of narrative I don’t feel is very present in the current debate, even if now we even had this climate and nature protection argument. Why do you think this is not in the center of the debate? It’s really quick and efficient way to reduce emissions and improve life and have hope and dream about a better life? Again, this sounds like a win win-win situation. Why is that not in the center of the debate?

Juliet Schor:
It’s fascinating. When I published The Overworked American in 1992, there was a lot of sentiment for reducing work hours. It was seen as almost, Oh yeah, common sense across political spectrum. You know, right wingers thought, oh, good for families. And left wingers, of course, had the Marxian tradition of the importance of reducing working hours, labour traditions, etc. By, I would say by the middle of the 2000s it was gone, just completely disappeared. I think it’s austerity thinking because the growth of inequality made people focus so much on inequality that they couldn’t see the importance of work time. Of-course there is inequality of work time and leisure time too. It was that single-minded focus that progressive economists had to sort of combat austerity, we needed more growth, we needed more equitable growth, and it just pushed work time off the table. There’s also the fact that many economists already had a kind of bias toward income. I remember the first seminar I ever gave on my research on work time. One of my colleagues, this was when I was at Harvard and we had a joint seminar with MIT. This was an MIT economist, very progressive guy who said, Why in the world would you look at work time? That doesn’t matter. All that matters is income. And there was, of course, I mean, thank god I didn’t listen to him, you know. But it has to do with this sort of the failure to think about the non-market and stuff the failure to think about the dimensions of wealth and well-being that are not just about what you could buy on the market. 

Carl Schlyter: 
I would also like to challenge the narrative that equality of work time is disconnected. Because if you have a work time reduction, everybody gets an hour of more life, free life. If you have the current growth model, you actually and an unequal growth were a larger share of the profit, of productivity, goes upwards rather than equally shared. So I would even challenge that that is inequality involved there. What you say?

Juliet Schor:
Yeah, absolutely. There is inequality of leisure or you know, or conversely of work time. That is also a big part of what is going on. When you have a lot of income inequality, one of the things we know is that work time tends to go up. As you know, people at the bottom are forced to work more hours in order to try and make up what they’re losing in the income and wealth distribution.

Gender Inequality

Carl Schlyter: 
In Stockholm, we had an experiment and we had reduction of work time for several groups employed by the municipality. When we made an evaluation afterwards, we saw a very distinct difference between what happened to men and women inequality. We saw that the relatively women got a lot more really free time. So that means that when we reduce working time, men’s share of domestic chores actually increased and women’s totally free time also from, you know, chores decreased more. So they had more free time, real free time. And that this was a benefit from a feminist perspective also is that’s something you have seen elsewhere?

Juliet Schor:
Well, we are studying that right now. I am leading research around the world on these trials of companies who are going to 4-day workweeks. We are looking at how people are spending their time by differences in gender. We are also asking those who have partners about their share of household labour and childcare. We have analyzed the results from the first three trials that have finished. It is about more than 2000 workers. What we see is in the first two trials, no change in the share of household labour, although some increase for men in childcare and their share of childcare. In the third trial, it looks like there may be a little bit of a change in the share of household work. Part of what’s happening is that in our trials people are using the off day. The biggest thing that they’re doing is leisure activities, hobbies, etc. So that’s good. I mean, they’re not just spending the whole day working unpaid housework, but that is the second most common thing that they’re spending time on, housework. So, you know, to some extent people are using that day off to do unpaid labour, which is, you know, part of why they need it that third day off in a week, because there is so much household work and with two earner families or with single headed families, that’s a lot for a person to do both those jobs. 

Permanent shift in priorities?

Carl Schlyter: 
But exactly is that an effect of a like a debt in household labour that would win out over time? Or do you think this is a permanent shift in priorities in people’s life? Like I had all my whole attic needs to be fixed, the house was running down, the garden was rundown and all the clothes need to be fixed and so on. Is this adept because we were overworked or is this like a choice of priority?

