For most of American history, we have used workweek reduction to maintain employment and markets and keep government small. For a century and a half as our technology advanced, we trimmed the workday and the workweek and crudely converted overtime into training and hiring.

We started in 1776 with six or seven 12-hour workdays - an over-80-hour workweek, with longer days in summer and shorter days in winter according to seasonal sunlight. For a century and a half, we downsized the workweek to spread among more potential consumers the market-demanded work still not yet taken over by inventions or immigrants - and spread the market-provided wages that went along with it - no minimum wage laws required.

Even haphazardly, this worked well enough that labor supply kept from overwhelming labor demand, or maybe even starved it a bit so market forces actually raised wages and consumer spending - without government intervention. Repeated cuts in the workweek kept the core of the economy in rough balance so the whole thing stayed in general alignment with rising levels of work-saving technology. A balanced center balances everything else, so we did not need big government (and big national debt and eventual taxes) to play that role.

Through the eighteen-teens, -twenties and -thirties (1810-1840), employers introduced steam power into their factories and laid off employees, creating labor surplus and cutting pay (and with it, consumer spending - hence lots of depressions). Employees, now a surplus commodity, were becoming desperate so they generally put up with it.

But workweek reduction from over 80 hours really got going around 1840 when employers installed new gas lighting in their factories and tried to extend long summer hours into winter. Early gas lighting was smoky, smelly, and a fire hazard, and employees had finally put up with all they could. "Workforce discipline" was not the problem despite management's constant well-funded complaints about it. The real problem was management discipline. Employees started organizing into unions to fight employers' attempts to invade their minuscule personal time and restrict their freedom, such as it was. Generally, they "lost the battles but won the war." They fought for and won the ten-hour day by the end of the Civil War, and the eight-hour day by the beginning of World War II.

It took America's employees 25 years to win the ten-hour day - 1840-1865 - the war really "helped" because it killed off the wage-depressing labor surplus of peace, raised pay and consumer spending, and produced the usual "wartime prosperity" thanks to the perceived "shortage" of labor = actually a balance , at last, of labor and employment, job-seekers and job-openings. After the Civil War, it took employees three times as long, 75 years, to win the eight-hour day and the 40-hour week (1865-1940, 75 years). Thus the workweek was cut in half from 1840 to 1940 - and instead of being the End of the World as employers were always warning at every step of the way, people had more time and money to shop and the foundations of the economy, consumer markets, were fuller.

If it takes the same three-times-longer (25x3=75, 75x3=225) to make the next step (to fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against un(der)employment). we won't get there until (1940+225=) 2165 - but here's hoping we make it by 2100. Then we can get to work balancing the money variables.

The Republican contribution (before they went nuts)

Downward workweek adjustment has been a major Republican (GOP) strategy since the birth of the party in the 1850s. Believe it or not, there was a time when the Republican Party was THE progressive party in America after the Democrats renounced the Declaration of Independence (1844) so they could embrace slavery and slave-owners. The backlash gradually created a Republican Party that actually worried about the longer-term future and wanted to enhance American freedom by abolishing slavery and increasing free time by limiting the workweek, thus easing the ever-tougher competition for jobs and its stifling effect on wages and markets. Nine of the 14 GOP administrations in the first century of GOP history made significant use of this strategy:

• 1863, Republican President Abraham Lincoln bans the unlimited workweek of slavery.

• 1868, a Republican Congress fights depression by cutting the federal government to 48 hours/week. ....Ref: David Roediger & Philip Foner, Our Own Time (Verso: 1989), p.101.

• 1869,1872, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant issues an executive order banning wage cuts prorated to workhour cuts. ....Ref: Roediger & Foner, Our Own Time, p.111.

• 1892, Republican President Benjamin Harrison spreads the 48-hour week via a federal hours law. ....Ref: Roediger & Foner, Our Own Time, p.149.

• 1903, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (TR) cuts the mining industry to 54 hrs/wk via arbitration. ....Ref: Roediger & Foner, Our Own Time, p.161.

