"More Time, Less Carbon" -- a Four-Day 36-Hour 'Full-Time' Workweek
(www.timeday.org/news-vol5issue1.asp#03, in the Take Back Your Time January-March 2007 newsletter):

Commuting, especially the kind of monster commuting consuming so many work hours of so many Americans, is a major part of many people's workday -- a big piece of the work they do, and sometimes the most grueling. As well as costly and unpaid.
A 36-hour official full-time workweek that is created by a reform of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that redefines the full-time week as 36 instead of 40 hours will enable a work week of four not-necessarily-consecutive days -- a one-tenth reduction in work which, even with a pro-rated ten-percent reduction in pay (if unavoidable in some jobs and sectors), would be a great time- and cost-saving, health-enhancing, road accident exposure-diminishing benefit for the nation's long-distance commuters who would gain a one-fifth reduction in their commuting.

This reform would also grease the skids for support of the recommendation by the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010 for a 15-cent increase in the federal gasoline tax, which as an environmentalist and anti-carbon advocate I fully support, and as an advocate for hands off of Social Security. A serious nationally-applied move to a Four-Day Workweek -- in the context of a newly-redefined full-time workweek of 36 hours, to enable nine-hour instead of ten-hour days -- is one of the very best ways to justify and enact a U.S. gasoline tax increase, which probably would need to be imposed in several year-at-a-time increases.