Robert Reich attacks AI four-day-week hype

Robert Reich argues in the Guardian that corporate America’s sudden enthusiasm for a four-day workweek is less a humane revolution than a marketing wrapper for automation-driven cost cutting. The pitch, he notes, is now everywhere: executives and consultants claim generative AI will “take over more tasks” and hand employees back time.

Reich’s exhibit list is a parade of powerful people promising leisure by algorithm. Zoom chief Eric Yuan tells the New York Times that AI will make a five-day week obsolete. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon speculates about a three-and-a-half-day week. Bill Gates muses about a two-day week. Elon Musk, never one to underpromise, forecasts that “working is optional” within 10 to 20 years, alongside “universal high income” and no poverty.

The Guardian piece punctures this techno-utopianism with a basic question: who owns the productivity gains? Even if AI delivers large efficiency improvements — still an open question — there is no automatic mechanism that routes the surplus to workers as leisure with unchanged pay. Reich cites a recent MIT study finding that despite $30–40bn in enterprise spending on generative AI, 95% of organizations report “zero return.” If the returns are uncertain, the bargaining power to claim them matters even more.

History is not on the side of the brochure. Reich points out that worker productivity has climbed for decades while inflation-adjusted median wages have barely moved. In that world, the “four-day week” most plausibly arrives as four days of pay — or as a euphemism for layoffs, reduced hours, and the cheerful suggestion that people patch the gap with gig work.

It is an old story in new fonts. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that labor-saving technology would outrun our ability to invent new work, leaving the West with an abundance problem: too much leisure. Reich’s implicit update is that Keynes underestimated a different human invention — institutional arrangements that let concentrated owners and managers capture the gains while everyone else keeps the same rent, healthcare premiums, and debt service.

The AI “shorter week” narrative, then, functions as a kind of corporate permission slip. It reframes replacement as liberation, and wage compression as lifestyle optimization. If workers feel poorer, the story suggests, they should blame their own failure to adapt — not the legal and market structures that determine who gets the upside.

Reich does not deny that AI could change work; he denies that it will do so on egalitarian terms by default. In practice, the decisive variables are ownership of models and data, competition versus platform lock-in, and the extent to which regulation entrenches incumbents. Until those questions are answered, the four-day workweek remains what it has always been in politics and business: a promise of freedom, carefully drafted to avoid granting any.