Juliet Schor:
Yeah, that we don’t know. We haven’t delved into what kind of household labour they’re doing. We just know. I do think, you know, it’s probably some of both in the sense that without long working hours, you get that build up of unfulfilled tasks. Also it’s just hard to keep up with the weekly tasks. Then we know a good part of that also is childcare. So people are doing more of their own child care on that fifth day that they’re no longer at work. In part, we know because their child care expenses fall, so they’re getting less paid child care.

Carl Schlyter: 
How do you think this could be better explained and better known and what would be your arguments in these cases?

Juliet Schor:
Well, you know, it’s still a kind of out there connection. The debate is so techno focused, right. It’s so focused on energy sources. And there’s been so little willingness to focus on demand, controlling energy demand. Although I do want to note and, you know, shout out to the IPCC for their Sixth Assessment Synthesis Report, where they introduce the term sufficiency.

Carl Schlyter: 
I love that, I agree. 

Juliet Schor:
Just be talking about maximizing production. Right. We need to think sufficiency. We’ve really got to get out of that technological blinder that this is really just about energy system. There is a reason that the debate has been pushed into that box. It has to do with where we started in our conversation, which is capitalism, and the unwillingness of the mainstream in the climate world to extend the conversation, to talk about changing the system. So the message always was, no, everything can be the same. We’re just going to swap out the energy source. That probably would have worked if we’d started decades ago. We could have been on a gradual transition to clean energy and, you know, we could have averted what’s happening. But this is no longer the case. It’s it’s not a credible claim, nor is it an appealing one, to the large majorities of people who understand the system is failing. I get the difficulty thinking like, oh, the idea that you need to change lots of things at once is a scary and, you know, risky prospect. I think this has to do with the big picture. We’re talking here today about system change. I think that the failure to consider things like working time reduction is a casualty of this difficulty of getting system change onto the agenda. I do think that there’s a lot more openness to that now. It’s also coming from the fact of the pandemic and the fact that people are so stressed out and burned out from the pandemic workers and they the idea that workers need a break, that work time is too much and people need to work less in order achieve wellbeing. That is a much more widely accepted, I’d say, even getting to the point of a common sensical attitude these days, in a way that pre-pandemic it was not. 

Policy recommendations

Carl Schlyter: 
What could you give advice, let’s say, you know, talking now to European decision makers or national decision makers in Europe and elsewhere, what would be your policy recommendations? I mean, when France reduced their working time, that was actually it didn’t even reduce the number of hours worth because they had, at the same time, a massive stimulus to reintroduce long term unemployed to the labour market, which is good in itself. But if you want to have this dual benefit of less stress and reduced emissions, what kind of policy options and what kind of working time reduction schemes would give those results, do you think? 

Juliet Schor:
I think you need a big suite of policies. If you think about the 20th century and the hours reductions in the early part of the 20th century, they were much more coordinated. Then you got standard workweeks and stuff. So the approach was everybody moved together in the same way. Much harder today because you have a lot more variation in schedules and you’ve got a lot of variation in demand for work time reduction. You’ve got well-paid professionals working too many hours that wouldn’t mind trading some income for time, but then you have very low paid people working long hours because their hourly wage is so low. So they need you need different kinds of solutions for them.

Carl Schlyter: 
Can I hold there for a second? Because I think that’s really important aspect, if people have low income today, you might be very hesitant to reduce working time because you can’t afford to reduce your income. So let’s be really clear on that fact that for low income households, the state need to compensate any income losses that would be the result of that.

Juliet Schor:
Yeah. And just also to be clear, I have never advocated work time reduction with reductions of current income. People hate that for obvious reasons. For the most part, except for high earners. Some high earners are happy to make that trade off, but the vast majority of people are not. Really, what we need to do is work time reduction without reduction in pay. However, over time if you do a lot of that, pay tends to lag and so for those lower earners you need to also do things to boost up their wages. 

Productivity and reduced stress levels

Carl Schlyter: 
Super. When you talk about productivity gains and at the same time you talk about reduced stress levels, how is that possible?

