Bernie Sanders backs a 32-hour work week — now German tool maker Stihl says 35 isn't cutting it. Is 40 still the magic number?

“It’s time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life,” said Sanders in an op-ed. “It’s time for a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay.”

Meanwhile, Stihl has argued for the opposite; it wants to rescind Germany’s long-held 35-hour work week for the company’s metalworkers.

“We no longer have the productivity advantage over key competitors that used to justify our high labour costs,” said Nikolas Stihl, who works as the chairman for the chainsaw company Stihl, to Euronews. “That is why I advocate increasing weekly working hours to 40, without any pay compensation.”

Here’s where both Sanders and Stihl are coming from — and which groups win if either of them get their way.

The 40-hour work week was a huge win for unions

Both the U.S.’s 40-hour work week and Germany’s 35-hour work week for metalworkers came from hard-fought union battles for workers’ rights.

The National Labor Union — the first one of its kind in the U.S. — was founded in 1866 and quickly started calling for an 8-hour work day. By 1912, the call had coalesced into a movement, complete with a slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will.”

Thanks to the Great Depression, unions finally got their wish. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the President’s Reemployment Agreement, which encouraged (but did not enforce) a 35-hour work week in the hopes it would cause companies to hire more workers.

In 1938, FDR signed the historic Fair Labor Standards Act, which officially enforced a 40-hour work week. If full-time workers worked more than 40 hours each week, they would have to receive overtime pay.

Germany’s 35-hour work week is comparatively newer; metalworkers won it in 1995, after a six-and-a-half week strike in the 1980s that also centered around growing unemployment in the industry.

But some people — including billionaires and company leaders — are unhappy about both of these wins.

“Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” Elon Musk said in a 2018 tweet. When pressed about how many hours it takes to change the world, Musk said, “about 80 sustained, peaking above 100 at times.”

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has also said that a longer work week — in his case, a 60-hour work week — was better, saying it was “the sweet spot of productivity.” Both Musk and Brin work in tech, an industry that not-infrequently requires its employees to work well past a standard eight-hour workday.

Volkswagen has also called for an end to the 35-hour work week, echoing Stihl’s statements on the German work week.

Who benefits from shorter or longer work weeks?

Stihl says he’s interested in bringing back the 40-hour work week to make Germany more competitive as a country with a high cost of labor. He’s hoping that companies in Germany can make this change to get a greater volume of work for less.

“If we want to maintain our prosperity and keep social benefits at a high level, the total volume of work in the economy has to increase,” he said to Euronews. “A higher volume of work boosts economic output.“