Rich, Charlie, Maddy, and Michael take on Senator Bernie Sanders’s (I., Vt.) proposal for a four-day work week on today’s edition of The Editors — and they’re not fans.
Michael points out the Marxian connection immediately, saying, “I believe this is fully rooted in . . . in Marx’s vision of the future, where you spend just a few hours in the morning working, and then the rest of the afternoon is hunting and writing poetry. . . . and, you know, being a dilettante at everything else in life for the majority of your time rather than being useful and [an] expert most of the time. And it’s ridiculous.
“I think . . . the only thing that’s kind of charming about it is that it’s so retro and 20th century, but it seems totally irrelevant to the future.”
“The government really just makes a lot of these things worse and introduces perverse incentives,” Maddy says. “We don’t really need more incentives for people to kind of not work. I think there’s already quite a lot of those. . . . Of course, it is important to be working hard. And it’s deep in our sense of dignity to do jobs, however humble they are, to do them well. I’m all for finding more time for leisure, finding more time for family and culture, but this is definitely not the way to do it.”
Charlie is equally opposed, saying, “I hate this in every way. I hate it in theory. I hate it in practice. I don’t understand why the federal government gets any say over this. . . . I also think that it is a ridiculous thing to want to do. Work is good. Work is good for people. If anything, we should work more. We are massively in debt.
“Bernie Sanders is trying to change American work culture.”
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