WORK LESS Institute of Technology

BLAST FROM THE PAST

The following article appeared in Parade Magazine in September of 1957

Do you really want a four-day week
By Sid Ross and Ed Kiester

Will you ever work a four-day week?

Vice President Nixon thinks you will. During last fall's Presidential campaign, he predicted an industry-wide four-day schedule “In the not too distant future.”

Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, thinks you should. Next year, he has announced, he will ask auto manufacturers to place workers on a shorter workweek without reducing their pay. Battle lines already are being drawn.

But do you really want a four-day week? Is it really “inevitable,” as the UAW likes to suggest, in view of automation and increased production? Or is it more likely to disrupt all of America — its jobs, its homes, its schools, its likes and dislikes?

One of the “hottest” controversies in the U.S. today is wrapped up in the answers to these questions. To find them, PARADE talked to industrialists, labor leaders, Government spokesmen, economists, sociologists, psychologists, educators, clergymen— all of whom have a stake in a four-day week. Briefly, here are highlights from what they had to say:

Some Differences of Opinion

• Most Americans don’t want a four-day week, even at the same pay, according to the Trendex News Poll and the American Institute of Public Opinion.
• Increased productivity will make the four-day week a strong possibility by 1970, a Department of Labor expert says, if workers prefer it to extra income.
• A four-day week might be short-sighted. We Americans, some economists and industry groups claim, could double our standard of living in 25 years by staying on a five-day week.
• If a change comes, it will be gradual, beginning in assembly-line industries and working down to service jobs like police, hospitals, stores.
• Many workers probably would take a second job in preference to a third day off.
• Some businesses probably would have to adjust, but others would boom: sports equipment, vacation resorts, garden supplies, gasoline, autos.
• Prices probably would increase further; crime rates might rise. Family breakups might be more widespread. But, conversely, some families probably would be drawn wore tightly together.
• The whole question may be decided not by workers but by their wives. Do you think,’ one psychiatrist asked PARADE, “that American women can stand to have their husbands underfoot three days in a row?”

And women, according to the American Institute of Public Opinion (the Gallup Poll), are more opposed to the shortened workweek than men. Gallup’s figures show that 67 per cent oppose the idea (after all, their workweek wouldn’t be reduced) while only 54 per cent of men do.

Trendex, surveying union members, learned that 47 per cent favored a five-day week. Nearly 30 per cent wanted a four-day week now, and 14 per cent suggested keeping the five-day schedule a little longer, but voted for a four-day week eventually.

Most workers told Trendex they need more income, not more free time. When the poll suggested a choice between a four-day week at present pay levels or a five-day week with increased pay, most workers voted for the pay raise. Businessmen point also to Akron’s rubber workers, who work a six-hour-day, six-day week.

They are openly opposed to returning to a five-day schedule. Reason: More than a third of them use their free time to hold down a second job.

Some industrialists— and some labor leaders —think the Reuther campaign is aimed not at more time but at more money. (Ford’s top negotiator, John Bugas, has called the plan “a smokescreen,”) The UAW, these sources say, wants to work the same number of hours but wants overtime pay to start earlier. In any case, they contend, the auto industry is unlikely to grant a four-day week next year.

“We could work a one-day week right now,” says a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, if we wanted to give up a lot of things. But of course no one does. Adds Dr. Solomon Fabricant, a New York University economist: “I doubt that a four-day week is likely in the near future without a reduction in pay — and people won’t pay the price.”

But by 1970 things may be different. Increasing productivity will make four days at slightly higher pay a strong possibility, according to Charles D. Stewart. deputy assistant secretary for standards and statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. Even then, would you want to work four days—or shoot for more money by working five?

Three Months Off at a Time?

The answer: No one is certain. Some union officials think you might prefer to stay on a five-day week and take the extra time off in long week ends or three months off every five years. When Trendex asked one machinist how be felt about a four-day week, he replied, “With a four-day week, I’d have another day at home with nothing to do.”

What would you do with an extra day off? Many businessmen predict a further boom in leisure-time industries. More families would tackle the mushrooming outdoor sports, like boating, skiing, skin-diving.

