The Anglo-Saxon Hide, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the 35 Hour Work Week
Too wide a scope for a blog post? You betcha. But this was going to be the core of my PhD Dissertation back when I was in such a program and had delusions of adequacy. So those who wonder “WTF does any of this have to do with labor hours?” Well bear with me. Or scroll away. Because much tedium and obscurity is found under the fold. A pure dose of ‘tl/dr’ which doesn’t even get to either Smith or Marx. Yet.
In 1086 and twenty years after his crowning as King of England in 1066 (and all that) William the Conqueror directed that inquiries be made and recorded on what today would be a combination population and economic census which results were recorded in a couple of books now known collectively as Domesday. And whether you see Domesday as being some sort of national agricultural rent book or as a tax assessment it is clear from beginning to end and top to bottom that the fundamental unit of assessment was the ‘hide’. Now what is the exact definition and origin of the ‘hide’. Well huge parts of early medieval British economic historiography revolve around that but by 1086 it was clear that the working definition was the amount of land that in midland England could be plowed by a standard heavy plow drawn by an eight oxen team in a year under a three field system. Now I will be happy to discuss any of those terms in comments but what it amounts to is 120 acres of arable ‘cornfield’ (corn in England meaning ‘grain’).
Now the definition of ‘acre’ is a little more firm than that of hide. The standard acre is 43,560 square feet or in terms more familiar to you all ‘one chain (four rods) by 1 furlong. Ha,ha! I jest. A rod is nominally 16.5′ making a chain 66’. While a furlong is either 600 or 660′ with the latter give us a standard 43560 acres (66 x 660). Now a ‘furlong’ is in origin a ‘furough long’ and is the nominal length that an 8 ox team can pull a plow in a single go. Now you will have to trust me on this one, but it turns out that in normal conditions a plow team could plow an acre a day in furlong long pulls. And over the course of a year could keep 120 total acres in cultivation which is why this area was also called variously a ‘carucate’ from ‘caruca’ Latin for heavy plow, or ‘ploughland’ whose derivation should be pretty damn obvious. So this sets up a schematic but more realistic than not identification of ‘hide’ ‘carucate’ ‘ploughland’ and ‘area plowable by eight oxen in the course of a year’.
Now while the equation of ‘hide’ and ‘land plowable by an 8 ox team’ is clear enough in Domesday, even more clear is that in early Medieval England no actual cultivator of the ground could expect to own a full team or the land to plow it. Instead you had landlords who ‘owned’ multiple hides, often grouped in fives (600 acres) and peasants of varying economic, legal and social status who ‘held’ specific fractions of hides, for the more prosperous a ‘virgate’ or ‘oxgang’ or 30 acres or 1/4th of a hide or a ‘semi-virgate’ or ‘bovate’ or 15 acres or 1/8th of a hide.
Now here is where arithmetic and labor economy comes in. You can plow 120 acres in a year with an 8 ox team. Yet this ‘ploughland’ or ‘carucate’ was split between typical 4 holders of ‘oxgangs’ (which comes from a word meaning ‘two oxen in a yoke) or 8 holders of ‘bovates’ (from Latin bos, bovis ‘ox). And those names indicate that in order to make up the plough-team each holder of a ‘bovate’ was obligated to supply one ox and each holder of an ‘oxgang’ two oxen to match their proportional holding of the ploughland.
Now all of this has been well-known for decades now and relatively uncontroversial but the question that has never really been addressed in the literature as it was when I left the Berkeley PhD program is what does this imply for labor time. Because it turns out that the standard labor requirement to run an 8 ox plough team is two people, a man to ‘man’ the plow and an ‘oxboy’ to guide the team. Which has the result that on any given day of plowing the land of four to eight English peasants can be done by a single man and boy which assuming a rotation of labor means that your typical peasant only needed to work his land one day a week during the heaviest work weeks in a year. Leaving him five full work days to fulfill all his other obligations including often enough plow work for his landlord. But even at that the landlord needed only a single ploughman a day for each 120 acres of demesne land and normally though not always supplied the physical plows and oxen on his own account.
What is more, though many people have the idea that medieval plowmen worked from dawn to dusk (often derived from the literary work ‘Piers Plowman’) in real life plowing knocked off at noon. Not because of any idea about medieval labor law but because the oxen needed half a day to browse and be watered so as to be able to be yoked up the next morning.
