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© 1998-2004  Philip Hyde, Timesizing Wire™, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080.  Asterisks indicate links *outside this website.

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Bibliography of Worktime Economics

The second-biggest big picture is provided by *Bruce O'Hara in his 1994 book, Working Harder Isn't Working.

"Mr. Interlocutor" for worktime economics is Tom Walker of Vancouver. He's published articles in books, such as The "lump-of-labor" case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback? = Ch.12 in Working Time, eds. Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart. In addition, Tom anchors the Work Less Institute of Economics, which has a *website and meets at Lugz Cafe, Broadway & Main in Vancouver (phone 604-255-4812 for details). Tom has recently come up with another well-researched article that fills in a major missing piece of the puzzle posed by Juliet Schor and Ben Hunnicutt, namely, what stopped the momentum of our greatest gauge of progress and the biggest issue in labor history, shorter working hours. Tom's article is "Missing: Sir Sydney Chapman's theory of working hours and its curious disappearance from the canon of mainstream economics," available online.

Aside from the question of how may employees still have any real choice over their lives, there's the question: Which will ‘go critical’ first, economy or ecology? Worktime economics has a pair of ‘Toronto kids’ working on this question, Hyde & Hayden, one for each possibility -

1. Timesizing, Not Downsizing by Phil Hyde (now in the Boston area), focusing on the economy, came out in Sept/98 and is available online from *Amazon.com.  Retailers can order the book from the publisher, Groundwork Ideas Press, PO Box 117, Cambridge, MA 02238.   For many of us, the economic area has already 'gone critical' in terms of deactivated consumers (e.g., 2m welfare families, 5.7m 'disabled,'  930k youth homeless plus older homeless, 2.2m incarcerated, 30k suicides/year...), but that realization is obscured by the self-insulation of affluent decision-makers, their repeated dilution of economic indexes (e.g., the unemployment rate), and their ever-consolidating ownership of the media.

2. *Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet by Anders Hayden (translation: "Other Hyde"?) focusing on the environment (published in April, 2000) - it's available from Amazon.com (click on title) or from Anders himself at ahayden@web.ca. (An earlier book on this unnecessary ecology-economics tension is Michael Common's "Sustainability and Policy: Limits to Economics" [ie: limits to physical economic expansion, not to doing more with less] {Cambridge U. Press: 1995}.)

• Juliet Schor's *The Overworked American in 1991 woke up a lot of people, including Phil Hyde, to the existence of worktime economics (though Phil Had already worked out the whole 5-phase structure of worktime balancing in the 80s and the central 3-phase core structure in 1976). Juliet pointed to Ben Hunnicutt's 1988 book (next paragraph) and Ben hinted at the strategic all-else-eclipsing priority of the worktime issue. But unfortunately, Juliet then lost focus and published The Overspent American, not an issue that we need to worry about while we're impoverishing our consumer base with labor surplus and lower wages. So the true successor to Juliet's Overworked American is "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their ConsequencesS" by Louis Uchitelle (Knopf: NY, 2007), though unfortunately Uchitelle shares the time-blindness of contemporary mainstream economics and has overlooked the worktime economics that kept us roughly in balance during the century from 1840 to 1940 when we cut the workweek by half. (See Roediger and Foner's "Our Own TIme," Verso: 1989). If Juliet Schor had done this sequel to her Overworked American, she could have clearly portrayed layoffs as a lethal byproduct of the freezing of the workweek and the cumulative surplusing of the American and global workforce with continuing mechanization, automation, and robotization.

  Worktime economics is the cutting edge of ecological economics. It is a branch of ecological economics that removes the key obstacle to environmental initiatives - fear of job loss - and solves the key kinds of pollution (poor, unskilled and under-employed human beings) and depletion (well-paying jobs). In addition, it uses ecological principles to accomplish these goals (wholism, homeostasis, gradualism, very long-term durable design...). The main ecological economist to look at is *Herman Daly and his books Steady-State Economics and For the Common Good.

• Ben Hunnicutt's *Work Without End (1988) or *used copy, was referenced by Juliet repeatedly. Work Without End presented the first history of the Great Depression that struck Phil as digging beneath the dazzle of the New Deal to the bedrock of the power gradient between employees and employers, which employers then began to tilt so much that unions, wages and markets began a long-term slide. Work Without End is still in print from Temple University Press, together with Ben's later *Kellogg's Six-Hour Day which covers a lot of the same ground from the viewpoint of a particular company.

