Below is the Sandwichman's entry in the SEIU's "Since Sliced Bread" Contest:
Bring back the authentic workers’ ethic: “share and share alike.” Samuel Gompers declared, “So long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot obtain it, the hours of work are too long.” Less well known is the endorsement of an industrial commission of the US Congress: “Lessening of hours leaves more opportunity and more vigor for the betterment of character, the improvement of the home and for studying the problems of citizenship.… A reduction of hours is the most substantial and permanent gain which labor can secure.”
The common sense workers’ ethic of sharing the work is quite distinct from the make-believe self-made man’s competitive, individualistic drive for success. Spellbound by that latter creed, many economists have disparaged the workers’ own ethic as a “lump-of-labor fallacy” and claimed, falsely, that sharing the work amounts to sharing the poverty. Baloney. Reducing the hours of work increases productivity and raises wages. In common sense terms, “whether you work by the piece or work by the day, reducing the hours increases the pay.”
John Maynard Keynes:
"It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard -- those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me -- those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties -- to solve the problem which has been set them.
"I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.
"For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter -- to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!"
Posted by sandwichman at October 11, 2005 07:28 AM