So my provocative question is how exploitative of labor time can a medieval economy firmly rooted on cultivation of grain really be if the most labor intensive part of that labor required the work or only one of four or eight participants for one half of the day on their own plots? Did landlords actually have enough land under their direct control to keep the other three or seven peasants fully occupied in plowing duties? That would suggest a ratio of landlord to tenant holdings of somewhere of 3 or 7 to 1. And exactly nothing in the records supports that. Instead landlords were more likely to take their slice in in kind and cash rents than in direct labor.
Now of course plowing isn’t everything. On the other hand there were only 120 typical plowing days in a year. Which were half days. Which begins to raise the question of what the actual work week of your standard serf/peasant in the Year of Our Lord 1000 given an agricultural system whose basic units were ploughlands and ploughteams whose operations only required a fraction of the standard household members supported. Or to jump forward 700 years or so was the 60-80 hour week in a early 19th century factory or mine really an advance over the workweek in William the Conqueror’s days?
Hi Bruce very interesting topic to me…My wifes gramma were German farmers who came to Michigan way back when. They settled in the Sandusky area as skilled farmers. they also had 120 acres with 12 kids to work the farm. 10 boys and two girls. Each boy was given about 10 acres to plow, plant and harvest with horse teams. Soon mechanization came about and all the community went in together to buy and share one tractor to do the work. The farm actually had to be self sustaining so there was always plenty of other work to be done with live stock ,ect. than just the 120 plow days of work you mention mentioned and imply as being only a 35 hour week. I do not believe that most farmers worked on average 35 hours/week even to this day… When I first entered the work force for big blue at the tractor plant there was a slanderous ,slang name given to the lowest scum workers in the plant were called “plow boys”. This was to be a great insult from the farmer community to be called or work this hard at that level. I will never forget it was like something worse than the n word to them…
It is understood that productivity gains have gone to the holders of capital since 1974. When I first started discussing this here at AB, there were a few commenters who argued that this was just in that the worker was more productive due to the capitalist expenditure. Of course neglecting that the equipment would be useless without the worker.
Over time, it appears that what was the cause toward greater consolidation of productivity gains was the new tool known as the computer leading to the concept of “economy of scale”. The computer allowed consolidation along with more output or throughput by a worker.
All this at a time when people were voting for those promoting anti labor policies. This I think happened because people were comfortable having lived in a society that reduced the risks of life to a more equal level not dependent on one’s income. Thus people felt rich which of course we all know means we are capitalists.
With that, I agree with Ryan. I think focusing on only the plowing aspect of a workers life as the unit of labor/payment ignores the additional work that went into being able to plow for 1/2 a day. Those ox did not feed themselves. The tools had to be maintained. After the plowing came seeding, cultivating, harvesting, processing and delivery.
My mom’s side of the family were farmers. The Harris’ arriving on the ship the Lion which followed the Mayflower. The tractor and it’s tools made it easier, but that just meant they could improve their productivity which resulted in implementing an economy of scale process….more land worked. Of course these were true sustainable farms. Not one off production facilities.
Of course plowing was only part of the work. But the conventional picture of the work week of the peasant was that of ‘Piers Plowman’ working dawn to dusk on his lord’s field and barely having a moment to spare on his own pitiful tenement.
That is it was worked under a theory that serfdom or the feudal mode of production of whatever you like to call it was based on maximum exploitation of worker labor power that was more akin to chattel slavery than anything.
This allowed both sides of economic liberaism, the free market libertarian-free market-capitalist side and the socialist–planned economy-Marxist side to each commit to an idea of overall progress even for workers, that is no matter how many hard working hours he put in at the factory (capitalist) or how many hours he was exploited and alienated (Marxist) at least he wasn’t a peasant serf.
In this mental model the Capitalist saved the English peasant from a life of unremitting toil just as the Communists liberated the Russian serf, “at least you (the factory worker) are no longer them (the serf)”.
This mental model that underlies the defense of industrialism generally breaks down if it turns out that the feudal mode of production was not as labor intensive/exploitative as conventional pictuers of the medieval period in literature and film would have it.
I am just beginning to fill out the picture by pointing out that the actual days plowing a fairly standard 15 acre parcel, would require only 15 half days out of a 120 day annual plowing period or 20 out of 160, that on any given day other than the one assigned to you to use all eight of the oxen you shared with your compatriots in the ploughteam that you couldn’t plow your field even if you wanted to.
