---
narrator: Vishal Reddy
subject: Union negotiating
facilitator: Nathan Schneider
date: 2026-06-24
approved: YYYY-MM-DD
summary: "A union negotiator is working to bring back a long-neglected demand in the labor movement: shorter working hours."
location: "Brooklyn, NY"
headshot: "vishal_reddy.jpg"
topics: [economics, family, mediation, labor, organizations]
links:
  - text: "WorkFour"
    url: "https://workfour.org"
---

*Vishal, to begin, can you tell me about how you introduce yourself as an organizer?*

I'm a union negotiator, fighting to improve wages, time, and working conditions for nursing home workers in the states of Washington, Montana, and Alaska. I also direct and lead WorkFour, the national campaign for the four-day, thirty-two-hour work week. We're fighting for working families to have more time with their loved ones, with their communities, and with their hobbies.

*Can you say a bit more about what a negotiator is, and how that fits into the context of the labor movement more broadly?*

I'm a deep believer in building worker power, and I think unions are a vehicle for building that. They give workers a real structure---or protocol, as one might put it---to build that power in a very concrete way. Within the labor movement there's a really strong emphasis on unionization, but a little less on what it actually takes to win strong contracts. I enjoy sitting at that piece of the puzzle, with workers who have won a union---either just recently, so they're bargaining their first contract over wages, time, and working conditions, or it's a successor agreement, where they've had a collective bargaining agreement in place for a while but there are still improvements to be made.

I'm someone who's not so into the spiritual side of the labor movement where it's like, just because you're in a union, there's something deeply good about that. I'm a bit of a materialist. The way a union is good to you, the way that experience is beneficial, is if it can win material things for you and your coworkers. I've found the negotiation process to be the fun part, where we do that. There's also a really healthy conflict there, between workers and the boss, that I find to be really productive and motivating.

*Tell me about the journey that brought you into that role. How did you realize that this negotiating side of the work was something you could do, that you could be successful in?*

I'll take us back to 2020. The first time I was at a unionized workplace was on the Bernie Sanders campaign. I had a great time working on that campaign, and I was a canvasser and the lowest rung on the totem pole in the operation. As a result, some other canvassers and I had issues that, absent the union, we wouldn't have been able to solve---questions around pay, and getting redeployed to other states once the primary in our state had wrapped up. I was obviously very pro-workers'-rights and had done different kinds of economic justice organizing before, but that was the first time I'd been part of a union.

In my next campaign job later that summer, we unionized pretty quickly, within a month, and I was our chief negotiator for that agreement. It was campaign work, so it's not like these agreements last forever---maybe a month or two before everybody moved on to the next thing. But that gave me experience doing contract negotiations. I was also a big-time fan of Jane McAlevey at the time. I was inspired and touched by her work, and it felt like a real opportunity to dig in and apply the lessons she talks about.

Then I went back to law school, wrapped up law school and did workers'-rights policy work for a year. I enjoyed that work, but it felt disconnected from the day-to-day struggle. It involved publishing things, running things, without having actual contact with the fight. It felt like I was on the outer ring of it. I was pursuing union negotiation roles instead. Part of the reason the role appealed to me is that, to be a successful union negotiator, you have to come with an organizer mentality. My background in community and political organizing helped me recognize that the most important thing about bargaining is not what's happening at the table, but what's happening outside the bargaining table. I enjoyed the blend of organizing with worrying about the words on the paper---what terms and words you're passing back and forth. It's very concrete way to win things for working people.

*I've seen programs on negotiation at business schools---this is a skill that people get taught in the business world. How is that skill taught in the context of labor organizing? What kinds of skills and habits did you have to pick up to be a negotiator?*

I've also done some of those trainings, and it feels so weird to apply the lessons from business-school negotiation trainings to labor organizing, because they're very focused on interpersonal psychology and these weird frameworks that don't really apply when you're doing collective decision-making.