  Focusing on the straight history of the American workweek, we have *Our Own Time by David Roediger & Philip Foner (Verso, 1989). Their most significant single paragraph is on page 244, because it recounts the time when the largest labor organization in the USA had the most ideas that will be widespread if and when intelligent life on this planet ever moves beyond social control by threatening people's livelihood:
  Until 1932, the American Federation of Labor refused even to consider the demand for passage of an Unemployment Insurance Bill, labeling it as the "dole,"
  [good from the viewpoint of not wasting time and political capital on bandaids that become unnecessary once you implement the critical worksharing system]
  but it was ready to raise the demand for shorter hours as its sole plan to increase employment.
  [And a totally adequate plan it is - especially when coupled with automatic overtime-to-training&hiring conversion.]
  The advocates of shorter hours in the labor movement reasoned that the depression had been caused by the rate of technological advance, which exceeded that of either wage increases or hours reduction. The inevitable result was technological unemployment, the displacement of workers by machines.
  [Absolutely accurate, despite the prevailing contradiction from mainstream economists that technological innovation is great because it makes life easier (presumably because it saves work and working hours) and also that technology creates more jobs than it destroys.]
  The solution was to cut the hours of work with no loss in earnings, thereby increasing the number of jobs.
  [Even the maintenance of wages is an unnecessary extra, because as shorter hours diminishes the surplus of labor, market forces alone restore any wage loss on an organic, flexible basis. If hours are cut further, market forces raise wage levels and centrifuge the "black hole" of income and wealth in the top fraction of the population. In the short-term transition, the unemployment insurance fund (UEI) can be used to maintain the total pay of low-waged employees, because after all, the worksharing system is maintaining employment and saving money for the UEI fund (see Fred Best's book, next paragraph).]
  This would lead to expanding purchasing power and the recovery of the system.
  [It's what happened anyway when the war cut the surplus labor hours on offer in the employment market and gave us wartime prosperity. It's what happened when the Black Death yielded "plaguetime prosperity."]

  Focusing on timesizing as an alternative to downsizing, we have Fred Best's *Reducing Workweeks to Prevent Layoffs (Temple U, 1988). Focusing on the vital economywide function of workweek reduction as the historic distributor of work and purchasing power, and the rising risks of rigidifying the workweek despite waves of technological innovation, we have - in the Scientific American's hardcover version of their September 1982 issue, The Mechanization of Work - the remarkable chapter "The Distribution of Work and Income" by an original thinker with a sufficient foothold in the mainstream to win the Nobel prize in economics in 1973, Wassily W. Leontief (who went to the supermarket in Belmont MA in February/1998 where Phil happened to be collecting signatures for his second Congressional race against Joe Kennedy - Wassily gave his signature like an ordinary good citizen and Phil read it and said, "Wait a minute, aren't you...?")

• Jeremy Rifkin's *The End of Work, 1996, a rather alarmist title, but possibly a useful wakeup jolt to complacent cliques of insulated CEOs and clueless pundits. (Compare *The Jobless Future by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, 1994.)

• *Sydney Chapman wrote such a definitive article on shorter hours in 1909 that later economists (Lionel Robbins and John Hicks) revered him right *off the surface of the planet. The article was "Hours of Labour" in the September issue of the journal "Economic Journal." Chapman's basic point was that as technological advance multiplies people's productivity, they need more free time for rest and focus. (Ref credit: *Tom Walker)

• *Arthur Dahlberg was a young engineer and sociologist when his wonderful *Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism (Macmillan 1932, reprinted by AMS Press 1969) rallied the large technocratic movement in the early 1930s and defined the right fork in the road toward the "small-government socialism" of work sharing. Dahlberg's proposal for a 20-hour workweek, and by implication the academic backup that he represented for the 30-hour workweek bill that passed the US Senate in April/33, were quickly disputed that year by FDR's academic point man, Rexford Tugwell. Rex had visited the nascent Soviet Union for three months in 1927 and somehow convinced himself that less work for more money was not progress as it always had been, but "defeatist" and mere "sharing the unemployment" (as if the same couldn't be said of unemployment insurance). Work had to be "reformed" and "saved" from too much leisure (Hunnicutt, 34). Rex took a phrase from Art's first chapter that referred to shorter hours as a single government intervention that would yield "less governmental interference and industrial control than we already have," spun it from negative to positive, reversed its order and made it the boast and title of his rebuttal, *The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, as if these were things we wanted more of! And since Rex was in FDR's brain trust and Art wasn't, guess who won the field, clinched by a more-snob-than-sense mastertome from John Maynard Lord Keynes three years later (The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 1936) - but not before FDR expressed regret, in 1935, that he did not "get behind the Black-Connery 30-hour bill and push it through Congress." By then he'd had two years of experience with how much running around it takes to balance a house on a perch if you balk at dealing directly with the perch.