Given that having to spend a day or two working your lord’s plough would not have the crowding out effect on your own productive labor that economic models of the medieval/feudal agricultural system assume.
If you look at the medieval English agricultural calendar you will see a rather bewildering series of holidays/Holidays on which there was putatively no work. Nor was there heavy agricultural work on Sundays. Now most of these holidays were concentrated in what was then as now the ‘holiday season’ or late October to mid-February but there were significant numbers of them from Feb to October including Easter and May Day. How did these exploited dawn to dusk workers find the time for so many non-working holidays?
I am not saying that daily life was some version of Merrie Olde Enland or still less resembled Hobbiton. But neither was it the life of the peasant depicted in Life of Brian. My argument is that insufficient time has been devoted to examining the work week of the typical peasant in a grain growing region during a time where the main metric for production was “land for x plows” if only a quarter to an eighth of the time even in the most intensive part of the agricultural year was actually devoted to what has always been seen as the central task of that peasant: plowing the fields.
Of course there were other tasks, but then many of them were concentrated in those portions of the year outside of plowing seasons. And this raises issues not only of labor time writ large but of labor intensity. Even granted that the medieval peasant was doing SOMETHING during the days and hours not spent behind the plow was it as grueling as working in an 18th century coal mine or 19th century factory.
And this doesn’t even begin to address Ryan’s point about the number of productive workers per family. Plowing using a heavy plow was work for a grown man and a boy. But a standard peasant household might easily been expected to have two grown men (say a 40 year old father and 20 year old son) along with one or two adolescent boys fully of age to serve as the ‘oxboy’. And labor services were generally allocated per household. Meaning that on any given agricultural day you could have one household man working the household fields while the other worked off the obligation on the landlord’s fields.
Which is to say that the limits of agricultural production in a grain growing area was more constrained by availability of land and the requisite number of heavy plows needed to cultivate it than of ploughmen themselves. Or another way to look at it was that the labor power of the households needed to supply the oxen and plough to cultivate a total 120 acres might be 8-16X that needed to literally man (and ‘oxboy’) that plough.. Did the lords then have enough land in 120 acre units and ploughs to suck up all that excess labor power? Or enough non-ploughing labor needs in ploughing season to use up the slack? If so what were these men doing? For how many hours? And at what degree of labor intensity? These questions are simply not asked because the silent assumption is “ploughmen gotta plough”. Well no because in the course of things there would always be an excess of ploughmen to available ploughteams. Even in the most intensive parts of the agricultural year.
Hey Bruce:
Interesting topic and I have a question.
Live in a Township which by design is supposed to be 480 chains (6 miles) by 480 chains. I believe Michigan was a part of the Northwest Territory and survey to yield 640 Acre plots “supposedly” taking this from Europe. At 640 acre parcels, it was easier to divide.
You are talking about 120 acre parcels. How did this come about? Did we in the US change it or what? Improved productivity? Just nosey.
Run somewhat coincidentally three years after I dropped out of my History PhD program I ended up working in a Permit and Land Use Department in a County that was part of the PLSS the Public Land Survey System that divided new territories into Sections, Townships and Ranges.
Now your 640 acres actually represents a Section which is a one square mile area making up 1/36th of a six by six mile Township. By the 1780s, the time in which the Public Lands Act of the Continental Congress was passed in what would soon be the United States the old notion of ‘hides’ ‘oxgangs’ ‘bovates’ and separate strips in an Open Field system had long broken down in favor of enclosed plots which for historical reasons might still be based on 120 acres units. But what the PLSS did was to take what were by then specifically defined land units of acres and miles themselves defined in defined furlongs, chains, and rods to lay out a grid system of square mile 640 acre Sections within 36 square mile Townships.
Now some of my ancestors were among the earliest pioneers in Indiana in the late 1810s and 1820s and we still have some of the original land grants in our possession. And back then the standard grant was not for a section but instead two ‘quarter-quarter sections’ or 80 acres with the understanding that 40 acres would be cultivated right away while the other 40 was for the future. Which by the way was the origin of the terms ‘upper 40’ and ‘lower 40’ in relation to dirt farming.
