The Industrial Workers of the World
During the heat of the fight for the eight-hour day in the 1930s, the Industrial Workers of the World were already making cartoon handbills for what they considered the next great horizon: a four-hour day, a four-day week, and a wage people can live on. "Why not?" the IWW propaganda asked. Indeed, why not?
It's a good question. A four-hour workday with a livable wage could solve a lot of our most nagging problems. If everyone who wanted to, worked fewer hours, there would of course be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn't be able to produce quite as much (if ever more people chose ever more leisure time instead of ever more work and consumption) -- which means that our economic system wouldn't be able to pollute as much, either. Rich countries where people work fewer hours than we do, tend to have lower carbon footprints. Less work would also leave plenty of time for family and child care, ending the agony over "work-life balance." Gone would be the plague of neglected children that is born of overwork, which, by the way, increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.
Historian Benjamin Hunnicutt
This professor at the University of Iowa has devoted his career to undoing the "nationwide amnesia" about what used to constitute the American dream of increasing leisure and the freedom to ramble that Walt Whitman called "higher progress." Hunnicutt's latest book, Free Time, traces how this dream went from being thought of as a technological inevitability, to becoming the chief demand in a century of labor struggles, to disappearing in today's dystopia, where work threatens to invade every hour of our lives (as the rich multiply their incomes accordingly, at our expense). "Dreams of more leisure time seem to have been completely forgotten by most people, who are nowadays lost in a mad scramble for work and money, as wages steadily fall and good jobs become ever more scarce."
John Maynard Keynes
There's a hint of what has happened in an essay that the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, titled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." By 2030 Keynes expected a system of almost total "technological unemployment" in which we'd need to work as few as 15 hours a week, and that much mostly just to avoid losing our minds from all the leisure. In the meantime, however, "avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still," he said. "For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."
Then he proposed a deal with the devil: Trust in greed for a while more, and it would save us from itself. To illustrate, Keynes made the rather anti-Semitic observation that, just as the Jew Jesus brought access to eternal life into the world, so the Jews' genius for "compound interest" and profit would produce so much plenty as to deliver us all from wage slavery forever. Keynes didn't expect, however, that like most deals with the devil, the devil would end up with the upper hand: As it turned out, greed spread, and managed to suck up most of the benefits of our almighty progress, for itself.
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