Four Days a Week: This Labor Day, Let’s Talk About Laboring Less
If the throughput of product remains the same or increases, why wouldn’t a 4-day labor week be allowed? If more output is required, another shift can be started on the fifth day. Tom Walker has discussed such utilization of production labor to gain greater productivity.
There is no loss of money to the company. Labor is happier with a system allowing more free time off.
“Four Days a Week: This Labor Day, Let’s Talk About Laboring Less,” theintercept.com, Jon Schwarz. September 3, 2023
Which U.S. vice president said this, and when?
“The time is not far distant when the working man can have a four-day week and family life will be even more fully enjoyed by every American. [These are] not dreams or idle boasts, simply projections of the gains we have made in the past four years.”
The answer is Richard Nixon, when he and Dwight Eisenhower were running for reelection in 1956.
When Nixon advocated for the four-day workweek, the demand to spend less time working had already been central to progressive politics for 90 years. After a long absence, it has finally returned. First and foremost, the United Auto Workers are preparing to strike, calling not just for better pay and benefits, but also a 32-hour, four-day workweek.
In the second half of the 1800s, new industrial employers regularly required 60 hours or more of work each week. On May 1, 1867, unions demonstrated in Chicago in support of a new Illinois law that mandated an eight-hour workday. This didn’t go anywhere: Employers largely ignored both the demonstrators and the law.
But in memory of the 1867 protests, a nationwide labor federation picked May 1, 1886 as the day for a universal strike calling for an eight-hour day. This was such a heartfelt desire that demonstrators sang a song called “Eight Hours”:
We want to feel the sunshine
And we want to smell the flow’rs.
We are sure that God has willed it
And we mean to have eight hours.Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will.
The millionaires of the Gilded Age found this so charming, Chicago police shot and killed several striking workers at the city’s McCormick reaper plant. The next day, a striker threw a bomb at the cops, killing one of them. All of this became known as the Haymarket Affair, one of the most significant events in U.S. labor history.
However, this didn’t make much difference for a long time. Unions had only intermittent success fighting for a shorter workweek until the 1930s and the Great Depression. In 1938, Congress finally passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the minimum wage, prohibited most child labor, and effectively created a 44-hour workweek. This was lowered to 40 hours two years later.
The fact Nixon who was not generally not seen as a left-wing radical, was calling for a 32-hour workweek by 1956 illustrates how deeply it had seeped into American consciousness. Over time, everyone would get to work less and live more.
The general concept is simple, even if its manifestation is complex.
Over time, people figure out ways to produce more with the same amount of human labor. Looms made it possible for fewer workers to generate much more fabric. Legions of typists were replaced by computers and word-processing software. Eventually artificial intelligence may supplant, for instance, the radiologists who peer at scans of the inside of your body and try to puzzle out what’s going on in there.
This process is so powerful that even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels celebrated it in “The Communist Manifesto”:
The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.
The bourgeoisie … has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
We’re used to the idea of people in an increasingly productive society can be paid more. But we generally don’t realize they also can get paid the same but work fewer hours. If productivity goes up enough, they get both: making more money for fewer hours.
John Maynard Keynes, one of history’s most important economists, considered what this meant in a 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”
As Keynes explained,
“The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race.”
However, he argued, “the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years” — i.e., right about now.
Keynes speculated that people would still want to work, but perhaps only 15 hours a week. Then the rest of the time, each human would have to figure out “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
Keynes wasn’t sure we had it in us to pull this off. Larry Summers, the prominent Harvard economist who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, agrees. He recently expressed distress about the prospect of regular slobs having too much leisure time, saying “for every nonemployed middle-aged man who’s learning to play the harp or to appreciate the Impressionists, there are a hundred who are drinking beer, playing video games, and watching 10 hours of TV a day.”
But what Keynes foresaw, and Summers fears, has been largely off the U.S. political agenda since 1956. Increased productivity can lead to better pay or less work for regular people. But we now know this requires an immense political effort. For the most part over the last 50 years, neither has happened. American society overall has gotten far more productive during that time. But most of the gains from this have accrued for the top 10 percent of Americans, to the tune of about $47 trillion total.
