The Case for a Four-Day Workweek in Maryland
The Maryland State Capitol building is older than America. It is the only state capitol to have also served as the nation’s capital; in the country’s earliest days, Congress met in its chambers. To work in Annapolis is to operate in the shadow of history. So maybe that explains why, 246 years into the American project, one state lawmaker sees his four-day-workweek bill as carrying on in the tradition of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. That, or it’s just a good hook.
“The Framers put in ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,’” Vaughn Stewart, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told me, emphasizing that last one. “This is really a larger conversation about where we are as a country, and whether we need to ask ourselves, for the first time in almost a century, if there is something better than living to work.”
The very buzzy—but actually kind of modest—bill would create what is effectively a five-year experiment with a four-day workweek, creating $750,000 in tax credits for Maryland businesses per year over five years in exchange for them shortening their hours and handing over data to the state on how it goes. “It’s going to be really hard for me to persuade my colleagues that the time is now for this idea if the only data
