Work safety

Elon Musk is wrong. Working extremely long hours doesn't make you better at your job.

In 1926, Henry Ford shocked industry leaders around the world when he announced a five-day workweek for his Ford employees. “Just as the eight-hour day opened our way to prosperity in America, so the five-day workweek will open our way to still greater prosperity...it is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,” Ford wrote then.

At the time, unions and workers’ advocates had been jostling for reduced working hours for decades, as part of efforts to improve working conditions. However, Ford probably wasn’t thinking about his employee’s well-being when he made the switch, says John Pencavel, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “He was more concerned, my guess, with preventing a possible unionization,” and losing any inch of control to organized labor.

To his probable surprise, Ford found, though, that knocking a day off of the work week actually improved productivity in his factories. It turned out,workers got more done in five days than they had in six.