Debra Lordan

One-fifth of a solution.

Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work… preferably in that order. But whose cruel idea was it that the standard workweek be five days long? I actually tried to track down the culprit and found that the notion of the five-day workweek has remained virtually unchanged since 1938. The Fair Labor Standards Act passed that year, standardizing the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek. Back then it was a big improvement in the lives of those who were forced to work 10-plus hours a day, sometimes six days a week.

But how did they come up with that? I can see that simple math easily divides a 24-hour day, yielding 8 hours each for sleeping, working and living. Has the difficulty of dividing a seven-day week caused this unbalanced lifestyle? That we should work for five days in a row before taking two for ourselves is clearly arbitrary, if you ask me.

Seriously, I’m not trying to get out of work… it’s obvious that an important factor in this equation is transportation—its cost and its consequential effects on our climate. Reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil until we come up with alternatives that don’t use fossil fuel.

Let’s look at what else I found. There are about 133 million workers in America and approximately 80 percent of them get to work by driving alone in a car. That means 106,400,000 single-driver commuter cars each day. Times 32 miles, the average commute, equals 3,404,800,000 miles driven to and from work each day. An average fuel efficiency of 21 mpg means that we gobble up 162,133,333 gallons of gasoline each day.

A four-day workweek could have a considerable impact on crude oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants. By taking 20 percent of our cars off the road each week, we could also reduce traffic congestion, reduce money spent on road maintenance and construction, reduce auto accidents and deaths, reduce absenteeism, decrease the cost of labor and business operations and increase productivity. We might even spend more time with our families and increase our quality of life.

And we could save about $70 million a day at today’s gas prices. Our high-octane ride of infinite growth is coasting to a halt, and I heard we could use the money…

Gas cost 10 cents a gallon in 1938. I think this 70-year-old five-day workweek idea has outlived its usefulness.