Juliet Schor:
So what the companies and our studies are showing is that there is a lot of inefficient time in the way workplaces are organized. So many of them are white collar workplaces. The vast majority, we have some others, we have construction, manufacturing, food service, a couple healthcare but the big majority are white collar. There are cultural aspects to the way white collar workplaces are run that are really inefficient and they make changes there before they start. And the two biggest things that they do is they drastically reduce the amount of time people spend in meetings, which is inordinate in the white collar world, and a lot of it’s just wasted time and they reduce distractions. There are two kinds of distractions that get reduced. One is distractions from other people and from email and so forth. So they move to more efficient kinds of ways of working. Some of the companies say that, you know, a certain hours per day are what they call focused time and people don’t bother each other during that time and so forth. Then, of course, there are the individual distractions that people are, surfing the net or playing video games or on Facebook during work time. They can just, you know, do less of that if they have to get all their work done in four days. And they do and they much prefer it, they’d rather have less time at work on Facebook if they’re going to get that fifth day. So what we found, which is pretty fascinating, is we asked people a question before the four day week trial starts. These are six month trials about the intensity of work. And then we asked them that same question. At the end of six months, we didn’t see any change. So it’s not a speed up that’s happening. There’s a little bit of evidence that there’s a little bit of speed up. But for the most part, it’s cutting out the waste and the manufacturing companies have it too, and the construction companies have it too. So it’s not only white collar workplaces, but I think that’s where you see the most of it. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, that’s exactly it. Because I met a German expert in labor insurance and accidents at work and he told me that in the German chemical industry, 80% of work- related accidents were in the last 2 hours of an eight hour shift or in the end of the week, you know, so that you can avoid to.

Juliet Schor:
Yes, there are a lot of industry specific factors in terms of how you can reduce work time and impacts on workers and so on and so forth. What things we found in our most recent trial, no, actually through all of the data, is that in a number of ways, the workers in construction had the biggest benefits and some of the biggest changes, which doesn’t surprise one. Of course, they’re some of the most long hours and overworked employees in many economies. 

In Conclusion: Positive Feedback

Carl Schlyter: 
Before we end though, you’ve talked about these experiments. What kind of positive statements and feedback have you heard and which ones of these would you like to share, like as an inspiration and motivation for people to follow this path?

Juliet Schor:
We’ve had just tremendous outpouring of interest and positive well, interest from the media, from society at large, from politicians. Just tremendous response to this movement, four-day week movement. Our findings have been pretty extraordinary in terms of very big wellbeing impacts or employees and very, very happy companies. Almost all you know, in the mid 90% of these companies are continuing with these schedules and many of them are saying that their productivity has gone up, the companies are doing better and overall rating the trials very, very highly. In the first two trials, a 9 out of 10 in the second one, an 8.5 out of 10 from the companies. I think maybe the thing that’s most positive to me is that what we’re seeing is this is not just a movement of workers who are trying to get reduced hours and fighting opposition from their employers, but there’s increasing employer buy in to the idea that shorter hours can actually work for them. That makes me very hopeful that we are in a moment in which that we’re in another period of kind of rapid work time reduction and that we really need to keep this momentum going. We are recruiting companies now all over the world in Brazil, in North America, in Europe, in Australasia. We have a trial that just started in South Africa. So just to let listeners know, this is something that you can do, that you can if you are in management in a company, you can do it. If you are employed, you can go to your management in your company. And our website is 4dayweekglobal.org and we can help make this a reality in your life too.

Carl Schlyter: 
That sounds wonderful. I think this is symptomatic of what system change is. End of this kind of competition and combat, but rather finding these Win-Win solutions, where employers are happy, where employees are happy, where nature is happy and the climate is better. These are exactly the kind of systems we talk about when we talk about systems change. So it’s really great having you here, Juliet. Thank you so much.

Juliet Schor:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Juliet Schor, an economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College, focuses on work, consumption, and climate change. Schor’s most recent project is researching trials of companies who are implementing four day workweeks organised by the non-profit 4 Day Week Global.