• *Frances Perkins, the first woman Cabinet Secretary (Labor), was the person FDR directed to draft an administration response to the Black Bill. Frances has a whole chapter on the "Thirty-Hour Week" in her insider memoirs, *The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946, pp. 192-97), where she identifies a number of the design flaws of the Black Bill. She came up with a substitute proposal that for awhile got the press calling the bill the Black-Perkins proposal (Hunnicutt 161). Frances says that Black's major mistake was inflexibility - he conceived of the relationship between the "amount of production, the size of the market, the number of jobs, and the total payroll in American life" as static (Perkins 192). She points out "There were no provisions for emergency variation or for appropriate modifications in different industries dependent upon different natural resources and conditions" (Perkins 193). Her version removed these bugs. We've counted roughly ten major flaws in the Black Bill, but if we had pushed it through (and FDR regretted not having done so as early as 1935), we could have at least spent the last 65 years "tinkering in the right garage" instead of enshrining a poison pill right in our gut (a frozen 40-hr week) and totally wasting our time bolstering economic life support (government job programs, training supports, tax fiddles, block grants, enterprise zones, CETA, industrial policy, subsidies, pork, IMF, welfare (AFDC), food stamps, housing programs, government child care subsidies, school busing, minimum wage, living wage, fighting environmentalism...) to prop up our economic life signs ("low unemployment!", "high stock market!").

  Going back to the villain of the piece, proof that Tugwell wrote his book to rebut Dahlberg is shown by the fact that Tugwell's title is a double reversal of a negative phrase in Dahlberg's first chapter, "governmental interference and industrial control." Tugwell's title simply reversed Dahlberg's phrase both in sequence and spin (The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts). The two books are locked in eternal debate. Tugwell has been winning so far because he was one of FDR's braintrusters and Dahlberg was just a young PhD student just out of school. However, as long as Tugwell's win is allowed to stand, humanity will see no substantial progress, no substantial benefits from technology in terms of greater freedom from work and worry, and no escape from our ultimate, still-active unemployment solution, war. World War II was what solved the Great Depression (down below 2% unemployment) - not the hodgepodge of big-government socialism spun as mixed-market capitalism known collectively as the New Deal (down to 14.6% unemployment at its best - the pre-New Deal level was 25%).

  Tugwell became FDR's scapegoat for the flaws in the New Deal, but he and his books are still well known. Dahlberg and his books are almost forgotten. Phil Hyde has recently (Jan./2000) discovered that Arthur Olaus Dahlberg died in 1989 (obit in NYT, 10/02/89, D12) and got in touch with his son Eric, who was kind enough to xerox for Phil his dad's 1927 book, Utopia Through Capitalism, which foretold the Great Depression.

• *Thorstein Veblen was the first important home-grown American economist. He focused on the institutions in the American economy - and their reform - and originated the American "institutionalist" school of economics. He was a wonderful curmudgeon and an articulate critic of the weaknesses of mainstream economic and social thinking. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago economics department from 1892 to 1906 when he published his first and best known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. His last important book, *The Engineers and the Price System, (1921) became the manual of the Technocrats, who with their proposal for a workweek of four 4-hour days made Dahlberg's proposed 20-hour workweek (see above) look moderate by comparison.

• A Canadian named *Stephen Leacock (who later became "Canada's Mark Twain" and in fact wrote a biography of Twain in 1932), stumbled across Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class" as soon as it came out in 1899 and went to Chicago to study with Veblen the same year. Leacock got his PhD from UChic. in 1903 with a dissertation on "The Doctrine of Laissez-Faire" (which he favored), having been hired to teach polisci&hist at McGill the previous year. He became chairman of McGill's Dept. of Econ & PoliSci five years later. In 1920 even before his mentor Veblen's last book came out, Leacock wrote *The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, in which he advocated a shorter workweek.

• Sismondi is a neglected genius (see Tom Sowell's "Sismondi, A Neglected Pioneer" in History of Political Economy, Spring 1972). His masterpiece, written in French in 1819 and revised in 1827, exactly a century before Dahlberg's first book, was only translated in 1991 (by *Richard Hyse of SUNY/Oswego) - *New Principles of Political Economy (Transaction Publishers - $63 from B&N - if trouble, click "Advanced Search" - "By ISBN" - 088738336X). Even its subtitle, Of Wealth in its Relation to Population., is far ahead of its time and foreshadows the Ecological Age and the *Limits to Growth. His encyclopedic grasp of human affairs came from writing many histories of the nations of Europe, and his economic ideas were decades, even centuries before their time. Sismondi is a lot more important in mainstream economics than generally recognized. John Maynard Keynes viewed Malthus' Principles of Political Economy as a forerunner of his own work. But anyone who has read Sismondi realizes that he's a likelier forerunner, especially in light of Karl Marx' sneer that Malthus' Principles book is just a "translation of Sismondi."