Now perhaps not by total accident there is a continuity between 120 acres farmed under the open field three course system typical of medieval England and the 80 acre land grant. Because under the open field system one third of the land would be held back as fallow at any given time meaning 80 acres under cultivation while the new farms carved out of the forest of the Northwest Territories were virgin soil that could sustain year in and year out planting. Meaning that a ‘standard’ 120 acre ‘hide’ has the same amount of arable as the indeed standard ‘two quarter-quarter sections’.
So both labor and soil productivity played a part but both systems ultimately rested on 80 acres of cultivated area. Just that by the early 19th century an American farm family could cultivate acreage that might have supported many peasant families. Then again not everyone was a landed farmer like my ancestors and the American system relied much more on hired labor from its very beginning than the English system which developed it over time only to pass it along to us.
(For geeks. Land descriptions and titles in the U.S. in at least the midwestern and northwestern states either use ‘metes and bounds’ or ‘sub-divisional’ styles. Metes are bounds are what in computing would be called vectors, they go from point to point at specific lengths and angles and define an area by calculation. Whereas subdivisions are more like computer objects. So a typical land grant might give ‘the NW of the SW and the SW of the SW of Section 21 Township 32 Range 4 East of the Willamette Meridian then abbreviated NW SW & SW SW Sec 21 Twp 32 Rge 4 EWM. Which would represent a parcel 1/4 mile (440 yards) wide by1/2 mile long and consisting of 80 acres whose corner points could be reset by survey as needed from various ‘monument’s themselves set by survey from the prime one. Which in the case discussed here is somewhere by Portland Oregon.
That is the much fabled ’40 acres and a mule’ promised (but of course never delivered) to liberated slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment was not arbitrary at all. It exactly represented a Quarter Quarter Section of a Township established under the Public Lands Survey System.
English land measure units seem totally odd today not just in terminology with their ‘rods’ ‘perches’ ‘furlongs’ ‘chains’ and ‘links’. But they all make sense once you understand the origins.
A furlong in origin is the distance an 8 ox team can drag a heavy plow in a single pull. Now in practice this would depend on the size and strength of your ox team as compared to the difficulty of the soil so this ultimately got standardized at 660 feet (or 600). Similarly the amount of land actually plowable would also depend on animal strength and soil condition but was notionally limited to four round trips. Now the ox goad needed to keep the team going had to be long enough to reach each member in the team and keep them ‘encouraged’ as necessary but was also a very convenient physical object to make sure that everyone was cultivating only their own acre that day. And in cases of dispute could be compared to other goads and used to measure the width of the tilled area. Four of those ox goads or ‘rods’ or ‘perches’ laid end to end measured the proper width of an ‘acre’ that was one ‘furlong’. Meaning that the precise vector length of a rod was less important than its role in establishing the subdivisional areas of an otherwise open field. That is over time a system whose origin was in the amount of land an ox team could plough in the half day before it was taken oft to feed was normalized as an area four ox-goads wide (4 rods) by 40 ox-goads long (40 rods = 1 furlong). Convenient numbers for the medieval equivalent of bean counters who needed to keep accounting records for the Abbot or Baron but only matching in rough and ready fashion with the facts on the ground which were established by vagaries of historical land use, soil, terrain, stream, bog and road.
In contrast the surveyors of the PLSS had a much easier task at least notionally. “Here, we have taken umpteen thousands of square miles of uncharted forest from the Natives and expelled them across the Mississippi River. Divide it into square mile sections so that we can move white settler farmers onto it 80 acres at a time”
Terrain still played a role but historical land usage largely not. Because in the Midwest and Plains and Northwest we just erased all previous land use patterns and started fresh. Which worked well for everyone except Native Americans.
Interesting!
Once wool came into vogue nearly everyone had to do the distaff.
While Edward I established a core of local archers who needed practice and drill to be proficient.
Ilsm, very interesting and could be developed further.
In the late middle ages archers and then crossbowmen basically neutralized heavy cavalry. And since archery required a certain amount of leisure and even cross bows training and practice turned military service from something reserved largely for the knights and nobility to something for yeomen and hired mercenaries. It was only the dawn of the modern age and the transformation of skilled mercenaries to unskilled but drillable rifle/musket bearing infantry that the elite could bypass the skilled middle class in favor of the lumpen. And so the draft.