To build on something I was saying before, in the labor context, the negotiation itself has a thin parameter for what's possible. The floor and the ceiling aren't that far apart, and the only way to change that is by doing things outside the negotiation to put pressure on the opposing party to accept the terms of our deal. That is where transformation is possible.

It's both a good and a bad thing about labor negotiating that there's a lot of mechanical work that needs to be done. We have to draft contract proposals, we have to set up meetings with employers, we have to coordinate transportation and make sure members are able to attend. We have to have listening sessions with the broader membership so that the bargaining team and I are putting forth demands that speak to their concerns. There's a lot of mechanical work that goes into putting the words on the page in the proposal, and I've found that in labor organizing we have to make sure that mechanical work doesn't take over the larger organizing work of building investment and power in the workplace.

*Can you share an example, or a particular moment that you're proud of, where you've seen this negotiating work make a difference in workers' lives?*

I can speak to a bargain we did last summer for a small supported-living facility in Washington. The workers were young, in their twenties and thirties, so for many of them this was their first time either unionizing or being part of a union. On the whole, relative to the market, they had good wages and benefits---what they'd call good working conditions---but they faced day-to-day disrespect from their boss, who ran the agency. It was like, "This is my domain. What I say sticks."

We come to negotiations from a place of believing that what we're negotiating for is beneficial for all parties involved. This is healthcare, too, so these workers aren't making widgets---the members care deeply about how the things we're bargaining for impact the clients they serve. That also sometimes makes it challenging to get a workplace invested in taking action, because there's a myth that workers' conditions aren't mutually beneficial with what clients are experiencing.

We had months of these hard-fought negotiations, and the boss just really wasn't moving. We had a bunch of organizing conversations to move toward a strike, because we'd tried to be really nice at the table, and we'd tried to be really tough at the table---we'd tried all these things that clearly weren't working. Because we had tried those things, it made the path to escalation relatively straightforward. The second we put a strike-authorization vote on the table, the boss recognized that folks were serious about what they wanted to bargain for and the things they wanted to win, and we got a deal later that afternoon.

It was a lesson to me that there's a benefit to waiting a little bit before flexing that power. A lot of members aren't always fired up from day one and ready to take action. But it was just the threat of our power that won those strong gains.

*In a negotiation like that, you're talking about the ways external forces within the workplace shape the negotiation---it's not happening in isolation at the table. But I'm curious how you think about the broader norms and patterns in the world around it. How much is your ability to achieve certain wins shaped by things happening at other workplaces, by---for lack of a better word---vibes, or by unwritten rules that are shaping the broader ecosystem you're in?*

It's a great question. When we first started that union campaign, there were a number of workers who had just internalized and normalized the idea that "we're low-wage workers, so there's a certain amount of disrespect we have to tolerate from the boss." That's a culture thing. It's not something the state can legislate. Even in a contract, we sometimes have provisions about mutual respect, but that's not enforceable in the way that "you have to pay somebody this" is.

That's one of the main unwritten things we're trying to combat---this culture of disrespect for low-wage workers. I talked a little before about how I'm a bit of a materialist, but I feel like that piece, that dignity, matters so much to folks. Having a union and a contract, and the dignity they can restore, can be really powerful for getting people invested and involved in the union.

*Are there particular skills or crafts you've had to cultivate in yourself---that maybe didn't come easily to you, but that you've had to really work on in the practice of being a more effective negotiator?*

My natural inclination is to listen, listen, listen. One thing I like about contract bargaining is that it forces us to act. You cannot listen forever; we can't be sitting in a stage of listening forever. At some point, we have to build consensus as a team and act on it. The longer I've been a negotiator, the less beneficial I see super-deliberative processes, because the delay is something that benefits the boss. Workers also want to see results quickly. The bargaining team is the most invested in the fight, but if we're bargaining a contract for a year or a year and a half, a lot of energy dissipates among the unit.

