If AI Makes Us More Productive, Why Aren’t We Working Less?

Say your employer gives you an AI tool that genuinely helps. A report that used to consume your afternoon is ready before lunch, including the time you spend checking it. You’re doing the same work in fewer hours, which sounds like it should make getting home earlier possible.

Then your manager assigns another report.

By Friday, you’ve produced more than you used to, but you’re still leaving at the same time. The company has gained capacity, and your working week hasn’t changed. If the tool becomes good enough, you might start wondering whether management needs everyone on your team.

That’s a plausible outcome of automation under capitalism. The business owns the tools and decides what work gets assigned, while your claim to the hours you helped save depends on what you can negotiate.

I want us to make a different demand. As technology allows us to produce what we need with less labor, working people should get more time to live, with enough income to enjoy it.

Faster work leaves a decision to make

Some of the productivity gains are already measurable. In a study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond examined an AI assistant introduced to 5,172 customer-support agents. Workers with access to it resolved about 15 percent more issues per hour on average, with larger benefits for less experienced workers. ¹

That result belongs to a particular workplace and kind of work. It doesn’t tell us that every employee can finish their job 15 percent faster, or that everything sold as AI saves time once someone has checked its output.

But when a tool does save labor, there’s a decision to make. An employer can use that capacity to serve more customers, improve service, reduce staffing, or shorten workers’ hours. The choice depends partly on what the business needs and partly on who has the power to insist on a share of the benefit.

An owner has a financial reason to keep a productive employee working a full week if there’s more profitable work available. Competition can reinforce that pressure. A business that keeps expanding output may gain an advantage over one that gives employees Friday off.

That helps explain why asking individual employers to be generous won’t get us far enough. Workers need agreements they can enforce, and public standards that prevent the most demanding employer from setting the terms for everyone else.

We’ve changed the working week before

The forty-hour standard came through political struggle and legislation. The Fair Labor Standards Act became law in 1938, and its weekly overtime threshold stepped down to forty hours by 1940. Today, federal law generally requires covered, nonexempt employees to receive overtime pay after forty hours in a workweek. It doesn’t prohibit longer weeks or cover every worker. ² ³

That distinction matters because the standard changes what employers have to pay when they demand more time. We can change it again.

I’d support moving toward a thirty-two-hour standard with protected weekly pay. A worker earning $800 for forty hours would still earn $800 for thirty-two. Without that protection, a shorter schedule could leave someone looking for a second job to make rent.

The same goes for workload. If your employer squeezes the old schedule into four exhausting days, expects unpaid work on the fifth, or takes away your breaks, you haven’t gained much control over your life.

A meaningful reduction needs enforceable limits on hours and realistic workloads, with workers involved in deciding how the job changes.

More time off is worth organizing for

There’s evidence that reducing work time can improve people’s lives. A 2025 study in Nature Human Behaviour followed 2,896 employees at 141 organizations participating in four-day-week trials without a pay cut. The researchers found improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, and mental and physical health, a pattern they didn’t observe in twelve comparison companies. ⁴

The intervention included reorganizing work at the participating organizations. We shouldn’t treat it as proof that every workplace could immediately drop a day with no staffing or financial changes. It does give us reason to take shorter hours seriously as a way to improve health and daily life.

For a parent, an afternoon back might mean picking up their child without negotiating a favor. For someone caring for an older relative, it could mean getting to an appointment without losing wages. It could also mean having an ordinary weekday with nothing you’re required to do.

People deserve that time even when they don’t use it to become more productive employees.

Workers need a say before the savings disappear

A workplace introducing AI should have to discuss what it expects the technology to change. Employees should be able to examine whether it actually saves time, what new checking work it creates, and what management plans to do with the difference.

Unions can bargain for shorter schedules with protected pay, limits on work intensity, and retraining when roles change. Those commitments should be made before the company has turned a productivity improvement into a higher quota or a redundancy notice.

Government has a role beyond encouraging voluntary trials. It can lower the overtime threshold, strengthen organizing rights, and enforce protections against unpaid work. Public investment and procurement can also come with conditions requiring employers to share benefits with their workers.

Some workplaces will need additional staffing. A hospital still needs people at the bedside overnight, and a childcare center still needs enough adults in the room. A shorter week for those workers requires funding and staffing plans. Gains elsewhere in the economy can help support that through taxation and public spending, instead of leaving access to a shorter week dependent on whether your particular job is easy to automate.

Universal healthcare belongs in this effort too. A person considering reduced hours or facing a job change should be able to keep their basic coverage. Public services and income protection would give workers more room to negotiate without putting their family’s security on the line.

Who owns the time we save?

This is why I’m interested in worker ownership and public ownership of productive technology. When employees help govern a business, they have a route to voting on how its gains are used. Publicly owned infrastructure could similarly be directed toward public benefits, provided people have meaningful control over it.

I don’t want an automated economy where a few billionaires own the systems and everyone else competes for whatever paid work remains. We should be building institutions that distribute the wealth those systems help produce, including through universal services and shorter hours.

We can pursue that now, using technology that works and being honest about technology that doesn’t. We don’t have to wait for a machine capable of doing every job before deciding that an improvement in productivity should buy workers some freedom.

The next time an employer announces that AI will save thousands of hours, employees should be at the table deciding what happens to those hours. I want a written agreement that lets someone close their laptop on Thursday and know Friday belongs to them, with their paycheck intact.

Notes

1. Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond, “Generative AI at Work,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 140, no. 2 (May 2025), 889–942. Published online February 4, 2025.

2. U.S. Department of Labor, “The Department in the New Deal and World War II, 1933–1945,” chapter 3 of its departmental history.

3. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #23: Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA,” accessed November 7, 2026.

4. Wen Fan, Juliet B. Schor, Orla Kelly, and Guolin Gu, “Work Time Reduction via a 4-Day Workweek Finds Improvements in Workers’ Well-Being,” Nature Human Behaviour 9 (2025), 2153–2168. Published online July 21, 2025.