I’ll need to think on this more. Heavy cavalry = elites, Archers = free farmers/ranchers plus paid craftsmen, Infantry = proletarian draftees.
Bernard Cornwell wrote a series of historical fiction novels on “the Archer” mixed 100 years’ war with a grail tale. As well as 1356 and Agincourt.
He and Conan Doyle [The White Company] wrote about freebooter “bands” of archers and lesser men at arms serving almost as mercenaries for lords raising up their “dues” to the suzerein.
Archers were skilled and developed strong upper bodies to string the yew bow and worked the heavy arrows.
I read somewhere that part time local training of archers and light infantry in England could have included up to 1 million men during the peak.
That is the foundation of the militia in the tradition of the second amendment, and EU militaries continue to be more reserve than active. While US is more active duty and contractors.
I wonder how much pand was needed to cultivate year round fodder for the 8 oxen…..
as keeping a destrier, [war horse] or two for the lord/mounted man at arms.
Ilsm, English medieval oxen would have been short scrawny beasts compared to todays (or rather early 20th century) ones, in part because I doubt they ever got any grain, instead they would be guided to post-harvest fields or to the field that remained fallow that year in three-field cultivation. Beyond stubble they would have had hay gathered in the meadowlands that were largely too wet to sustain heavy farming. That is they wouldn’t have been a huge burden on cultivatable land but which in turn was absolutely dependent on their dung as fertilizer. Indeed an oft-resented rent burden was the requirement to turn out your oxen and sheep on the landlord’s land so that he could profit on subsequent soil improvements and better yields.
Advances in breeding for size and improved harnessing and yoking meant that by modern times you had a lot more literal horsepower with a pair of Belgian or Percheron plow horses than probably the strongest eight-ox team in history. And subsequently more work hours for man and beast, you could work a team all day and feed the horses in the barn. As such it would be interesting to see if modern industrial agriculture with a focus on primary production for world-wide markets is actually on net more labor intensive in terms of work week than medieval production focused on self-sufficiency and feeding largely local elites. e.g AS-Hide, Smith, Marx, 35 hour weeks. (I promised to get back to that)
This article has the most info I’ve ever seen about the origins of my name = Hyde/Hide. The article deserves to be well edited and reposted – my attempts & comments on Timesizing.buzz under 1/08/2016 #2.
A very qik scan suggests that none of the comments have taken into consideration the very important cross-effects between labor shortage (or surplus) and workweek length. As Arthur Dahlberg pointed out in his 1932 “Jobs, Machines and Capitalism,” capitalism only runs well under an employer-perceived labor shortage (everyone else perceives a labor-employment balance), whereby market forces flexibly maintain and raise wages and consumer (and derivative=all other) spending and momentum of monetary circulation and marketable productivity (=only kind that counts) and consequent stable investment – in contrast to our current situation.
Highlights to note: 1348 the Black Death = poster event for plaguetime prosperity, repeatedly a vital creator of labor-empowering labor shortage for worktime regulation and an ally of wartime prosperity until modern medicine put a stop to plagues.
Then repeated wars created that magic labor “shortage,” yielding labor power and work-spreading via workweek regulation, mostly reduction. WorldWar1 (WW1) created rising wages and spending and “wartime prosperity” by killing off some labor surplus, until demobilization and a downsizing followup to mechanization, rather than, say, timesizing to trim hours a bit for all and keep everyone employed and spending, led in the 1919 recession and the weak economy of the 1920s, culminating in the laborsurplus-borne Great Depression. The Senate’s 30-hour workweek bill, passed 53-30 in 1933, was sandbagged in the House by FDR until he realized his socialist alternatives weren’t working (SocSec, wrkmn’s comp, min.wage, unempl.ins; CCC, WPA, NRA, TVA…) but then all he could get was 44-42-40 hr/wks for 1938-39-40…BUT they still worked to cut unemployment 1% for each hourcut (19.0%, 17.2, 14.6 in 1938,39,40) and then WW2 took over with its traditional wasteful ‘solution’ of killing off the labor surplus – but the magic labor “shortage” (in employers’ eyes) and rising wages&spending that it created lasted late 40s, 50s, 60s until the postwar babyboomers grew up and entered the job market around 1970 – replacing the labor surplus of the Depression … wages plateaued and started down, the unspread national revenue funneled up to the topmost tiny population who spend and donate the smallest % of any bracket – our ‘black hole’ economy was created, and here we are, no investment stability because we’re taking our “entropy dump” as more money into storage with the super-rich instead of more job-secure free time for everyone. Deets on Timesizing.org
But workweek reduction creates plague-/war-time prosperity without the plague or war – can we stand so much of the most basic freedom, job-secure Free Time?! As for that sneering sophistry known as the Lump of Labor Fallacy, maybe the amount of work that could be done is infinite but the willingness to pay for isn’t, and without pay it’s useless in providing livelihood or consumer spending = the whole point. And ‘rightsizing’/’leansizing’/DOWNsizing (to get Growth=UPsizing?!?] is occurring in the immediate “market” term, and so must the solution, not in some indefinite future
Phil welcome to Angry Bear. And I won’t spoil that by my typical attack. Just to note that a lot of FDR’s ‘socialistic failures’ like Social Security, workman’s comp, minimum wage, unemployment and even the TVA are still going strong eighty years later even after FDR’s retrenchment into austerity in 1936.