My natural inclination is to allow everybody's voices to be heard in the process, and as chief negotiator you have a lot of authority, for good and bad, to facilitate those conversations within the bargaining team. It's on us to make sure people are heard, but then also to steer the conversation. When I first started, I'd open up a contract, and we'd walk through it as a bargaining team. Like 90 percent of it could be improved---there's bad language here and there, reflecting compromises over years and years of negotiations. Increasingly, we're building out a culture where, sure, 90 percent can be improved, but if we waste our time doing all of that, we lose it. We need to have real priorities.

One thing we've learned is that if we don't indicate our priorities by picking and choosing our battles, the boss will solve the less important problems. We'll put two articles on the table, and maybe one's about health and safety, which is really important to members, and another is about uniform policy, which would be a fun win but isn't that important. If we make a big stink about both, because both are important, the boss will solve the one that asks them to sacrifice less, pat themselves on the back, and then be offended when we say that's not good enough. The biggest thing I've learned in this job is that speed matters, and that means building consensus quickly. Building a sense of direction is what helps build that consensus.

*Now I want to shift to your concurrent work on working hours, which is a demand that has lost prominence over the last century. It used to be one of the central demands of the labor movement, but it appears to be, at least in many contexts, less so today. Did this interest arise in the particular context of workplaces you're involved in organizing? Did you see working hours showing up in people's lives in a way that made you want to take this up?*

It showed up in two ways originally, and it has grown over time. This was 2022, when I got involved with shorter-hours work. The Biden adminstration was talking a lot about building an economy for workers---"we're pro-unionization, the earned income tax credit," all these things. In my opinion, the material wins were small, but they helped create the aesthetic of a very pro-worker set of politics. I was sort of living it as someone probably making $60,000 or $70,000 at the time, and nothing in my life felt that different. That's even more true when you talk to people making less than me. Nothing about that pro-worker economy felt deeply transformative. Nothing big was on the table.

Part of my impetus for starting to think about work-time reduction, was: what's a big demand we can win? Following COVID, especially, we saw a lot of workplace transformation, but it didn't result in any fundamental shifts in how we worked.

The last thing I'll say is that part of what was motivating me, too, is something that has frustrated me a lot with workers' rights and labor advocacy over the last decade: a lot of what we focus on is very niche stuff that speaks to specific classes of workers. They're all good things---in New York City, for example, we now have laws regulating wages for fast-food workers, and laws that affect gig-economy workers. These are good things, but they apply to specific sectors, and they also reinforce this perception that "workers" are a small subset of people who make less than a certain amount of money and struggle to live. I was thinking through what type of demand could actually stitch together a coalition of the full working class. To me, money is not that thing, because a lot of the working class make healthy salaries are not so pressed for money. It's time that actually connects people across different stratas.

All of that had me thinking about work-time reduction as a really powerful, galvanizing demand. At the same time, in a job I had started---I was unionized, and it was a policy and organizing organization---our union was heading into bargaining, and we started to bargain for a four-day, thirty-two-hour work week. We ended up winning the demand, and it made me realize: we're a specific class of workers with a specific set of hours that makes this, in the grand scheme of things, pretty winnable, but this advocacy feels incomplete. How do we make sure everybody can have something as life-changing and beneficial as three-day weekends every week?

*Can you talk a bit more about the experience of that transition for you? How did it affect your life? Was it even possible---or did people just begin filling that extra day with new ways of reconfiguring their work?*

One thing we did was make sure the transition happened over a period of months, so there was an actual transition. Part of what we were trying to do was break down the internal systems and norms in our own heads about work---this idea that work is a kind of endless bucket we're always filling.

Second, as a union, we had conversations at the time about how it's important for us to police management's ability to impose work on the fifth day, but it's also really important that we hold ourselves accountable. Especially in social-justice work, we're all coming from the perspective that we're fighting for something bigger than ourselves, which means it's easy to dedicate endless time toward that work. At the same time, the benefits we knew could accrue from what we fought for in the form of a four-day, thirty-two-hour work week---we'd seen the studies on happiness and stress and family relationships---only accrue if we actually work less. It doesn't really matter what the policy on paper is; we have to police it.