The UAW’s demand illustrates that, at long last, regular folks are realizing again that it is totally feasible for them to work less, yet make the same amount of money or more.
The idea is slowly spreading through society across the world. The Maryland state legislature has been pondering a bill to encourage businesses to establish a four-day week. The Scottish National Party, the ruling party in Scotland, has called for a 32-hour week. Last year, 70 companies in the U.K. participated in a trial of a four-day week.
Making a four-day workweek the standard is obviously still far away. It will certainly face the same ferocious opposition as a five-day week did 100 years ago. But people simply understanding that it’s possible is a big, big step forward, and something to celebrate this past Labor Day.
If the throughput of product remains the same or increases, why wouldn’t a 4-day labor week be allowed?
[ The problem for me, is that I cannot imagine output remaining the same after the work-week is cut be 20%. The implementation of the idea, given a competitive international framework, seems an impossibility.
Tom Walker draws on socialist theory to rationalize and suggest severe work limitations, but responsible socialist countries find there is too much necessary work to be done to consider such an idea. ]
ltr:
Having been in manufacturing, supply chain, purchasing at the base level of on site, I can assure you it will work. It depends on factors such as plant layout, cells of production, etc. and understanding the flows and eliminating the bottlenecks. You really have to know the process of manufacturing within the facility. The other side of this is understanding the supply chain. It does work as I have done it.
Tom discusses throughput and labor which is along similar lines.
Barbers and massage therapists will not be able to produce the same output in less time, but bartenders, video game programmers, and TV producers can make up the difference.
And every nonemployed middle-aged man who’s learning to paint will actually increase the output of canvasses for relatives’ walls, even if no one else will be willing to hang the stuff.
I can assure you it will work. It depends on factors such as plant layout, cells of production, etc. and understanding the flows and eliminating the bottlenecks. You really have to know the process of manufacturing within the facility. The other side of this is understanding the supply chain. It does work as I have done it….
[ This is important, but expressly in manufacturing, American productivity has failed to increased at all since 2011. That means no manufacturing productivity increase, rather a decrease, these last 12 years:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lSyd
January 30, 2018
Manufacturing and Nonfarm Business Productivity, * 1988-2023
* Output per hour of all persons
(Indexed to 1988)
ltr:
The decrease comes from off shoring. I am sure you know this. The impact of which was seen quite clearly during the pandemic when there were simple shortages such as face masks. There is a slue of others.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=mMNp
January 4, 2018
Manufacturing and Nonfarm Business Productivity, * 2007-2023
* Output per hour of all persons
(Indexed to 2007)
Manufacturing productivity in America has now failed to increase since 2011.
I follow the logic of this but the points in the past of decreasing “normal” hours of work are strung out over a time of increasing use of energy, and quite specifically fossil/carbon energy. I have no crystal ball, but I could imagine this heading in the other direction under circumstances where substantially reducing total energy use becomes a part of the approach to limit climate change. By in large, most people are not in the mood to accept reduced material prosperity meekly. If one way to keep your lifestyle where you want it is to work longer hours to afford more energy, well many will opt for longer hours.
Eric:
What is the smallest cost of manufacturing?
Labor frequently. That has little to do with my point, which is that if for some reason net energy is subtracted from human endeavors and access to wanted products and services declines at any particular wage “spectrum” a lot of folks may chose to work more hours to capture more total wages. So maybe you have a 4 day work week at your first job, but that doesn’t mean millions more don’t seek a second job or one or more side hustles. Heck, the growth in married women working in paid employment these past 60 years looks to me a strong signal that collectively the need (or want) of monetary income is more powerful than having more time. Before anyone starts with a deep analysis of the complexities in this, I agree that there are lots. But the trade ran strongly to getting out there and earning money rather than unpaid activities even as lots of domestic labor-saving trends were happening. Very broadly, and with lots of exceptions, at current standards of living, Americans have shown a preference for money over time. If money somehow gets devalued via climate actions (for example, pricing energy much higher to curtail demand because can’t get enough alternative energy sources operating at what people think of as “normal” prices) well I predict folks will try to work more.
Eric:
You are off on a tangent which is not what I am discussing. In any case women in the Labor Force have been decreasing for 20 years.