Economywide (macroeconomic level) -

• USA, 1938-40
  The early Depression saw the American right using voluntary worktime reduction.  On 3/15/1932, the President's Organization on Unemployment Relief published findings to the effect that, of 6,551 respondents among 25,000 companies surveyed, 59% used workweek reduction for work spreading.  Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover made shorter hours part of his "nine point economic program" later that year.  Sen. Hugo Black (D-Ala. & still very conservative at the time - he started in the Ku Klux Klan and finished as a liberal justice on the U.S. Supreme Court) pushed a 30-hour workweek bill through the Senate on April 6, 1933.  FDR, deluged with protests from near-sighted businessmen and jealous of his own elected role as savior of the nation, blocked it in the House - until he changed his mind two years later and brought it out five years later as a 44-hour workweek in 1938, with a two-hour-per-year reduction thenceforth - too little too late but still effective in cutting unemployment one percent for every hour's workweek cut (1938-41: 19,17,15,13% with an extra 3% from makework & war prep in '39-40 to 10% in '41, see exact figures).  But then World War II started for the US in 1941 - Lend Lease (Mar.11) was even before Pearl Harbor (Dec.10), so merchants’ preferred 'cure' for labor surplus, namely wartime production (plus killing and maiming workers), took over and obscured the freezing of the workweek at the 1940 level in 1941 - and...ever...since.
  
  
• France, 1982-2001
  Driven by high unemployment, the French Left planned a one-hour-per-year reduction between 1982 and 1987 from the 40- to the 35-hour workweek level, but got indefinitely stymied at the 39-hour level in 1983 by political turmoil. However, double-digit unemployment forced the French Right (the center-right UDF party = Union pour la Démocratie Française), to introduce a voluntary work-spreading program in 1996. This 'Robien Law' offered stepped 7-year taxcuts to companies who would voluntarily hire, or not lay off, 10 or 15% (more) employees and cut their workweeks 10 or 15% to make or save the jobs for them. Pay arrangements were left to individual companies and in the event, they went equally three ways - about a third kept pay the same, a third cut pay the corresponding 10 or 15%, and a third came out somewhere in the middle. Only one hundred and five firms took advantage of the offer between its start in August and the following January, so unemployment kept rising to a high of 12.6% in 1997. So the Right was thrown out of office and the French Left, between spring 1997 and spring 2001, designed and implemented the originally planned additional four-hour cut off the still-prevailing 39-hour workweek as it prepared for, and implemented, the whole four-hour cut at once but stepped it in by sector and company size, to achieve the world's first nationwide 35-hour week. Similar to the American experience 60 years earlier despite primitive design and implementation, France still succeeded in cutting one percent off its unemployment rate for every hour's cut in its workweek, going from 12.6% unemployment in 1997 to 8.7% in the spring of 2001, before the weight of the US-led recession began to drag it, among the last in Europe to succumb, back up to 9% unemployment. And despite their failure to standardize the link between threatened layoffs and worksharing via workweek adjustment, France's business climate improved (see 4/07/2001 #1).

• Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA, and other US states, currently.
  Massachusetts has had a *WorkSharing program since the early 1990s. It elaborates Fred Best's idea (Reducing Workweeks to Prevent Layoffs, Temple Univ. Press, 1988) of using the unemployment insurance fund to cushion the pay-cutting side-effects of hours reduction by companies in trouble. In one quarter alone, it saved 1400 jobs in the wake of 9/11/2001 when 50 businesses signed up. See 2/09/2003 #1. There are 17 other states that had similar worksharing programs as of August, 2002. Here's the whole list of 18 (36% of all 50 states): AR, AZ, CA, CT, FL, IA, KS, MA, MD, MN, MO, NV, NY, OR, RI, TX, VT, WA. The catch in worksharing programs by U.S. state governments is that they are temporary, lasting only 6-12 months, since they are generally tied to unemployment insurance. Thus they do not solve the mounting problem of increasing automation and a national workweek that's been frozen at the 40-hr/wk level since 1940.
  A specific example of a small company that has used a state worksharing program is Kuhn & Wittenborn Advertising in Kansas City, Missouri - see 10/28/2003 #1.
  And then there's Endicott Interconnect Technologies in Endicott, NY - see 3/12/2009 #2.
  And here's a rather old (1986) article, Work Sharing Programs: An Evaluation of Their Use by Stuart Kerachsku, Walter Nicholson, Edward Cavin, and Alan Hershey, evaluating these programs.