In the same way, right now we live in a world where, on paper, a lot of workplaces have a five-day, forty-hour work week, and very few people actually hold themselves to that, or they can't afford to. Going into it, we were clear about the levels of accountability that needed to be had. The other really amazing part about work-time reduction is that once you experience it, it's really hard to go back. Once you start having summer Fridays, where you have that fifth day back, it feels like something really important has been taken away from you when you start going back to that fifth day. It *has* been taken away from you. It's your time. Part of what helped build that accountability was being really insistent from the jump that the day is sacred, in a sense, for people to do what they please with it. We made sure to set that norm from the beginning, because we knew the self-interest in keeping that norm going forward would be strong enough to keep things good.

*Say more about policing the norms. I think, for instance, of the French policy a number of years back, where you had to turn off your email after working hours. What kinds of tools have you been able to use, especially when a workplace sticks its neck out and tries something that isn't the prevailing norm in this society? How do you protect that space and time?*

I'll speak to that organization, and to other organizations that have adopted the four-day, thirty-two-hour work week. There are a couple of ways to protect it.

One is just proactively communicating with the people you work with. In the nonprofit context, that's the board, the membership, the constituents; in the for-profit context, it's clients. Some level of proactive communication is needed---"Hey, we're undergoing the switch for this period, we're seeing how it's going to go, but the research and evidence back this up as a transition that can work, and that's why we're confident, and we've put a lot of thought and attention into it." Other stakeholders need that, because we all live in a world that's normalized the five-day, forty-hour work week as this kind of immovable object.

Then there's the ongoing work. On Fridays, you start having out-of-office replies that say, "Hey, we're out of the office Fridays---this is just what we do now. I'll get back to you on Monday or Tuesday, but also, if this is urgent..." In the same way that if something urgent happens on a Saturday or Sunday, or there's some emergency, there's an expectation that there's something to be responded to.

In the union context, there's a very clear process for enforcement. We have those protections in the contract. We can have labor-management committee meetings about the steps management needs to take to make sure people aren't working beyond that scope. If there are violations, that's what the union contract is there for---there's a grievance-and-arbitration process, and that gives a really clear framework for winning the four-day, thirty-two-hour work week.

Take the Kickstarter Union example. When they first won the four-day work week, there was sympathetic leadership on management that was invested in this issue, alongside the union. They won contract language that gave them a four-day work week, but a lot of it was ultimately up to management discretion. When things are going well, there's not really much to enforce. Going into their most recent set of negotiations, there had been some moves by management to start encroaching on the four-day, thirty-two-hour work week---maybe for specific projects, just suddenly imposing a five-day work week, things like that. Folks realized that even if they self-policed, the language wasn't enforceable. They had to improve what was written on the page to enshrine it. They'd built such investment that folks went on strike for forty-plus days to win stronger contractual protections for their four-day, thirty-two-hour work week. They also had some pay-related demands, but this was part of the core set of demands. Their experience speaks very strongly to how, once people experience the benefits the four-day, thirty-two-hour work week has on their lives, they will fight tooth and nail to keep it, because it has such a profound impact on their happiness.

*Have you experienced skepticism from workers, saying, "Why are we asking for this?" What kinds of pushback do you get from workers?*

There are two layers of pushback. One is the "why": "Why are we pushing for something so ambitious?" Sometimes it can be, "Hey, we really believe in the business---is pushing for this going to hurt the business, or the nonprofit, or the thing we all signed up to do?" That's a very common kind of pushback. They focus on the demand being so ambitious: "We can't win this, this is like asking for a 100 percent pay increase, this feels too good to be true."