Husbands would attempt new and more involved do-it-yourself projects. Movies would draw more customers, more television sets would be sold, sports events would play to bigger houses.

The nation would need more highways because more people would use their spare time to travel. More cars and more gasoline would be sold; vacation resorts would be overrun. (But one businessman points out, logically, that more leisure requires more spending money. Could you afford a four-day week?)

A switch to four days’ work would give you more time with your family, but this is a two-edged sword, PARADE was told repeatedly. One psychiatrist predicted a four-day week would mean more broken homes. “There are a lot of marginal families based on keeping out of each other’s way,” he told PARADE. “Husband and wife are thrown together just two days a week; they can stand that. But the extra day might be enough to push them over the brink.”

For other families, another psychiatrist says, three days together could be a great boon “It could be the answer to the problem of father-son relationship we see so much of now,” he says. The Rev. Dr. Ralph W. Stockman, of National Radio Pulpit, adds: “The American family could well be drawn more closely together, and stronger moral fiber might be the result. But with three days of leisure, Americans might face many, many more temptations.”

Dr. Stockman does not subscribe to the idea that work is virtuous and play sinful. It’s simply that, mathematically, there’s more time to be tempted. Unfortunately, psychiatrists told PARADE, many people do regard work as “good,” and play as “bad.”

These are victims of what psychiatry calls ‘the Sunday neurosis.” At work, they feel satisfied, convinced they really are worth something; at rest, they are gnawed by feelings of guilt.

One psychiatrist who has specialized in the psychological overtones of leisure believes Americans can’t cope with three days off unless they have definite interests and hobbies with specific goals. For them to get the most from it, their spare hours will have to be planned — by themselves or others.

Dr. Eli Ginsberg, a Columbia University economist, once studied a group of movie projectionists who worked a four-day schedule. He found the same leisure-time pattern as for a two-day week end— only more of it.

“Time definitely did not hang heavy on their hands,” Dr. Ginsberg says.

“These men occupied themselves helping their wives, or with do-it-yourself projects, or watching ball games.”

But one psychiatrist predicts further scrambling of the jobs of husband and wife: “If the husband is home three days a week and spends his time washing dishes or cleaning the living room, how can a child tell who’s mother and who’s father?”

One of the biggest dislocations might be in the schools. Recently Dr. William E. Stirton, vice president of the University of Michigan, urged educators to plan now for an avalanche of students as workweeks shorten, Other educators also anticipate a boom in adult education — either by workers looking for “something to do” or by those trying to reach executive ranks (where, one hard-pressed executive told PARADE acidly, “they can then work 60 or 70 hours a week”).

Will the schools follow the pattern and cut back to four days? Many educators don’t see how the number of school days could be reduced without children being short changed. Dr. Earl J. McGrath, former U.S. commissioner of education, points out that many elementary schools already are experimenting with even longer school terms.

From parents, however, Dr. McGrath anticipates pressure to bring schools into line with the workweek. Absenteeism may increase as parents utilize three-day week ends for family trips.

“At the moment,” Dr. McGrath says, “most educators would oppose shortening the school week. It’s not the same as speeding up an assembly line.”

To many experts, this is the big stumbling block to a four-day week. As Reuther begins dickering with the Big Three of the auto industry, you’ll hear more and more of the UAW arguments: that a four-day week would spread jobs, that automation is displacing workers, that continually increasing productivity means workers are making more goods in less time, and this savings in time should go to the workers.

Today, however, nearly 50 per cent of Americans are providing services, not manufacturing products. Automatic assembly lines don’t include them. Yet if factories should cutback to a four-day week, inevitably a cry would go up for a four-day week in these fields, too.

One economist told PARADE a cut in hours would mean another rise in prices — and again the service workers would be the victims. Dr. William Haber, a University of Michigan economist, suggests that the most practical course would be to continue a five-day week. American living standards would increase and the nation could mop up some of its shortages — in highways and schools, for instance.