• Japan cut to a nationwide 40-hour workweek in the late 1980s and is now exploring worksharing systems at the corporate, municipal and prefectural (county-state) levels.

• South Korean trade unions were demanding timesizing (work-sharing via cuts in working hours) instead of more downsizing as early as 1999 (The Economist, 2/20/99, p. 38-39) and the nation is now in the process of cutting its workweek from 44 hours to 40.

• The west-German unionized sector has a 35-hour workweek while the east-German unionized sector still works a 38-hour week for the same pay. Overall, German employees are averaging 37½ hours a week. However, Germany, France, and the rest of Europe (including Britain) still have high unemployment because they have not yet focused on timesizing and let unemployment automatically control how much shorter the workweek should adjust. They have also failed to implement automatic overtime- and overwork-to-training&hiring conversion. Like the rest of the world, they're still kicking and scratching to avoid the obvious and inevitable solution - sharing and spreading the vanishing work - and spending power, and consumer confidence....

Corporations (micro-economic level) -

• Larger Corporations - Nucor, Lincoln Electric...

  • *Nucor Corp. {NUE.N} of Charlotte, N.C. (a rustbelt company) is the nation's No. 3 but most profitable steel producer - "Nucor remains strongly committed to not laying off or furloughing employees in periods when business is down.  During the past 20 years, Nucor has not laid off a single worker due to lack of work.  The result is a committed team of Nucor employees that looks ahead to a bright future."  From The Nucor Story (Nucor Cp.), p. 16.  Nucor's secret?  Tremendous worktime and wage flexibility.  Nucor coasts on a 3-day workweek and an $8/hour wage.  When contracts come in, it expands to as much as a 7-day workweek and a $22/hour wage.  It is arguably the most flexible and survivable corporation in the world. It has very few layoffs.

  • *Lincoln Electric of Cleveland, Ohio (a rustbelt company with 3200 U.S. employees) manufactures welding equipment - To glean more innovative suggestions from employees, Lincoln instituted a lifetime guarantee of employment in 1959 - so employees would not fear innovating themselves out of a job. Lincoln has not had a layoff since, though their workweek ranged from 55 hours a week to 32 over a two-year period in the early 1980s and has made several shorter trips below 40 since then. Lincoln has a 3-year mutual approval period before they give a new employee their lifetime employment guarantee, in return for which they ask three things -
    1. acceptance of the principle that everyone sacrifices together, starting at the top
    2. willingness to accept job reassignment
    3. complete cooperation (no unions)
    Lincoln Electric reinvests massively in its products and its employees. It distributes to employees a substantial merit bonus annually. Lincoln employees have high levels of productivity and morale and the highest pay of any rust-belt employees in the world. Lincoln has not had a layoff since 1959 when the lifetime employment guarantee was extended to the entire company after 8 years of testing. (The company does not extend the guarantee to subsidiaries.)
    See update in article on 5/12/2009 #1.

  • SAS Institute of Cary, N.C., has a 35-hour workweek. Author Carl Honoré ("In Praise of Slow") notes employees of software giant SAS maintain a 35-hour work week instead of the standard 40. "The rest of the time, the staff are encouraged to go home," Honore says. "Their CEO is a crusader of the idea that working less makes you more productive." See 1/27/2004 #3 re SAS (and 10/02-04/2004 #4 or 10/02-04/2004 #4 re Carl). Coincidentally, an unrelated firm (we believe) in Pittsfield ME named SAS Shoemakers appears on our 'miracle CEOs' webpage - see 12/18/2003 (and distinguish SAS Institute also from unrelated SAS Airlines of Sweden).

