In 2025, we’re constantly told, artificial intelligence is bringing about a workplace revolution. Countless billionaires have waxed poetic about the “coming recession” and “unemployment crisis” that their hyped up AI chatbots are sure to bring.
Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont, has been listening.
Calling the US tech industry on its AI hype — which mostly involves generating shareholder value — Sanders recently posed a rhetorical question on the Joe Rogan podcast: if AI is as powerful as they say, why not give workers a 30-hour week?
“Technology is gonna work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations,” Sanders said. “You are a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right? Instead of throwing you out on the street, I’m gonna reduce your work week to 32 hours.”
“That means, give you more time with your family, with your friends, for education, whatever the hell you want to do,” the senator suggested. “You don’t have to work 40 hours a week anymore.”
While a 30-hour work week may sound untenable to some, it’s important to remember that the 40 hour week is less than a century old, only becoming federally law in 1940. One could look at that legislation as a concession to placate industrial workers, who in 1933 were agitating for the same 30-hour week which most of us in 2025 can hardly imagine.
Even Bernie agrees. It’s “not a radical idea,” he told Rogan, adding that “there are companies around the world that are doing it with some success.”
However, the reality is that AI is far from ready to bring about optimistic labor reforms like Sanders’ laudable 30-day week, or even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s guilt-ridden idea for universal basic income.
Despite widespread fear of AI-fueled layoffs and a job market in shambles, AI’s main function is currently to give corporations cover as they outsource high-paying jobs to lower-wage workers. As time goes on, more and more corporate executives are realizing that AI — buggy, inefficient, and stubbornly prone to hallucinations — is no match for human beings.
Still, even in the utopian world where AI could execute tasks accurately, Sanders’ idea has some flaws.
Most notable is the issue of unequal exchange between rich and poor countries. Given the tech industry’s growing tendency to offload laborious tasks like AI grading to low-wage workers in countries like Kenya, it’s likely that an AI-powered 30-hour workweek in the US would only increase inequality in other parts of the world.
We’re already seeing signs of this: a 2024 digital labor study found that the AI industry helps rich countries maintain poor nations’ economic dependencies on exploitative trade, at the expense of their workers. In poor countries, AI also leads to new types of economic turmoil, while worsening that which already exists.
Within the US, the 30-hour concept also relies on the goodwill of for-profit companies, something they’ve never offered workers out of the kindness of their hearts.
Even now, with today’s deeply flawed AI, workers in the US report that the tech is lowering their productivity and saddling them with more work per day — not less. Meanwhile, studies show massive AI investments have had “no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.”
These issues aside, Sanders’ proposal does cut to an exciting fact: that a universal 30-hour workweek is possible, and it’s up to the workers of the world to win it for ourselves.
More on labor: Top Venture Capitalist Says AI Will Replace Pretty Much All Jobs Except His, Which Relies on His Unique Genius
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