Something really interesting and powerful about this movement is that, thanks to the work of Juliet Schor, 4 Day Week Global, and Work Time Revolution, there are all these organizations and researchers who've studied organizations that shifted to the four-day, thirty-two-hour work week and shown that it's a win-win for both the organization and workers. That helps defray the why question---it makes clear this is a choice. It's not an impossible thing; it's just a choice on our part and management's part, or the employer's part, to do this, because we know it can work. More than 90 percent of companies that pilot this stick with it. When I first heard that number, I was amazed. I felt this is a cause worth pushing for even if 25 percent of companies that adopted it ended up sticking with it. But the fact that it's more than 90 percent meant there's clearly a recipe for success that benefits everybody.

That's the "why" pushback. Then addressing the "how" pushback is sometimes even harder. It's, "Okay, we all agree we want this, but I just can't imagine how to do my work in four days," or, "I can't imagine how this department, or how we as a team, could serve the people we're meant to serve in four days." The way we've recommended defraying that is, first, to have really open and honest conversations with people about the "how"---to co-create what that four-day, thirty-two-hour work week looks like. In the context of union negotiation, that co-creation would look like having a lot of conversations within the bargaining unit about shaping the proposal that goes to management. But even beyond that, the proposal should also include co-creation between management and the union about what that week looks like. Our best-practices language for bargaining a four-day work week means you're not having the four-day work week the moment you ratify the deal, but that there's a month-long process to co-create a four-day work week that actually works for the organization.

In the same way that the five-day, forty-hour work week is not one-size-fits-all, people sometimes put that kind of pressure on a four-day, thirty-two-hour work week: "This is how it worked for that company, but there's no way that model would work here. What works for a tech company isn't going to work for healthcare." But luckily, we have models across different industries that show it can be done, and can be done in different ways. Having those conversations openly with the bargaining unit is important, because people are skeptical---and skeptical for valid reasons.

*How do you see automation playing into this question? The old dream is that automation will free up time, maybe even dangerously so---leaving us idle and adrift, with nothing to do with our lives. Yet, in the context of ongoing automation for many decades now, we see not an erosion of working hours but a slow increase, and that increase appears to be accelerating with generative AI---not only the number of hours, but the intensification and stress that come with them. Can you talk about how you see this demand in light of automation, both from the perspective of the workers you've been engaging with and as a broader macroeconomic story?*

In the last eight decades, we've seen more than 400 percent productivity growth because of automation and technology, and yet work hours on an individual level have stayed constant and are now increasing. Meanwhile, work hours on a household basis have actually increased, due to labor-force participation rates and the like.

What that makes us realize is if we want to make people happier by creating a different societal standard for how much we work, it's not a technological question, it's a political one. We started doing this work before I'd even heard of ChatGPT. Part of it was in response to the technological revolution we saw during the pandemic, when we really changed work structures and norms, and lots of new technology was deployed to make things more efficient or to accommodate different work structures. Yet none of those efficiency gains, broadly speaking, were captured by workers. It led to "efficiencies," but, to your point, it led to more intensification and more surveillance. It never leads to more time for workers. It almost always just leads to more money for those at the top.

We're at a really interesting point, at the precipice of what AI and automation are capable of, and we see it in all different types of sectors. Obviously, we're seeing a lot of contraction and layoffs in the tech industry, which for a while had the gold-standard jobs. I have a friend who does four-day-work organizing in the tech industry, and in a lot of ways it's very similar to the autoworkers of a hundred years ago, where these are the really good jobs that will set you up for life. We're seeing a lot of contraction. Three years ago, it was an industry giving out benefits left and right for workers; now it's the opposite, and the impact there is clear.

For low-wage workers and essential workers, we're seeing something a little different right now: more surveillance. In nursing homes and home care, we've heard of technology that can track workers' movements throughout the building to make sure they're covering enough ground. You've heard of apps that currently work about 30 percent of the time and are very buggy, but track how often workers are clocking in and out on time, or whether there are issues with hours. We've heard of staffing AI assistants where, based on client acuity and the number and capabilities of your workers, it can optimize so that you have perfectly efficient staffing. AI and automation have been a little slower to trickle into the domains of essential work---whether that's healthcare, retail, or food---but it's coming.

