The 4-day workweek was a longshot. The UAW isn’t giving up

Of all the bargaining goals set out by the United Auto Workers union in the just completed talks, none was more ambitious, or gained less traction in negotiations, than the idea of a four-day, 32-hour work week.

Of all the bargaining goals set out by the United Auto Workers union in the just completed talks, none was more ambitious, or gained less traction in negotiations, than the idea of a four-day, 32-hour work week. Without a cut in pay, too. That didn’t happen, at least not this round. And it might sound like an impossible dream for most American workers. But UAW President Shawn Fain says that it’s not just achievable, but a dream that his union forefathers believed in. “I think it’s a very realistic goal,” he said in an interview with CNN Business. He points out that it was a negotiating goal of the union back in the middle of the last century, soon after it won the right to represent workers at the nation’s automakers. “I don’t know what happened over the next 60 or 70 years, but that conversation fell by the wayside,” he said. “So I felt it was imperative that we get the dialogue going back to, you know, workers reclaiming their lives,” he said. But the idea was dismissed by automakers. Some executives, such as Ford CEO Jim Farley, said agreeing to that would lead to massive losses for the automakers.