FILE - Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., talks to the media as he walks to the House chamber before President Joe Biden's State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol, March 7, 2024, in Washington. Sanders, the far-left independent from Vermont, introduced a bill Thursday, March 14, that would shorten to 32 hours the amount of time many Americans can work each week before they're owed overtime. Now some members of Congress want to give hourly workers an extra day off.
That means people who currently work Monday through Friday, eight hours per day, would get to add an extra day to their weekend. Workers eligible for overtime would get paid extra for exceeding 32 hours in a week. “The majority of employees register an increase in their productivity over the trial. They are more energized, focused and capable,” Juliet Shor, a Boston College sociology professor and a lead researcher on the UK study, told Sanders' Senate committee.
GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said paying workers the same wages for fewer hours would force employers to pass the cost of hiring more workers along to consumers. “Do we continue the trend that technology only benefits the people on top, or do we demand that these transformational changes benefit working people?” Sanders said."And one of the benefits must be a lower workweek, a 32-hour workweek.”The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, restricted child labor and imposed other workplace protections that included limiting the workweek to 44 hours.
In the 1830s, coal miners and textile workers began pushing back against workdays of up to 14 hours. After the Civil War, the abolition of slavery caused those in the U.S. to take a fresh look at workers' rights. Unions rallied around the slogan:"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.”