The Labor Department’s Stewart thinks industry might drop back to a four-and-a-half-day week, then to four days, just as the six-day week went to five and a half, then five. Other experts agree that the progress of the shorter workweek — if and when it comes —will be uneven, touching an industry here and there and leaving others on five days and some even on six.
Reuther’s demands have dramatized the issue. But no expert interviewed by PARADE believed a switch to four days of eight hours each is practical now, or even five years from now.

Both the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have assigned study committees to the subject, knowing that it will crop up frequently in the future. (Other unions already have taken their cue from the UAW and made similar demands.) They want to know, among other things, whether Americans really want to work only four days.

“Maybe what we’ll see is people trying to hold down two jobs,” says one industry spokesman. “Instead of a five-day week, they’ll choose a seven-day week.” Like many business figures, he feels that the abbreviated week will be theoretically possible someday — maybe in 20 years, maybe in 30 years, maybe more. Whether it will ever come true in fact is another question.

Will you ever work a four-day week? You can tomorrow, if you want to. But do you really want to? These, as the experts see them, are the terms.

LABOR'S TIME

The following quote comes from near the conclusion of Jonathan Cutler's book Labor's Time: shorter hours, the UAW, and the struggle for American unionism:

"The 1958 round of UAW collective bargaining negotia­tions was a major defeat, not only for the 30-40 demand, but for any positive labor program within the UAW. Faced with widespread unemployment and worker insecurity, Reuther dumped the 30-40 demand and the UAW moved into full retreat.

"The ultimate demise of the UAW, and of the industrial union movement more generally, was delayed during the inflationary years of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Nevertheless, the 1958 bar­gaining round in auto set the stage for the future of American labor. The shorter workweek movement had been decisively defeated within the industrial union movement and organized labor had demonstrated its complete helplessness in the face of recession and unemployment.

"The twentieth century ended with organized labor in the United States flat on its back. Shorn of any serious strategy for bat­tling the threat of unemployment in a post-Keynesian economy, organized labor suffered mightily during the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s.

"Today, almost fifty years after the merger of the AFL and the ClO, organized labor in the United States is so unresponsive to its own rank and file and so removed from its own history of struggle that labor leaders are no longer even compelled to venture a posi­tion on the hours question. There is no hours question. The dis­course of shorter hours—the vision of less work and more pay—has vanished from the horizon of possibility."

WHY SOME ECONOMISTS DISLIKE SHORTER WORKING TIME

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Recent eruptions of the lump-of-labor fallacy claim
3. True believers and left-wing kooks
4. Origin of the fallacy claim
5. Puffing up the fallacy claim
6. How “fixed” is a fixed amount of work?
7. The ideals of life vs. the GDP

Or download a PDF file of Why some economists dislike shorter working time

WHY SOME ECONOMISTS DISLIKE SHORTER WORKING TIME (part 7 of 7)

The ideals of life v. the GDP

The reduction of working time is an issue that affects aspects of life beyond the numbers of jobs and the price of labor. From the perspective of workers and of society as a whole, the chief prospective benefit is an increase in disposable time. The question that needs to be asked, then, is not merely how many jobs would result from a given reduction of working time but also whether more disposable time or higher incomes will better contribute to people’s well-being -- that is, to things like health, learning, family life, self-reliance and citizenship. It is a question that can’t be answered with a mathematical equation. Nor can comparing rates of change in the gross domestic product provide the answer.

Richard Layard (pdf file) has commented on the inappropriateness of that practice, arguing that even though taxation may reduce both work effort and GDP, ”we should be equally clear that this does not matter, because GDP is a faulty measure of well-being.” Yet critics of reduced working time policies – including Layard himself – do point precisely to slower growth of GDP as a defect of such policies.

That lack of correspondence between GDP and well-being may provide a clue to anxieties underlying the preemptive use of the lump-of-labor claim. If there is indeed a possibility that reduced working time could represent “an advantage to the entire community,” as the report of the US Industrial Commission argued over a century ago, then economists would have to grapple with the fact that such an advance registers as a decline in GDP. Similarly, a loss of free time registers as an increase in GDP, even if the loss demonstrably exceeds any compensating gain from market activity. Furthermore for some values of the duration of working time, an increment in the hours worked can produce a loss of both income and leisure, a condition that Chapman showed is not only possible but even likely under competition. None of this makes for convenient mathematical model-building along established neoclassical lines.

