Once again, a legislative proposal to shorten the American workweek to 32 hours has surfaced in Congress, renewing an enduring argument about what labor is worth and what life is for. Senator Bernie Sanders frames the measure as a matter of human dignity — the right to time — while opponents cast it as an economic miscalculation that would burden businesses and raise prices for ordinary people. The debate is old, but the questions underneath it remain genuinely unsettled: how much of a person's waking life belongs to work, and who gets to decide.