Cassidy talked as though Americans' average workweek derived from some sort of immutable law that could be tampered with only at our economic peril.

That's nonsense. On average, American workers spend 400 more hours on the job per year than Germans — that works out to about 1½ hours more per working day. Americans work 200 hours a year more than workers in France, the Netherlands and Britain, Schor testified.

The result, she said, is "extraordinary levels of stress, burnout and exhaustion for American workers."

Cassidy also called the four-day workweek a "fringe proposal." But it's nothing of the kind. A 32-hour, four-day workweek has been talked about for decades. Even Richard Nixon, as vice president in 1956, said he foresaw a four-day workweek "in the not too distant future."

To be fair, Nixon made his prediction as a way to boast about economic growth under Eisenhower and make the case that the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, would institute policies that would hobble the "unbelievably prosperous" future that would unfold in a second Eisenhower term.

As it happens, by the time Nixon entered the White House on his own in 1969, he was no longer promising a four-day week.

History tells us that employers always view changes in work conditions to benefit workers as unimaginably radical — "fringe" proposals, to use Cassidy's term.

That was the case in the 1870s and 1880s, when the eight-hour day became the rallying cry for the Knights of Labor, the first truly national industrial labor union.

The eight-hour campaign contributed to the Knights' massive expansion, which in turn fostered a misimpression that it could launch and win a strike against the railroad network controlled by financier Jay Gould.

But Gould outmaneuvered the union leadership into reaching a settlement with major union concessions. The strike collapsed, followed by the Knights themselves.

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