In his presidential address to the Economics and Statistics Section of the British Academy for the Advancement of Science, Chapman expressed doubt that fallacious ideas about the mechanics of distribution played any significant role in motivating workers to seek shorter hours. Instead he attributed the drive to “ideals of life, formed half instinctively.” In the conclusion to his paper, Chapman worried, "lest the growing importance of leisure generally, and of a proper use of leisure, should not be fully realised." That danger arose, Chapman suggested, because "some of us who have an economic bent of mind get into the way... of thinking too much of the quantity of external wealth produced and too little of the balance between internal and external wealth."

The theory of the hours of labor Chapman articulated came to be generally regarded as authoritative in marginalist analysis. It has never been refuted, only displaced by a simplifying assumption and a collective dose of amnesia. The simplifying assumption – that the given hours of work be assumed to be optimal – was introduced by John Hicks in 1932 with the caveat that any calculations resulting from that abstraction needed to be thought back to a more realistic form. Hicks’ caveat, like Chapman’s theory has simply been ignored. Meanwhile, the red herring of the lump-of-labor fallacy has gained unwarranted currency at the summit of the policy food chain, poisoning the prospects for dialogue between different analytical traditions in economics and for progressive policy innovations centred on the reduction of working time.

WHY SOME ECONOMISTS DISLIKE SHORTER WORKING TIME (part 6 of 7)

How “fixed” is a fixed amount of work?

The meaning of a “fixed amount of work” may seem self-evident at first glance but, as Daniel Kinderman has pointed out, this fixedness could refer to at least two different things. It could refer to an upper limit on the demand for labor and thus be contrasted with the long term historical record of employment growth. Or, it could refer to a constant demand for labor, unaffected by changes in the cost of labor. Thus, the fixed amount of work could represent either a ceiling or a floor. The various explanations of the fallacy offered by economists are steeped in that ambiguity.

For some economists, the fallacy committed by advocates of shorter working time dwells in the failure to subscribe wholeheartedly to the dictum, derived perhaps from a fundamentalist reading of Say’s Law, that job losses from new technology are temporary and local because any increase in supply automatically stimulates a compensatory increase in demand. For others, the fallacy consists of not noticing that the increased costs per employee associated with a reduction in working time must inevitably lead to a fall in demand for labor. Yet others are eager to go in both directions at once, contrasting the presumably automatic growth of employment over the long term with the deplorable decline in demand for labor that would result from an arbitrary restriction of the hours of work.

Those economists might be surprised to learn that in drawing attention to fixedness they are following the rhetorical precedent of Karl Marx’s 1865 address to the General Council of the First International on Wages, Prices and Profit Marx derided John Weston’s argument against demands for higher wages with characteristic polemical panache:

If our friend Weston’s fixed idea of a fixed amount of wages, a fixed amount of production, a fixed degree of the productive power of labor, a fixed and permanent will of the capitalists, and all his other fixedness and finality were correct, Professor Senior’s woeful forebodings [regarding his “last hour”] would have been right…

But if the critics’ rhetoric superficially resembles Marx’s, their logic more fundamentally echoes Weston’s (and, by implication, Senior’s). To paraphrase Marx: if before a reduction in working time the total demand for labor was variable, and not fixed, it will continue to be variable and not fixed after the reduction in working time. Which is to say that a fall in demand for the presumably more costly labor is no more automatic than is an increase in employment from the shorter hours. There are several variables at play beside the hourly wage rate that economists single out for attention, a fact that Beardsley had stressed long ago in his rebuttal of Rae.