But on the whole a nice solid contribution to AB and so thank you for participating and hope to hear from (and joust with) you more going forward.
ditto on the contribution. He is right in there with Sandwichman
Phil:
“can we stand so much of the most basic freedom, job-secure Free Time?! As for that sneering sophistry known as the Lump of Labor Fallacy, maybe the amount of work that could be done is infinite but the willingness to pay for isn’t, and without pay it’s useless in providing livelihood or consumer spending = the whole point. And ‘rightsizing’/’leansizing’/DOWNsizing (to get Growth=UPsizing?!?] is occurring in the immediate “market” term, and so must the solution, not in some indefinite future”
You found a home at AB.
run75441 aka Bill
Does anyone know Ken Burns? The most important documentary he could do would be a history of the workweek! Starter ‘seed’ on workweekhistory.com and Roediger & Foner’s “Our Own Time.”
Phil:
One of the people I follow is Sandwichman at Econospeak. I think you might like him. He has written numerous times on Sidney Chapmen. See if you might enjoy this: http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2009/07/hours-of-labour-i.html There is a whole series on Chapman if you are interested. By the way, I do throughput analysis on manufacturing.
A nice and interesting blog you have there.
Work week and labor relations are recorded in the Old Testament.
Bruce and Bill,
Phil and I are longtime friends and colleagues in the shorter working time (“SWT”) movement.
Arthur Dahlberg’s “Jobs, Machines and Capitalism” that Phil mentions is a fascinating book very much influenced by Thorstein Veblen and (presumably) Stephen Leacock’s “Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice” also a Veblen-influenced analysis.
sandwichman:
Thanks! Guess I have some reading to do then.
Hello Bruce,
Very interesting article.
It made me think of a comedy series by a former Monthy Python, that made basically the same point, albeit in a very monthy python-like way. (which can be very convincing 🙂 ). I t was called Medieval Lives.
I don’t know if links are allowed here, but here it goes: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=medieval+lives
The first episode is about the peasants, and if i remember correctly, makes the same point about the working days , comparing now and then. The whole mini series (8 episodes) is very funny, some being better than others, but on the whole, many things appeared correct to me. It is worth watching, specially since they are quite short.
@ Phil Hyde,
If only Ken Burns would make an adaptation of Howard Zinn’s book, A peoples History, that would offer a structure to discuss what you mentioned, THAT I would take a week off from work just to watch 🙂
Welcome Pablo. Links are certainly allowed. As long as they are not sales oriented. For example feel free to link your own website. If it is political, economic or personal. But we are a little ruthless with the people selling man-part pharmaceuticals. Which is why all first time commenters end up in moderation. From this point forward your comments will sail through unimpeded.
Bonjour tous les gars! (=all you guys – are there some gals? Linda? Rebecca?) –
Merci for the welcome –
Yes Tom Walker is Short-time Yard’s man on the West Coast, alias The Sandwichman, and for us halftime residents of New France (Québec), his alias is Le Flaneur. My aliases are MrTimesizing.com of course, but also ArmchairMessiah.com (though my colleagues in the Ottawa branch of the Club of Rome are much more deeply seated in the plush) and – while indulging a splash of despair – windmillTilter.com
Perhaps the webmaster (Daniel Becker?) could add Timesizing.org to the list of “Blogs of Note” in the right hand column of this page? Sandwichman might have one to add too.
