Juliet Schor: Does the Future of Work Mean Less Work? The Movement for a Four-Day Week

Free and open to the public

Juliet Schor is an economist and Professor of Sociology at Boston College. In 2022 she became the lead researcher for pathbreaking trials studying hundreds of companies instituting four-day, 32-hour workweeks with five-days’ pay. The research, which is ongoing, finds large improvements in well-being outcomes and success for the participating organizations. Her book, Four Days a Week (HarperBusiness, 2025), details these findings.

Schor has been researching worktime since the 1980s and is the author of The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1992), which was a national bestseller. Schor has also researched sustainable consumption and the link between climate change and worktime, and, since 2011, the platform economy. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years in the Department of Economics and later, the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. Schor’s other books include After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back (California, 2020), Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (Penguin Press 2010), Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner 2004), and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Basic Books, 1998).

Schor is the recipient of numerous awards, and is an Elected Fellow of the AAAS and, most recently, the 2024 Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, among others. A frequent contributor to public discourse and media, Schor’s Ted talk on “the case for the four-day week” has more than three million views.

The event is presented by PERI and the UMass Amherst Economics Department Economic Theory Workshop.

For more information, contact Nicole Dunham: ndunham@umass.edu.