Similarly, to suggest that the past record of employment growth demonstrates that a job creation strategy based on reduced working time is unnecessary sidesteps the relevant fact that job growth since the middle of the nineteenth century has indeed been accompanied by a substantial reduction in the hours of work. Although the historical record does not itself establish that reductions in working time directly caused the employment growth that did occur, it does draw attention to an implicit and rather dubious assumption underlying this version of the lump-of-labor fallacy claim: that an equal or greater amount of employment growth would have occurred even if the hours of work had remained unchanged since 1850. Chart 1 shows that work hours in the US fell from an average of more than 3,500 per worker a year in 1850 to fewer than 2,000 today.

According to Bosch, “the reduction of working time over the past 100 years has not only constituted a form of redistribution, but has also, through its effects on work organization and operating hours, provided much of the impetus behind productivity growth and economic growth.” It is indeed hard to imagine how much of modern technology could have been introduced were it not for previous reductions in working time. Summarizing research studies of working time reductions, Bosch concluded that most work time reductions show positive employment effects ranging from 25 percent to 70 percent of the “arithmetically possible effect.” Only a few find no positive effects. As Bosch cautioned, though, the gains are "not just a question of 'whether' but also of 'how' the reductions are implemented."

Part 7

WHY SOME ECONOMISTS DISLIKE SHORTER WORKING TIME (part 5 of 7)

Puffing up the fallacy claim

It was not late Victorian writers on economics but anti-union employers’ associations and their spokesmen who transformed the fallacy charge into a weapon targeted at the eight-hour day itself. In so doing they pointedly ignored the crucial distinction between shorter hours of work and restriction of output and instead fused the two, claiming that reducing the hours of work was no more than a tactic employed by the unions to restrict output.

The employers’ propaganda campaign commenced in England during a lockout of engineers that began in 1897. The precipitating incident for that lockout was the engineers’ demand for an eight-hour day but the underlying dispute concerned a struggle about control over the introduction of new machinery. The defining moment for the anti-union campaign came in a 1901 London Times series by Edwin Pratt titled “The Crisis in British Industry.” William Collison, the publicist for a strike-breaking organization called the National Free Labour Association, claimed the series was based on material supplied by him. Collison’s organization had served as the principal agency for recruiting replacement workers during the engineers’ lockout and had been active in propaganda activities against the unions.

The Times series described the rationale for the eight-hour day as being the absorption of all the unemployed by “obtaining employment for a larger number of persons on such work as there was already” instead of by the “laudable and much-to-be-desired means of increasing the volume of trade…” Pratt found this strategy objectionable because, without the disciplining factor of unemployment, “the workers would have the employers entirely at their mercy.”

This objection mirrors ironically the view put forward by J.–C.–L. Simonde de Sismondi and Marx that the threat of unemployment puts workers at the mercy of employers. Like Schloss or Rae, the Times series contrasted its own stance of economic realism with its opponents’ supposed primitive belief in a fixed amount of work. But nowhere was there a hint that the eight-hour day was socially or economically desirable, that a larger share of the national income should go to workers or, indeed, that total output in an eight-hour day might match or exceed that in the longer day.

In the United States, the National Association of Manufacturers embraced the same portrayal of a nefarious motive behind the eight-hour movement. In a 115-page pamphlet directed against the eight-hour bill in Congress, the manufacturers’ association blamed restriction of output by unions as “surely one of the chief causes of the industrial decline of England.” As for the shorter working day, the pamphlet declared that the movement for shorter hours was part of the general union strategy of restriction of output aimed at subordinating employers to the will of the unionists.

Coincidentally, at approximately the same time that the London Times and the National Association of Manufacturers were demonizing the eight-hour day and its advocates, an Industrial Commission established by the United States Congress was coming to a more sanguine estimation. According to the Commission’s final report, the shorter day represented “the most substantial and permanent gain which labor can secure.” The report argued that reduction of the hours of work was advantageous for the community because of its salutary effects on health, character, family life and citizenship. It declared that the case for an eight-hour day needed little qualification even from the standpoint of employers.

Although the report’s section on the hours of work is not signed, it appears likely that Commons drafted it. He is identified at the front of the volume as the Commission’s principal investigator on labor questions and was one of eight experts singled out for special acknowledgement in the letter of transmittal by the Commission chair, Albert Clarke. In addition, Commons testified before the Industrial Commission regarding the hours of work and his testimony stresses several of the same points made in the Commission’s final report.

