Can Employer-driven Reform Be a Good Thing for Workers? The Case of the Four-Day Week

media release: This is an online event, which you can join via zoom. If you would like to attend, you must register in advance on TicketTailor (click on the link above, or visit our website). You will be sent a confirmation email after registering with instructions on how to join. If you do not receive the meeting link, please check your junk mail folder. For any additional information, email havenswrightcenter@ssc.wisc.edu.

Juliet Schor is an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College. Since 2022 she has been a lead researcher for pathbreaking trials studying hundreds of companies instituting four day, thirty-two hour workweeks with five days’ pay. The research finds large improvements in well-being outcomes and success for the participating organizations. Schor has been researching worktime since the 1980s and is the author of The Overworked American: the unexpected decline of leisure (Basic Books, 1992), which was a national bestseller. Schor has also researched sustainable consumption and the link between climate change and worktime, and, since 2011, the platform economy.

A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years in the Department of Economics and later, the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. Schor’s other books include After the Gig: how the sharing economy got hijacked and how to win it back (California, 2020), Plenitude: the new economics of true wealth (Penguin Press 2010), Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner 2004), and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Basic Books, 1998).

Schor is the recipient of numerous awards, and is the 2024 Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and an Elected Fellow of the AAAS. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, among others. A frequent contributor to public discourse and media, Schor’s Ted talk on “the case for the four day week” has more than three million views. Four Days a Week will be published by Harper Business in June 2025. 

This event is presented in collaboration by the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice and the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison.