Opinion: Maryland is striking a blow at the absurd culture of over-work

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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Maryland is striking a blow at the absurd American culture of over-work.

State lawmakers have put forward a bill that would incentivize companies to move to a four-day work week, offering $750,000 in tax breaks for organizations that move a sufficient number of employees over to a four-day, 32-hour-a-week schedule. This would be part of a state-wide pilot program in which the state Department of Labor would gather data to get a better sense of what a shorter workweek might mean for employees, productivity and the bottom line.

In the last few decades, American work life has undergone a revolution. Technology has made many of our jobs more desk-bound and more efficient. Automation has replaced many forms of manual labor. Working women, once an anomaly, are a standard part of a workforce that is more diverse and better-educated than at any point in American history.

American workers are remarkably productive, but while they have spent the last 50 years steadily producing more and more, real wages have not risen at the same rate. We are, in other words, doing more for less. And this is all despite the promises of technology – to free us from drudgery so that we might spend more of our time on creative pursuits, or with family, or doing what brings us joy.

Instead, it seems, technological innovations have just made us more tethered to machines and devices (while machines also threaten to take over our creative works). Why are we doing this to ourselves?

The truth is that it’s human beings – us – who build our societies, workplaces and economies. There is nothing innate or natural about a five-day workweek, and the 40-hour workweek was not handed down from God. Yet suggestions that we change it can feel like an affront to ambition or the American work ethic, or simply an impossibility.

But the only reason a five-day, 40-hour workweek feels normal and necessary is because we’ve made it that way. We can – and should – adapt, especially when the best available…