In April 2021 LinkedIn gave its entire workforce of nearly 16,000 people a week off. Its chief people officer, Teuila Hanson, said, “What we think is most valuable right now is time for all of us to collectively walk away.” In June 2021 the dating app Bumble closed for a week, “as a way to thank our team for their hard work and resilience.”
In both cases the company granted the week.
On April 6, 1933, the U.S. Senate passed a bill by Senator Hugo Black for a 30-hour work week. The vote was 53 to 30. President Franklin Roosevelt turned to a different recovery plan, and the bill was dropped. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 required overtime pay after 40 hours, but did not cap hours.
On March 14, 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act, for what news reports called “a standard 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.” He said, “Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea.”
Some American work has a legal limit on hours. A truck driver carrying freight “may drive a maximum of 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty.”
Hospital residents have a national limit of 80 hours a week, averaged over four weeks. It goes back to the death of Libby Zion, 18, at a New York hospital in 1984. New York set limits for residents in the late 1980s. In 2003 the national accrediting body for residency programs set the 80-hour limit for the whole country.
The resident limit grew out of concern for the safety of patients.
No federal law requires American employers to give paid sick days. The Family and Medical Leave Act requires unpaid leave only. In 2006 San Francisco voters passed a paid sick leave law that its supporters called the first of its kind. In 2011 Connecticut became the first state to pass one for private employers.
In May 2026 the advocacy group A Better Balance listed 18 states, one of them not yet in effect, and the District of Columbia with paid sick time laws.
In 1992 the psychologists Henry Cloud and John Townsend published Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. The publisher calls it a plan “for setting healthy boundaries with family, friends, and co-workers.” Wikipedia puts its sales at two million copies.
In 2021 the therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab published Set Boundaries, Find Peace, a New York Times bestseller. Its description says, “Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them in order to achieve work/life balance.”
In October 2021 Google added a new kind of event to Google Calendar, called Focus time. Google’s announcement said it lets users of some paid Google Workspace plans “block out and protect your time for heads-down individual work.” A Focus time block can “automatically decline conflicting events.”
In the comedy Office Space (1999), the manager Bill Lumbergh asks Peter to come in on Saturday. Then he adds: “Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.”
Lumbergh phrases his orders as requests. He says “I’m gonna need you to” and “that’d be great.” He has Peter work nearly every weekend.
Near the end of The Devil Wears Prada (2006), the assistant Andy tells her boss Miranda that she had no choice when she took the place of her colleague Emily. Miranda answers, “You chose. You chose to get ahead.”
Earlier her boyfriend has told her, “The person whose calls you always take? That’s the relationship you’re in.” Later, in Paris, when Miranda calls her, Andy throws her phone into a fountain.
In February 2021, thirteen first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs gave management a survey of their working lives. They reported more than 95 hours a week and five hours of sleep a night. One wrote, “This is inhumane.” Chief executive David Solomon told staff, “We’re strengthening enforcement of the Saturday rule.” Under the rule, junior bankers should not be expected in the office from 9 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday.
In May 2024 Leo Lukenas III, a 35-year-old associate at Bank of America, died after reportedly working several weeks of more than 100 hours. JPMorgan then told junior bankers that they should typically work no more than 80 hours a week, with exceptions for live deals.
Both rules were set by the banks themselves, after complaints or a death became public.
On November 16, 2022, Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter staff. “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Employees who wanted to stay had to click yes on a link. “Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.”