Between 1920 and 1934, the shorter-hour cure for overproduction and unemployment was almost as popular and important as the other solution, i.e. spreading the gospel of consumption. The critical debate about unemployment that developed in the 1920s was not, as it has been since the Depression, over how to stimulate demand. Rather the debate revolved around the question of whether work time would continue to decrease, thereby limiting unnecessary production and redistributing necessary employment, **OR** whether new markets would be created and established for the sale of ever more goods and services. Note that both points of view shared the idea that the economy had reached a critical juncture.
The arguments of the supporters of increased leisure and the shorter-hour cure for unemployment may be summarized as follows.
Economic abundance and growing productivity threatened us with overproduction and the resulting unemployment. Shorter hours could decrease the work each of us had to do while at the same time being quite compatible with increasing wages, redistributed employment, reducing unnecessary production and surpluses, and insuring a standard of life for everyone that could not go below some established but not-too-low minimum. Therefore, increasing leisure was as practical a solution (for over-production) in this "New Economic Era," as were new markets and increased production, and was for several reasons preferable to them.
It was preferable in the first place because leisure could be used to revive the benefits and values that work had lost to ever more advanced machinery. Things such as craftsmanship, creativity, worker control, and initiative could take place during, and through: hobbies, volunteer projects, leisure-time craftsmanship, and other constructive recreation. Leisure was preferable, also, because it would help keep other institutions and traditions alive which were threatened by mass society, standardization, and mass consumption/production. To wit: Individualism, the community of workers, the family and, for many, the church, would be strengthened and would grow as people had more time to devote to these things. In addition, increased leisure would keep open the possibility of what Edwin Sapir called "genuine progress." The dreams of utopian writers, socialists, and reformers which had been around for over a century -- dreams of a democratic culture, worker education, the universal pursuit of happiness, and "humane and moral freedom" -- were reasonable possibilities, but only with increased leisure time. Lastly, shorter hours would counter the new "economic gospel of consumption," which had begun to define progress solely in terms of economic growth, just as it abandoned the other, more humane kinds of progress.
AFL President William Green explained that less work and more free time were natural results of technological advance and the more efficient satisfaction of human needs. This free time could either be forced upon some workers, in the form of unemployment, or it could be rationally distributed, among all workers, in the form of more leisure for all, in combination with higher hourly wages! A. 0. Wharton, president of the International Association of Machinists, argued that "increased production accentuates the problems of overproduction and underconsumption, whereas increased wages and reduced hours go hand in hand with increased production. Economic balance could be maintained only if "wages advance and leisure hours increase. If some sort of balance is not maintained, we are headed straight for disaster." AFL vice president Matthew Woll observed that since "production is overtaking our ability to consume," shorter hours would serve as a "restraining influence" and limit production to "rational levels.""
In addition to limiting production to "rational levels," shorter hours would improve wages according to the labor spokesmen of the day. By reducing the supply of labor, shorter hours would create a sellers' market for labor, thereby strengthening the unions' bargaining positions. Thus workers would be able to command a larger proportion -- their "fair share" -- of the nation's generated wealth (which in recent years has been increadingly funneled into the pockets of the top 1%, and especially to the top tenth of that 1%. Instead of the rich buying ever more _luxuries_, ever more workers could then buy ever more and better _necessities_, and the direction of the economy would be changed from the production of ever more expensive and luxurious goods for the ever more wealthy, to the tasks of assuring that everyone had their basic needs met. Before 1927, organized labor considered shorter hours as an efficient and fair way to help redistribute wealth, while at the same time assuring that adequate amounts of necessities were produced before luxuries -- and without the need for direct governmental action (welfare programs) to aid the poor.
An example of those reformers who actively supported labor was George Alger. Active in New York reform efforts such as child labor laws and penal reforms, he came to believe that reformers in the 1920s should be concerned "as much with the growing social surplus of time" as the "distribution of the social surplus of things." He argued that the new business view of economic advance led to "artificial demands for useless products" -- it led to "a consumer wonderland" and yet also to a "new slavery." Individual self-expression and creativity had been sacrificed because "the people who can set before us a long list of new things to want, as well as a way to make us want them irresistibly, are the main contributors to our current concept of progress." He criticized work as specialized, mechanical, passive, lacking in self-expression, dull, monotonous, and the cause of increased drug addiction, insanity and crime. He was also suspicious of industrial psychologists and advertisers who, between them, had led the masses to a "pendulum-like existence" -- a "life of producing and purchasing" ever more in the way of comparatively useless things, for artificial and contrived reasons. He reasoned that "the stimulus of what we want to buy, rather than what we want to be, is, in current theory, that which keeps us at work."
Concluding that, in the face of the "new economy of consumption, any theory of the use of leisure which might make it something else, other than principally an expression of buying power, may be considered an alarming heresy because of its possible effect on sales," Alger nevertheless suggested such a theory. "The quality of work and the lack of self-expression, through work," eroded virtues and "paralyzed our powers."
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