In Charles Chaplin’s film Modern Times, the protagonist appears trapped in a factory production line that never stops. His task seemed simple: tightening nuts over and over to the rhythm of a machine that never slowed down. The rhythm was not decided by the worker, but by the gears. This production became a critique of the dehumanization of industrial labor.
Three and a half decades after Chaplin, cinema returned to the same issue with a very different tone. While Chaplin criticized industrial labor through comedy, The Working Class Goes to Heaven addressed the physical and mental wear and tear of the worker with a much rawer approach. Between one film and the other, there is a change in tone, but not in the question: what happens to a person when work begins to be organized solely around production?
The irony is that, in the midst of 2026, this question reappears in very current discussions. Some debates on the organization of work seem to bring us closer to those “old times” than to the modern ones that progress promises.
The debate over the 4×3 work week in Costa Rica has been presented mainly as a tool to improve the country’s competitiveness, attract and retain foreign investment, and generate more jobs. However, work is not just an economic variable. It is also an element that defines the daily lives of people. Even so, public discussion has concentrated mainly on these possible economic benefits, leaving a fundamental question in the background: how does this schedule scheme impact the lives of working people?
A not-so-modern topic
Twelve-hour workdays are not new. In sectors such as construction, transportation, logistics, or private security, they have been normalized for years. In many cases, they occur in grueling cycles of 10 continuous workdays followed by 4 days off (10×4), or even 11×3 and 12×2. These shifts are sustained through the systematic use of overtime or through contractual arrangements that fall outside the spirit of Costa Rican labor legislation.
Data from the Programa Estado de La Nación show that a portion of the working population has faced inappropriate labor conditions for decades. In 2014, it was estimated that 6.2% of salaried workers worked more than 72 hours per week. Various subsequent studies on the quality of employment continue to reveal structural gaps in the country’s labor conditions, especially in sectors with less job stability or lower oversight capacity.
In other words, Chaplin may have filmed his feature film in black and white nearly a century ago, but some gears of the working world continue to function with the same mechanism. In different sectors of the economy, the labor clock has long moved to the rhythm of extended shifts, as if someone had left the factory lever stuck in the “more hours is better” position. In The Working Class Goes to Heaven, this logic appears with rawness: the machine is never fast enough, and there is always a way to ask the worker for a little more.
Therefore, before discussing whether the country should legally permit ordinary twelve-hour shifts, it is worth recognizing something uncomfortable: in some sectors, they have already existed for a long time. Because of this, the real question is how to prevent these modalities from deepening the problems that already exist regarding labor rights, job quality, and health and safety at work.
Between gears
The workday does not begin or end at the workplace. It also includes daily commutes, which represent a growing problem in Costa Rica. The Programa Estado de La Nación has pointed out the issues that traffic congestion poses in the lives of citizens. Every year, thousands of traffic jams are reported, some reaching several kilometers and extending trips by up to four additional hours. This represents up to sixteen hours away from home.
One of the criteria for evaluating sustainable human development in Costa Rica is the existence of workdays that allow employment to be compatible with other life activities, such as leisure, personal development, rest, and physical and mental recovery. Under such extensive workday schemes, the time available to fulfill that objective is drastically reduced. When the day is almost completely occupied by work, the rest of life begins to seem like a brief intermission between two scenes of a movie.
In Modern Times, there is a particularly revealing scene: a company presents a machine designed to feed the worker automatically while he continues working. The promise is efficiency. The result is a comic disaster: the machine goes out of control and spins too fast, the corn hits the worker’s face, the soup spills, and everything ends up out of control. The scene provokes laughter, but the idea behind it is clear: the worker ends up adapting to the machine, and not the other way around.
In the film, Chaplin ends up literally trapped inside the machine’s gears. In real life, there are no cameras or background music, but exhaustion can have a similar effect. In The Working Class Goes to Heaven, this logic appears without humor: the frantic pace of production ends up taking its toll when the protagonist loses a finger in the machinery after trying to keep up with the factory’s speed. The scene is harsh, but it serves as a reminder of something obvious: when the speed of work increases, the limit is one’s own body.
The political debate usually presents the 4×3 workday as an evident benefit: three consecutive days off. But the human body does not function like a bank of hours. Various studies have found that twelve-hour shifts increase fatigue, decrease mental clarity, raise the risk of cardiovascular diseases, deteriorate mental health, and can increase the probability of workplace accidents by up to 30%, especially in critical tasks such as operating machinery, driving vehicles, or working at heights. The problem is not only how many days one rests, but what happens during those long hours of work. When the time in front of the machine is stretched too far, the margin for error begins to shrink dangerously.
The transformation of the world of work is inevitable, and labor legislation must adapt to new productive realities. But that adaptation should not imply a deterioration in the well-being of working people. The proposal also suggests that the adoption of these workdays would be voluntary. However, an inevitable question arises: how free can a decision be when access to employment depends on accepting it? When the alternative is to be left outside the factory, the capacity to decide looks too much like resigning oneself and accepting the rhythm of the machine.