Part 6

WHY SOME ECONOMISTS DISLIKE SHORTER WORKING TIME (part 4 of 7)

Origin of the fallacy claim

Authors who employ the charge of a lump-of-labor fallacy as a trump card against reduced work time policies consistently fail to cite a source for the supposedly unimpeachable tidbit of economic reasoning. However, when one investigates the murky pedigree of the claim, the reason for such a scholarly lapse becomes plain. There is no authoritative source for the claim. In place of an acknowledged authority there is only a pastiche of superficially linked but fundamentally contradictory fragments. Thanks to the availability of full-text searching on journal articles ranging back to the nineteenth century, an early and apparently founding mention of the “Theory of the Lump of Labour” can be found in an article on piece-work by David F. Schloss. In that article, Schloss employed the phrase to condemn the restriction of work effort and output, not the reduction of working time.

Debates about the intensification of labor through piece-work, its postulated effects on employment and workers’ retaliatory tactics of restricting output go back at least to the mid-1840s when the Trade Union Magazine published a condemnation of piece-work. However, workers’ objections to piece-work encompassed far more than fears, justified or not, about the loss of jobs. In “Why Working-Men Dislike Piece-Work,” Schloss discussed those substantive objections at length before mentioning that “noteworthy fallacy to which I desire to direct attention.” The context of Schloss’s complaint about the lump of labor is instructive. Not only did he spend the bulk of his article sympathizing with workers’ substantive complaints against piece-work but he also concluded by endorsing the eight-hour day as highly desirable on both social and economic grounds and stressing the urgency that workers should receive a larger share of the national income. His objection to the lump-of-labor fallacy was solely with regard to the withholding of work effort during the time worked and not to reducing hours of work.

Ironically, it was another supporter of the eight-hour day, John Rae, who denounced the supposed belief in a fixed amount of work by fellow eight-hour day proponents who, unlike Rae, expected shorter hours to help solve unemployment. Rae was reacting to extravagant claims such as those by George Gunton in the United States, about the direct and immediate job-creating potential of shorter hours. Rae’s statement that redistributing the hours of work was “not a simple sum in arithmetic” would have been above reproach had he not gone on to insist that the case against job creation was cut and dried.

Charles Beardsley soon refuted Rae’s overextended argument, pointing out that Rae relied on a variation of the same fallacy that he attributed to others. The case for employment gains from shorter hours is neither as direct nor immediate as George Gunton claimed nor as untenable as John Rae insisted. Although few modern proponents of shorter work time would make the extravagant claims that Gunton did, many economists mistakenly believe that the utter futility of work sharing has been conclusively established. It hasn’t.

Neither Schloss nor Rae saw the eight-hour day as a measure aimed exclusively at restriction of output. On the contrary, Rae expected the eight-hour day to result in a higher hourly output and possibly increased total output, which was why he dismissed the possibility that it would reduce unemployment. He assumed that since an equal or greater output per worker would occur in the shorter day, there would be no need for new hiring to take up the slack.

This view of higher productivity during the shorter day was in harmony with the growing body of evidence accumulated from industry over the course of the nineteenth century. Philip Sargant Florence later summed up that evidence as indicating that the reduction of working time from 12 hours to 10 hours increased daily output per worker. Furthermore, daily output remained at its peak during an eight-hour day. Moreover, for days of less than eight hours, average hourly output would continue to increase although total daily output may decline.

Chapman also relied on the same body of evidence when he developed his theory of the hours of labor. Chapman argued persuasively that the hours of labor determined under competitive conditions would tend to be longer than would be optimal from the perspective both of total output and the long-term welfare of the worker. Although economists like Rae, Florence or Chapman didn’t directly draw such conclusions, their premise regarding the increased productivity of shorter hours could form the basis for an “efficiency week” hypothesis for reduced work time such as suggested by Robert LaJeunesse.

Part 5