Bernie Sanders Is Still Pushing Hard for a Four-Day Workweek – And He’s Tying It Straight to AI

Honestly, sometimes I sit on my couch with the fireplace crackling and a fresh mug of coffee and think: man, we have it ridiculously good compared to pretty much everyone who lived before us. Child labor? Twelve-hour factory shifts in dangerous conditions? People literally dying of exhaustion? That was normal not even that long ago. Now most of us can work from home in sweatpants, there are actual laws about overtime and safety, and if your boss is a jerk you can just… leave.

So when someone starts talking about cutting the standard workweek from 40 hours down to 32, my first reaction is “wait, it gets even cushier?” But then I remember how fried everyone seems these days, and I kinda get it.

Bernie Sanders definitely gets it.

The 84-year-old senator has been beating this drum for a while now, and he’s connecting it directly to the AI boom. His basic pitch: if machines and software are making us crazy-productive, the extra value shouldn’t all flow to a handful of billionaires. Regular people should get some of it back in the form of time.

He laid it out pretty plainly on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year:

“You’re a worker, your productivity shoots up because we gave you AI tools. Instead of firing you or keeping you at 40 hours and pocketing the difference, we drop you to 32 hours and you keep the same paycheck.”

That’s the heart of his “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act,” which he re-introduced last year and keeps pushing. The way it would actually work is pretty clever: after a phased-in period (four years so companies don’t freak out), anything over 32 hours would automatically trigger overtime pay. Businesses that want to keep running five-day schedules could still do it; they’d just have to pay extra for that fifth day. Most would probably shift to four tens or some version of a long weekend instead.

Sanders frames it as the next logical step in a very American story: technology improves, life gets better for workers. The 40-hour week itself only became law in the 1940s because machinery and electricity made us more productive than ever. He thinks AI is that kind of leap all over again.

Of course he’s also blunt about the flip side. If we let AI just supercharge profits for the Musks and Bezoses of the world without doing anything to spread the gains, the wealth gap is going to turn into a canyon. “The top 1 percent already own more than the bottom 93 percent,” he keeps pointing out. Add another trillion-dollar AI gold rush on top of that and, well, good luck having anything resembling a functioning middle class.

Love him or roll your eyes at him, the guy’s been ridiculously consistent on this stuff for decades. And with companies from Microsoft to tiny startups already experimenting with four-day weeks (and usually reporting happier employees and the same or better output), his idea is starting to feel less pie-in-the-sky than it did five years ago.

So what do you think: would you take an automatic three-day weekend if it came with the same paycheck, or does the whole thing sound like fantasy-land? I know which side my couch is voting for.