  So far, we have discovered one place where Sismondi indicates the necessity of the government's setting an upper limit on working hours - "Thus, the task of government, as protector of the population, is to set everywhere limits to the sacrifices which everyone could be forced to make on his own; to prevent that a man, after having worked ten hours daily, would agree to work twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen hours...." (p. 570). This is acutely relevant today when vulnerable "20-something's" are finding themselves working 80, 90, even 120 hours a week (see our "Omen" on 3/12/2000 "The new nerdocracy") - marathons that we have not been conned to run since the 1840's and the heyday of plantation slavery - and an ever greater portion of it on yet more work-saving technology. The more we work ourselves out of a job by producing work-saving technology without increasing our leisure, the more redundant and insecure we make ourselves, and the stronger we make the forces of supply and demand that are flattening and sinking our own pay - leaving us with only one recourse, to not share our skills, to complicate and cut down training opportunities for others - same ol', same ol' BS.

  In one famous paragraph (fingered by Heilbroner in his foreword to Hyse's translation, xiii), Sismondi even expressed the reductio ad absurdum of the direction in which we are currently careening. His paragraph anticipates by 170 years Kate Jurow's (and probably many other people's) prediction, upon viewing the relentless mergers and downsizings in the economy, that eventually we'll have one megacorporation staffed by robots and all run by one man, owned by millions of insulated and isolated idle rich - with billions of starving, idle people beyond the pale. Here's Sismondi's version. Commenting on David Ricardo's statement that "Provided its net real income, its rent and profits be the same, it is of no importance whether the nation consists of ten or of twelve millions of inhabitants...," Sismondi says, "Indeed? Wealth is everything, men are absolutely nothing? What, is wealth itself only something in relation to taxes? In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England." (p. 563, fn). And of course, the whole image conjures up our short-sighted "neutron bomb" concept of business efficiency and the Reuther-to-Ford Retort - Ford "Let's see you unionize these robots," Reuther "Let's see you sell them cars." Morale - downsizing, instead of timesizing, is suicidal in the longer term, and the "longer" term is arriving faster every day.

  Note around the same time, Charles Dilke, who said that wealth is disposable time and nothing more, and if capital was left to its own devices then people would only have to work half as much. The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties (as deduced from the principles of political economy), pamphlet, 1821.

• Edward A. Filene, son of the founder of Filene's Department Stores which later started Filene's Basement, published a book in 1932 (Simon & Schuster) called "Successful Living in this Machine Age," which he begins with a definition of 'mass production,' -
  "Mass Production is...large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that increased production demands increased buying.... For selfish business reasons, therefore, genuine mass production industries must make prices lower and lower, and wages higher and higher, while constantly shortening the workday and bringing to the masses not only more money but more time in which to use and enjoy the ever-increasing volume of industrial products" (p. 1, Brit.ed. p. 15), and again, "If [the profit motive] can be attached to a [mechanism] well designed to serve the common welfare, the common welfare would seem to be assured, whereas if the common welfare is dependent upon keeping idealism at white heat, there is no such assurance" (p.198, Brit.ed. p. 258). Timesizing is just such a well-designed mechanism, albeit in prototype.

• The biography of Willam Keith Kellogg of Kellogg Cereals in Battle Creek, Michigan was published in 1956 ("The Original Has This Signature - W. K. Kellogg" by Horace B. Powell), -
  It was W. K. Kellogg himself who, during the Great Depression when spread-the-work was imperative, set up a six-hour day at the Battle Creek plant. "If we put in four six-hour shifts," he said to Mayor William Penty who was also a Kellogg employee, "instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek." (p. 188 - the 30-hour experiment was much more important in Kellogg's life than this one page indicates - see Hunnicutt's "Kellogg's Six-Hour Day.")

• Lord William Hesketh Leverhulme of Lever Brothers Soap in England published a book in 1918 that inspired Kellogg's British-born president, Lewis Brown, in implementing Kellogg's 30-hour week in 1930. The book was "The Six-hour Day & Other Industrial Questions" (London: George Allen & Unwin), -
  "But we have learned much during the last three years [covering the first three years of World War I in Britain, which were Aug/1914-July/1917] on the subject of fatigue, overwork, and excessively long working hours. We have proved conclusively that prolonged hours of toil, with resulting excessive fatigue, produce, after a certain point, actually smaller results in quantity, quality, and value than can be produced in fewer hours when there is an entire absence of overstrain or fatigue.... Therefore, as we shall require an enormously increased output of goods to replenish stocks that have been allowed to run down, both for our home and export trade, and as we have the machinery available, and which hitherto in most industries has been run for only 48 hours per week [that being the usual workweek of the time -ed.], a solution of this one of our difficulties can be best and most readily found by working our machinery for more hours and our men and women for fewer hours.
  "We must have a six-hour working day for men and women, and by means of six-hour shifts for men and women we must work our machinery twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four hours per day."
  [Note that with the usual six-day week common at the time, this would result in a 36-hour workweek, one more hour than the 5x7= 35-hour week that France had the "radicalism" to implement on 2/15/2000, fully 82 years after Leverhulme published these words, as the only nation in the world to date to be so "radical."]

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