That also speaks to the moment we're in, where there's a lot of anxiety around AI. I talk to workers all the time, and when you say something like AI, nobody's initial reaction is, "Oh yeah, hell yeah, bring it on." It's, "That sounds scary." There's a gut instinct that this is a bad thing. But we also have some leverage---the mass displacement hasn't happened yet. We live in a moment where people have the potential to really exert control over the economy, motivated by something that animates low-wage and high-wage workers alike: everybody feels AI is coming for their job. There's a lot of leverage here.

The last point I'll make is that in the last year, we've seen a lot of the AI tycoons start talking about work-time reduction. Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei---they say AI is going to usher in a two-day work week. But they don't apply those same principles at their own workplaces, they don't fund any work in that direction, and they don't lobby for that type of policy. They just say it on these funder calls and hope it gets aggregated, because they know one way to diminish public anxiety around AI is to promise it'll deliver good things, while putting none of their money where their mouth is. In some ways, they recognize the power of work-time reduction more than a lot of policy and labor advocates do, and they are trying to use it as a tool to defray anxiety---not that successfully, because people are still worried about AI even though they use it all the time. That's one of the weird paradoxes of this moment: people can see on a day-to-day basis how it's helpful, but at the same time have deep anxiety around it.

*Everyone is using a tool that everyone hates.*

It's interesting. That's maybe the one other thing I want to really affirm: so many of the big economic ideas are not ones that speak to young people. I was in my twenties when I first started thinking about the four-day work week; I'm now in my early thirties, so I don't know if that constitutes being a young person anymore---I don't know where that line is. But there's something really cool about this generation. As younger millennials and Gen Z, we want so much more out of our economy, and yet the ideas the establishment puts forth---and the establishment generally isn't made up of people of our generation---are deeply untransformational, in my opinion. There's a huge generational disconnect on how we think about the economy at large. Tapping into that generational disaffection is where there's a lot of power and momentum to be had. We're obviously witnessing that in other ways, on other issues, too.

*Let's talk about the broader strategy. Working hours are a norm across the economy. They tend to cut across industries, even though there are certainly differences among them. Can you talk about the strategy for shifting a norm like this---how you're approaching it beyond just workplace to workplace, toward building a broader demand and a broader narrative?*

The four-day work week is a win-win for employers and workers, but it's also a win for society---environmentally, when it comes to gender and racial justice, and for democracy, with people having more time. There are so many entry points, and so many levers on which this issue can work.

Some workers'-rights demands really only apply to your workplace. Some can really only be won at the legislative level. What's cool about work-time reduction is that it's something that can be won in a lot of different ways, and it doesn't have to be all or nothing---there are incremental steps people can take to win it across those different levers.

We've talked a lot about workplace-level change. There, we both engage employers as a movement and engage rank-and-file members and union staff---we're hitting it from all angles. What's also exciting is the political, policy-oriented dimension. We've seen a lot of traction just in the last two or three years: fifteen to twenty states have now introduced bills. In New York, the four-day-work-week bill was introduced by a democratic socialist; in Maine, it was introduced by a more centrist Republican. There's a possibility here for a deep coalition. Just in the last year, in Chicago, a four-day-work-week resolution passed the lower chamber, and in Maine, a bill that would fund a pilot has passed one step. Each year, we're seeing more states introduce this, the coalition grows, and the road to an actual bill gets clearer and clearer. We're actually passing certain things. It's not just some rogue legislator who's like, "This would be fun, let me introduce a bill." There's real work building. Policy is where there's a big conversation to be had.

Then there's also the cultural dimension. There's been a lot of work in the last three or four years, since COVID and predating that as well, about the meaning of all this. What value are we deriving from this much work in a deeply unhappy, exhausted, stressed society? There's got to be a better way to live. It's the larger cultural conversation of whether we want to build a society where we work to live or live to work.

