Making the case for the six-hour workday

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Making the case for the six-hour workday

Mark Paul, assistant professor of economics at New College.

Mark Paul, assistant professor of economics at New College.

The eight-hour workday became common practice in the early 1900s, in a time before the rise of digitalization, robots and technology. Yet even today it still remains labor standard.
The average full-time employed American works 42.5 hours per week, or 8.5 hours per day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That isn’t likely to change anytime soon, according to Mark Paul, assistant professor of economics at the New College of Florida.
“I think that there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that workers aren’t productive sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, and that the eight-hour workday is willfully outdated,” New College of Florida’s Paul says. “There’s a number of studies that indicate that reducing work hours to six hours a day would result in basically no losses for a lot of employers in many instances.”
Read the entire article here.