  • BMW (Bavarishe Motor Werke) in Bavaria, Germany, has no overtime [premium?] pay and working hours fluctuate with demand, but job security is guaranteed (see "BMW shows the way," 9/03/2004 Straits Times, Singapore).

  • *Volkswagen (VW), automobiles -
    • Wolfsburg, Germany - Early in 1994, to avoid 30,000 layoffs in their headquarters town here, VW reduced the company workweek from the 35 (five 7-hr days) to the 28.8-hour level (four 7.2-hr days) and pay to the 32.5-hour level.
    • Sao Paulo, Brazil - In Dec/98, Volkswagen's 20,000-worker Ancieta factory here saved jobs despite the 25% collapse of Brazil's car market by cutting hours and pay to the level of a four-day week. Along with attrition, this was hoped to cut the firm's wage bill by roughly 15%, in return for which the firm would invest $600m to build the successor to its Polo small car. (Economist, 1/09/99, p.59).

• Smaller firms and organizations - pls. patronize our timesizers -

  • *Hooker Furniture of Martinsville, Va., routinely steps its workweek down to 35 hours and draws on a whole palette of primitive but effective timesizing techniques when business slows, thereby avoiding layoffs and the whole traumatic and output-cramping cycle of firing&hiring and the costly training that goes with it. We featured recent Hooker stories on 6/21-23/2003 #1 and 5/29/2003 #1 and 4/02/2003 (from 3/29).

  • *American Community Insurance Co. (AC) of Livonia, Mich.   Writes AC account executive Victoria McGonigle in a 7/18/2003 email, "AC has a 36 hour work week and allows flex time for all employees.... [In] visiting the home office...I saw a company with little turnover, many employees with over 10 years employment, and HAPPY workers. They bend over backwards to do a good job..\.. I count my blessings each and every day."

  • Swann-Morton surgical blades in Sheffield, England, is a small company similar to Lincoln Electric in terms of reinvestment, employee involvement and annual bonus. Its 280 employees have a 35-hour workweek, 10-week vacation, private health care, 28% annual distributed profits and 50% ownership of the firm. Its current managing director is Mick McGinley and its sales director is Mike Johnson. Like Lincoln Electric, Swann-Morton reinvests massively its products and processes, and has a track record of multiple "firsts." It supplies 95% of the National Health's scalpels in the UK and has 75-80% of the EU and Australia-New Zealand markets. It snubs management fads like out-sourcing and JIT manufacturing. It promotes from within. Its management style is focused on keeping enough work for people to do. It makes as many as possible of its own machines and maintains a large company orchard in Cambridgeshire to supply employees with their own fruit. It has kept growing while most of Sheffield's industry collapsed. (There are thousands of smaller firms like this in the U.S. too but they never get any media. It's all chance mentions and word-of-mouth. The big profit-funneling firms parasitize the stable markets that these small profit-recycling firms provide via massive reinvestment in their employees.) The Economist tries to deflect interest in its article on the firm by misleading leftist labeling (4/14/2001, p.54: "Trotsky and the Third Way - Socialism and profit tend not to mix. But every rule has exceptions"). However, it ruefully concludes that founder Walter Swann "'could be a socialist one day and a capitalist the next.' He evidently discovered the Third Way before Tony Blair was born." Swann-Morton's last layoffs were in the 1940s "but most eventually got their jobs back."

  • At *Brockton Hospital, Brockton, Mass., nurses approved an hours cut to save jobs. Rather than the layoff of 86 nurses, the staff agreed to reduced hours and pay cuts. The agreement between the Massachusetts Nurses Association and the hospital not only saved jobs but also gave supervisors the ability to adjust staffing levels to meet daily patient volume. For more details, see 2/29/96.