Yes the 4th of the Ten Commandments (Ex.20:9) establishes the ‘constitutionality’ of workweek limitation, but for a different purpose than vigorous conversion of chronic overtime into training and hiring (convertingovertimeintojobs.org) and full employment, and only down from the seven- to the six-day level.
Bruce, to corral your paraphrase back into context, “FDR..realized his socialist alternatives weren’t working” to end the Depression, not merely to last indefinitely as second-best, two-edged policies. Alternatives to what? Ben Hunnicutt in his great history of the Depression, “Work Without End,” traces how the beatified FDR watched Hugo Black push a 30-hour workweek bill through the US Senate by a vote of 53-30 on Apr.6, 1933 and caving to some short-sighted businessmen, he blocked it in the House, determined to find…alternatives – and Ben shows how the whole subsequent history of the Depression was a vigorous attempt to block the 30-hour bill. FDR weakened in 1935, wishing aloud at a union meeting that he had pushed the bill through when he had the chance (his anxiously grasped socialist straws had already revealed their powerlessness against the Depression), but with a raft of short-sighted businessmen against the bill, the best he could do was a 44 hour workweek in the overtime section of the FLSA of 1938, with two yearly steps to the 40-40-40 Plan: 40 hrs maximum workweek, 40 cents minimum wage, in 1940, but if he’d been prepared to trim the workweek further, he wouldn’t have needed the rigid arbitrariness of the minimum wage, because general labor shortage would have take care of low wages flexibly without opening a gap at the bottom of the wage ladder against new entrants to the job market. And if he’d had the insight and compersion to push through the 30-hour bill in 1933 and hold the private sector’s feet to the fire so they cleaned up their own mess of disposable employees and funded their own markets, no need for the other 3 ‘socialisms’ or the alphabet soup of makework programs. The employee-empowering labor “shortage” and job surplus, as seen by employers, would have harnessed market forces on employees’ side, raised wages and spending, and solved the Great Depression in America faster than Hitler solved it in Germany via The Conservatives’ Makework Program = military defense buildup (cf. Reagan’s).- see makework.org – no need for unemployment insurance when there are tons of jobs and OJT (onthejob training) – see convertingovertimeintojobs.org – and no need for workmen’s comp from gov’t when employers are competing against one another for “too few” good employees instead of employees competing against one another for too few(!) good jobs. And no need for mandatory retirement (and SocSec) when there are plenty of jobs without forcing people at some arbitrary age to ‘walk the plank.’ And note that the potential environmental damage of desperate makework programs needed only if we’re unwilling to melt the Forever Frozen Forty-hour Full-time workweek – see Anders Hayden’s “Sharing the [natural, market-demanded, not artificially made up] Work, Sparing the Planet.”
Phil:
Interesting.
Have you been watching or reading what is in SCOTUS these days. “Union fees in jeopardy: In Plain English” http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/01/union-fees-in-jeopardy-in-plain-english/
“For nearly forty years, it has been settled that, although public employees who don’t join a union cannot be required to pay for the union’s political activities, they can be charged an “agency” or “fair share” fee to pay for other costs that the union incurs – for example, for collective bargaining. After over an hour of oral arguments today, public-employee unions are likely very nervous, as the Court’s more conservative Justices appeared ready to overrule the Court’s 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and strike down the fees.”
This could have far reaching consequences for Public Unions in the future and also private unions. Interesting are those who enjoy the success of union bargaining gains wish to continue to gain and do not wish to opt out of the gains.
To answer your questions on Rebecca and Linda. I am sure both read AB. Rebecca has added to her family and is pretty busy with it. Linda has taken a leave for personal reasons; but, she has promised to return and write again. Daniel has retired from being the AB head and passed the reins to Dan Crawford as Bruce has mentioned.
I will mention to Dan your request if Bruce has not done it already. I think there was a space issue at one point.
Just to keep the record straight the Blogmaster is Dan Crawford who is solely reponsible for template related things while there are four or five more of us with keys to the joint who do overlapping tasks more or less when we feel like it or when Day Job responsibilities allow.
To steal a phrase from Wil Rogers: ” We are not members of any organized blog, We are Angry Bears”.
But the joint has been around an astonishing amount of years. Blog years anyway.