Could A U.S. State Pass a 30 Hour Work Week?
The Senate passed one in 1933 by 53 to 30. Roosevelt withdrew his support twenty-five days later, and the forty-hour week is what remained.
The Massachusetts legislature passed the first minimum wage law in the country in 1912, and more than a dozen other states and the District of Columbia had their own within a decade. Congress did not set a federal minimum wage until 1938, twenty-six years later. Voters in Colorado and Washington legalized recreational cannabis in 2012, and it is still a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law today. So could a state pass a thirty-hour week on its own?
Internationally, progress is being made.
In France the legal week has been 35 hours since 2000, and the government that passed it argued for it as a jobs measure, on the theory that shorter hours divide the same work among more people.
Between 2015 and 2019 the Reykjavik city council and the Icelandic national government ran trials on their own employees, cutting the week to 35 or 36 hours with no reduction in pay. Unions then negotiated shorter hours in their contracts, and about 86 percent of Icelandic workers now work shorter hours or hold the right to negotiate for them.
Actual hours worked are lower than the legal maximums. Dutch workers averaged 31.9 hours a week last year and Danish and German workers 33.9, against a European Union average of 35.9.
The bill that passed the United States Senate in 1933 set the week at thirty hours, fewer than any of those countries has today.
The vote was 53 to 30 on April 6, 1933, and it was bipartisan. The American Federation of Labor, then the largest union federation in the country, drafted the bill and Hugo Black of Alabama introduced it in the Senate.
The bill made it illegal to ship goods across state lines or out of the country if the people who made them worked more than six hours a day or five days a week. The bill also stated that employers could not cut anyone’s pay for the lost hours.The federation projected six million new jobs in a country where roughly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed.
Frances Perkins, weeks into her tenure as Secretary of Labor, supported it publicly. President Roosevelt endorsed it. Newsweek, four months old at the time, ran it on the cover under a headline saying the bill startled the nation.
Kellogg’s employees in Battle Creek, Michigan had been working six-hour days for more than two years by then. W.K. Kellogg replaced three eight-hour shifts with four six-hour shifts at his cereal plant in December of 1930, raised the hourly rate by more than twelve percent so the shorter day cost workers nothing, and hired the fourth shift the change required. Several other large industrial firms cut voluntarily to forty hours and then to thirty across 1930 and 1931. William Green, the federation’s president, told a meeting in San Francisco that spring that they stood unflinchingly for the six-hour day and the five-day week. The Kellogg’s shifts ran until 1985, fifty-five years of operating data on a shortened workday inside one American company, and they ended for reasons other than productivity.
The bill was sent to the House.
The National Association of Manufacturers organized against it and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States joined. Business representatives arrived at the House committee with amendments that would have removed the bill’s central provisions. Perkins offered amendments of her own. The federation offered others. On May 1, 1933, twenty-five days after the Senate vote, the administration withdrew its support, and the House Rules Committee never scheduled a vote.
Roosevelt had concluded that organized business would not support his recovery program if the thirty-hour bill became law. His administration then began drafting the National Industrial Recovery Act, which he signed on June 16.
The Supreme Court voided the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States on May 27, 1935. It had been law for twenty-three months.
Benjamin Hunnicutt at the University of Iowa has spent a career on what he calls the historical mystery of the end of shorter hours. His argument in Work Without End is that the century-long movement for shorter hours was replaced between roughly 1920 and 1940 by a different definition of progress, one measured by more work for more people, with the promise of leisure substituted by a list of things to purchase. The Senate passed Black’s bill in the middle of that period.
What replaced it became law in 1938. The Fair Labor Standards Act set the week at forty-four hours, reduced to forty by 1940, and the thirty-hour provision was not included.
Black would reintroduce his bill in 1933, 1935, and 1937 without success. Perkins had responded to the original bill by drafting a substitute that added minimum wages to maximum hours, which is where the law we have came from. The forty-hour week is the result of the thirty-hour bill’s defeat.
A six-month trial across 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States moved 2,896 workers to four days at full pay. Burnout dropped. Job satisfaction, mental health and physical health all improved, and twelve control companies showed no such pattern. Wen Fan, Juliet Schor, Orla Kelly and Guolin Gu published the results in Nature Human Behaviour in October 2025, tracing the improvements to sleep, fatigue and workers’ sense of their own capability rather than to compressed intensity. Schor had testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on March 14, 2024, alongside Shawn Fain, on a federal thirty-two hour week.
In February 2022, California Assembly members Cristina Garcia and Evan Low introduced Assembly Bill 2932, which would have defined the workweek as 32 hours for employers with 500 or more workers and prohibited them from lowering the hourly rate to compensate. The California Chamber of Commerce put it on the organization’s “job killer” list, commissioned an analysis projecting between 340,000 and a million job losses, and wrote to Low that the costs would be untenable for many businesses. The Assembly Labor and Employment Committee declined to schedule a policy hearing. Low said afterward there had not been time to study the implications.