  • American Optical, St. Louis branch, Missouri, 1975, was faced with a drop in sales and the need to cut costs and was looking into laying off four of its tightly knit workforce of 40 people. When they heard this, the employees banded together and went to plant management and said, "Don't do it, we'll all take a paycut so nobody has to lose their job." The plant manager could hardly believe it but he agreed, adding that he would cut hours proportionately because he didn't need the productivity anyway. The result was a 10% workweek cut instead of a 10% workforce cut. Everybody took a small hit but everybody kept their jobs. And we suspect that some if not all appreciated the new 36-hour workweek anyway. But isn't this kind of employee fellow-feeling uncommon? More common than you'd think. A well-known example is the network of "digits" aka former Digital Equipment Corp. employees celebrated in "Employee network outlives firm - Digital alumni serve as resources for one another," by Martha Mangelsdorf, 6/29/2003 Boston Globe, p.G1.

  • Bonus - Ron Healey, a management consultant in Indiana, has registered 30/40 (30 hrs work for 40 hrs pay) as his trademark. Ron has a number of plastics companies actually doing the 30/40 Plan®, not to relieve labor surplus but to draw upon an untapped reservoir of quality employees, mainly persons with families who can handle a reduced workweek but not a 40-hour one, and who appreciate the full-time pay and benefits.

  • Note also the scores of working models on our Timesizing news page and its archive (accessed by links at bottom of that page). Everybody in New England/USA asks, what about *Malden Mills in Lawrence, Mass., and Aaron Feuerstein (pronounced "fewer steen"), its celebrated owner. The answer is that although Feuerstein did the right thing and carried his employees through the crisis when his PolarTec® plant burned down, he did not connect any elements in the rescue to an automatic worktime-adjustment scheme. It was a one-time discretionary chunk of charity, and as such, praiseworthy. We have one page where we collect such examples, and Feuerstein is our first example. However, most of this website is devoted to a long-term sustainable economic redesign and our main page of discussion and examples has many pages of archives (accessible at the bottom of that page).

Individual persons ('nano-economic' level) -

• In Y2000, Paul Simmons of Somerville, Mass., negotiated with his employer, Financial Times - InterActive Data (FT-IDC) of Bedford, Mass., for a four-day, 80%-salary, workweek so he could pursue his many hobbies (such as gardening) and interests (such as the Somerville Conservation Commission). Friend Phil Hyde can testify that Paul has gone from a chilled-out exterior (only) to both a chilled-out exterior and interior. Paul retained full benefits, and raises since 2000 have since brought his salary back nearly to its Y2000 100% level.

• Colleague Kate Jurow (actually Phil's constant friend and occasional wife) has been cut, for budgetary reasons, from 'full' time (40 hrs/wk) to ¾ time (30 hrs/wk) by her client, HP-Compaq-DEC. Although she is frequently asked to take on more projects, she must in each case remind her 'suitors' that they have cut her, indefinitely, to ¾ time. Like Paul, she generally takes Fridays off.

• Phil Hyde, though blessed with numerous temporary and/or part-time gigs since being laid off from his last permanent, (much-more-than) full-time job in 1993, has been living on savings and IRAs and working on this website and his 3-4 books since then.

Historical View

• *Kellogg's of Battle Creek, Mich., breakfast cereals, for over 50 years offered a 30-hour workweek option. When they started it in 1930, it was 30 hours work for 35 hours pay, to provide jobs for the heads of 300 more families in their headquarters town, but within 5 years, pay was back up to the 40 hour level, a true 30/40 plan. (Far-sighted W. K. Kellogg himself retired in the late 1930s and the company gradually slid back to a 40-hour week, completing the process in 1986. Full story in *Ben Hunnicutt's Kellogg's Six-Hour Day (Temple Univ. Press: Philadelphia, 1996).