*How useful do you find it, in working toward this future, to reference the past---to times when working hours were a more prominent part of the labor movement? Do you see this work as continuous with that, or does it need to break with some of those legacies as well?*

It's really useful, because we now live in a moment where it's a real aberration that work hours, as a matter of policy, have stayed constant---and, as you were saying, they might actually be increasing. But generally speaking, they've stayed around the same threshold, and it's been that way for eighty years. If you take the eighty years before that, from 1860 to 1940, work hours were constantly changing as new technologies were introduced, because there was a larger political struggle around that issue.

It's deeply important to talk about the history, because people don't realize exactly how we settled on this whole structure of a five-day, forty-hour work week. People think, "Okay, this is just thousands of years of us refining our economy to reach the perfect balance point of how much people should work." It's also good to point this out because it's an archaic structure, an archaic policy. So much of how we work has changed---labor-force participation among women, especially white women, has increased significantly in the last eighty years; the internet, computers, remote work, so many developments have really shifted work---yet somehow work hours have stayed constant.

One of the myths we try to smash is that the legacy of this country is not for work hours to stay constant. It's actually to reduce work hours, and this period of eighty years where it hasn't changed is the anomaly. In the same way that workers, policymakers, and labor joined overtime to reduce work hours one hundred years ago, we have the opposite struggle now: the billionaires and the people who run companies are working overtime to make sure people feel they have to work endlessly. We're trying to bring balance to the force on that question.

What's also interesting about the history is that there are moments where you realize this is really just totally vibes-based. In the 1930s, at one point they put forward a bill that would have just set the work week to thirty hours, but some people said, "Oh, that's too little." It's not like there was deep, refined economic thinking about this. It was just policymakers picking a number and sticking with it. I forget the exact legislative path of that bill, but it was very close to passing. We were that close, one hundred years ago, to a thirty-hour work week, and it was just vibes-based opposition that landed us on forty. We originally settled on forty-four, then a few years later on forty. There's no real deep science to how we landed here, which means what we want is what's important here, not some super-sophisticated macroeconomic analysis of what the optimal work week is.

*What would the world look like with a four-day work week? What glimpses have you seen from your experience of how it would feel if this were a new normal, rather than just something that happens at a few workplaces here and there, or is proposed in a few legislatures?*

We know what it feels like. We've had three-day weekends, we've had holidays, we've had time off all the time, and we know how much happier that makes us. Going into those weekends, there's a whole conversation everybody's having: "What are you doing this weekend?" Leisure, community, fun.

Ultimately, I think we'd have a much happier world, and that's what's ultimately drawing me to this. There are so many ideas we put forth that might make people marginally happier, but they don't really cut at the core of somebody's happiness or fill the voids in their heart. We know time back does do that. We have these glimpses in society where everybody gets a four-day work week---not everybody, since obviously some people work those days, but largely---and those lead to the best memories in people's lives. Juneteenth was last Friday, the Fourth of July is next Friday; it's summer, and people are going to the beach, hanging out with their loved ones.

The four-day work week is a very pro-social policy. Part of what has made us so antisocial is the lack of time to build deep and meaningful connections with people's communities and their interests. A world in which everybody has a four-day work week is one of untapped potential when it comes to people's happiness. As somebody who's had a four-day work week and experienced it solo---my partner doesn't have one---sometimes when I have Fridays off, I think this would be so much more fun if all my friends had Fridays off too, or if my wife had Fridays off too. There's so much joy that could be brought from that. That's what keeps us going in this movement: knowing what the promise holds, and making sure everybody would get to live and enjoy that promise.

*I love how we've made the journey from materialism to joy.*

Maybe my true colors are showing! I'm actually all about the soft values. This is ultimately about a positive, affirmative vision for what life entails---about joy, about happiness. What's the point of having an economy that doesn't do that? What's the point of having AI if it doesn't make us happier? What's the point of working five days a week if it doesn't make us happier? The economy's been bent in a way that makes people deeply unhappy and deeply overworked, and it's time to bend it back.