Eighty-nine years apart, a bill to shorten the week without cutting pay was stopped by a chamber of commerce and a committee that would not schedule a vote, and in neither case did the legislative body that stopped it hold a vote.
A state legislature set a minimum wage twenty-six years before U.S. Congress did. Voters legalized cannabis in their home states despite federal opposition. A city or a state can set a thirty-hour week the same way.
Now we stop recalling history and start making it.
Welcome to the American Reformation, a new era of progress in our cities and states. We take this same material, dulled and worn from corruption, and we reform it into something better, yet built from the founding ideals which inspired and forged the revolution that started it all.
We are the heat. We are the change. And we are democracy going on the offense.
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THE CALL TO ACTION
Category: Labor law.
Difficulty Rating: 1/10. One message, five minutes, in your own words.
Congress set the week at 40 hours by 1940 and has not changed it since. The Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act would lower it to 32. A state can require overtime sooner without waiting for Congress, which is how California already pays it after eight hours in a day, and a city or a county can put its own employees on a shorter week, which is what the Reykjavik city council did first.
Contact your US senators and representative at congress.gov/members/find-your-member and tell them to cosponsor the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. Then contact your state representative and state senator at openstates.org/find_your_legislator, or your city council member, mayor, county commissioner, governor, school board, or union, by searching their name and “contact.” Email, phone, and mail all count, and you can fax free at FaxZero.com.
Tell them you are a [your job] in their district, that you want overtime required after 32 hours a week with no cut in hourly pay, and that you want the public employees they already schedule moved to a shorter week now. Ask for a yes or a no. If your state already requires daily overtime, ask for thirty.
Then post about it on social media. Say who you contacted, how you contacted them, and what you asked for, and ask the people who follow you to do the same.
IF YOU CALL
“My name is [name], I’m a [job] in [city], and I live in [representative’s] district. I want to know whether they will support requiring overtime after 32 hours a week with no cut in hourly pay. A yes or a no. If I get a form letter back I’ll know they don’t care about their constituents. You can reach me at [phone or email].”
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Lowering the standard workweek while maintaining the same pay would never survive in today's climate of corporate greed, where profits matter more than people. But if we're talking about working fewer days for the same salary, let's start with Congress.
Members of Congress seem to spend fewer and fewer days in Washington doing the people's business, yet their pay never goes down. While millions of Americans are expected to work longer hours just to make ends meet, our elected officials continue collecting full salaries despite accomplishing less and less.
If workers are constantly told they have to "earn" every dollar they make, then Congress should be held to the same standard. Equal accountability shouldn't stop at the Capitol steps.
Thank you for the fascinating history lesson. You keep coming up with things I (and I dare say most people) have never heard of before.
(Sorry, I hit “send” too early by accident)
That said, as far as I am concerned, pounding on the doors of Congress (figuratively) will just eventually bloody our knuckles.
As I have said many times, we cannot take examples from other countries vastly smaller or more monocultural than we are and pretend that what they did can work here! I don’t blame you; I see this error repeated over and over again across the board.
We *cannot scale up anything* and expect it to function in anything like the way it worked when much smaller.
I mean, Iceland?? There are around 300,000 people in the entire country. That’s half the population of our least populous state, Wyoming. The USA, at 342,000,000 (342 million) population, is a thousand times bigger.
We simply cannot use them as a model for us, ever!
Each representative in the House in Congress is supposed to represent over 750,000 citizens, on average, way more than double the entire population of Iceland. *One* person in Congress, among 435 members, supposed to be working for 3/4 million citizens in their district?
You can take Denmark, even Hungary, and many others. Most of them are similar in population to just one of our 50 states.
These comparisons are absurd and I sincerely wish people would stop pretending that Congress can do much of anything anymore, as a result. Our federal government has long since been crushed by the weight of our population, the tsunami of technological change, and the globalization of finance and trade, now with over 8 billion people on the planet.
The only way for change for the good to happen is on a much smaller scale. When you suggest that the states stand up against federal policy, I’m with you. When you herald the actions taken by cities, towns, or neighborhoods, I’m with you even more!
Huge institutions are incapable of seeing us as anything more than faceless statistics. Our individuality, our diversity, everything that makes us unique wonderful human beings is lost. Bring things down to the neighborhood level, and we start to see each other as real individuals again. We can brainstorm and create together. We can network with other neighborhoods and learn from each other. We need not exist in isolation.
As counterintuitive as it may seem to most people, the revolution we seek must have its foundation at this level, not to force the giant institutions to change, but to abandon them as much as possible. It’s *way more* effective in the long run to pull the rug out from under them (starve them by withdrawing our financial and energetic support) than to fight to change them.