• *Ford Motor Co. - "Of the Ford employees 32% now are on the full 5-day week; 18% are working four days; and 50% are still on the 3-day week." Wall Street Journal, Apr. 28, 1931. All the Detroit car companies have used timesizing instead of downsizing in every recession since cars were invented, to retain their skill set. Timesizing is independently invented in every recession for this purpose - see American Optical (recession of mid-1970s) above under Smaller firms.

• "WASHINGTON - Operating schedules in many manufacturing establishments were cut still further and the number of part time workers increased in July, the monthly employment bulletin of the Federal Employment Service reported today." New York Times, Aug. 2, 1931. Quoted in "Oh Yeah?" (Viking: New York, 1932) p.26.

“But the unions will never go for it!”  Oh yeah?

• Local 76 - Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, Powell River, B.C., Canada - Julie White, chap. "Reduced overtime and 40 hours" in Working Less for More Jobs (CEP: 1999) -
  "Your neighbour's laid off. How do you feel coming home at night knowing that the double shift you just worked was his job?" - worker....
  Local 76 saved jobs by reducing overtime and by moving from 42 to 40 hours for shift workers. As a result, all of the [89] workers who were laid off returned to work. As well, other announced lay-offs were cancelled and further cut backs at the [Pacifica Papers pulp and paper] mill have been absorbed without further lay-offs....
  In April 1997, overtime dropped from 7% to 1% and stayed there. Over two years the overtime rate has remained below 2%. This is the lowest rate of overtime at any mill in B.C. [province] and probably in the whole [of Canada].... "At first your pay checks are a little smaller and you miss the money. But let's face it - overtime is just that: it's not necessary work, it's above and beyond your regular pay check. If you're relying on it to make ends meet, there's something wrong." "You become accustomed to working 16 to 20 hours (overtime) every two weeks - that's just part of your lifestyle. You take that away and you'll find something else to fill your time, which is what a lot of guys have done. They're not really interested in staying down there. Most of the guys have families at home and that's more important." "I could never see myself going back to working some of the hours that I used to work. You get a bit caught up in it. If you sit back and look at it, you shake your head."
  In December 1998, shift workers moved from 42 to 40 hours a week. This is the only CEP local in B.C. where all the shift workers are on 40 hours. As a result, 22 new positions were created at the mill.

• *Disneyland Paris, (entertainment) theme park - "...Four of the seven unions representing workers at the Disneyland Paris theme park west of the capital agreed Thursday [4/15/99] to reduce their hours from 39 to 35, part of a government plan to cut the nation's high jobless rate. Salaries will remain the same.... The agreement, which concerns some 10,000 park employees, is scheduled to take effect on June 6. Under the new agreement, some part-time workers will be offered full-time positions. Park management said the shorter workweek will create 600 new jobs by May 2000. The law, passed last May by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, calls for businesses with more than 20 employees to institute the 35-hour workweek by Feb. 1, 2000. Smaller companies have two more years to comply. Disneyland will benefit from tax cuts and other incentives offered to businesses that act before the deadline." AP via AOL News, 4/16/99, 10:59 EDT.

• In the 1970s, there was an All Unions Committee to Shorten the Workweek, headquartered in Chicago.

• In 1964, labor leader Walter Reuther advocated "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek" at the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City. He envisioned the workweek varying inversely with unemployment, which is one of the anchor design concepts in the Timesizing program (see Phase 4) - the other is automatic overtime-to-training&hiring conversion (see Phase 2 for overtime per job, Phase 3 for overwork per person).

• In 1933, a 30-hour workweek bill passed the U.S. Senate thanks to support from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) headed by William Green. The AFL fought the next 5 years to get the bill passed the House and enacted into law but against the insidious propaganda campaign of the New Deal that portrayed the shorter-hours forces as "defeatist" and "sharers of unemployment," they succeeded only in getting a 44-hour workweek in 1938, 42 hours in 1939, and 40 hours in 1940, which along with the 40¢/hr minimum wage constituted the 40/40/40 plan.