• 1907, TR cuts the railroad industry to 96 hours/week.

• 1908, TR enforces federal 48-hour week.

• 1908-12. Republican President Howard Taft suggests workers get two months a year off "to recharge." ...Ref: Cindy Aron, Working At Play, p. 195, via Joe Robinson, Work to Live, via Dan Aronson.

• 1912, Republican President Howard Taft strengthens the 48-hour week.

• 1912, TR advocates (in his Progressive Party platform) 40-hour week for women, children and continuous-production industries such as steel. ....Ref: Roediger & Foner, Our Own Time, p.179.

• 1922, Republican President Warren Harding cuts the last-holdout industry with the 84-hour workweek, big steel, to 48 hours via his Republican Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. ....Ref: Ray Wilbur & Arthur Hyde, The Hoover Policies (Scribner's: 1937) pp.126 ff.

• Feb. 1931, Republican-dominated Congress passes 44-hour workweek for postal employees. ....Ref: Benjamin Hunnicutt, Work Without End, p.149.

• 1932, Hoover avoids mass layoffs by cutting the federal government from 44 to a 40-hour week and, calling shorter hours the fastest and most efficient way to create jobs, builds momentum for a maverick Democrat's Senate passage of a 30-hour week on April 6, 1933 (the Black Bill, named for sponsor Sen. Hugo Black).

  Progress by Democrats Cleveland, 1888, and Wilson, 1916, is then reversed by Democratic Pres. FDR's tragic flipflop: he blocks the 30-hour workweek in the House in a pressured and panicked switch from sharework to makework (the New Deal). In 1935 he admits his mistake, flipflopping again, and uses a 30-hour workweek (four 6-hour shifts instead of three 8-hour shifts) in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) program. He then cuts the nation's workweek to 44 hours in 1938, 42 hours in 1939 and to a 40-hour maximum straight-time workweek in 1940 (implemented each year on Oct. 24) and though starting too high, too late, he still achieves a roughly two-percent drop in the unemployment rate (UE) each year (from 1938's 19.0% to 1939's 17.2%, to 1940's 14.6%, to 1941's 9.9%, amplified then by the rampup for war), yielding the same 1-hour-cut = 1% UE-drop corelation that France achieved when they cut the workweek from 39 to 35 hours between 1997 (UE 12.6%) and 2001 (8.6%) before the US-led recession hit.

  The 38-hour week that many people are expecting in 1941 never comes. The Democrats cite war and later Cold War as excuses. So the workweek gets stuck indefinitely at its 1940 level, despite all past U.S. history and all future technology. No further free-time benefits of wave after wave of efficient technological innovation will be experienced while the workweek remains frozen. All free-time benefits will be converted into economy-stifling unemployment and under-employment, not to mention welfare (2m families), disability (5.7m persons), homelessness (940k youth alone), incarceration (2.2m), and suicide (30,000 yearly). And the management-controlled media and economics profession succeed in almost completely obliterating from the historical record the powerful and reliable 'corelation' of workweek cuts and unemployment drops, and even in spinning shorter hours as having "been tried and failed" (no backup evidence) - e.g., MIT's Lester Thurow at a Boston University public lecture in Morse Auditorium, c.1981. ....Refs: Wilbur & Hyde, The Hoover Policies (Scribner's: 1937) p.135; Roediger & Foner, Our Own Time (Verso: 1989), p.252.

• Still, in 1956 Nixon (of all people) boasts that the GOP will bring everyone 2 cars, 3 TV's and a 32-hour workweek (but Ike quickly gags him & the GOP drifts toward cold-war military spending on a colossal scale - just what Ike warned against in '59 because without people power enforced by market forces in response to a perceived general labor shortage, the weapons manufacturers' rule verges on absolute).

• In 1964, Walter Reuther pushed for "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment" at the UAW Convention in Atlantic City.

• But then in 1980, the GOP gets in bed with the Christian Coalition aka Religious Right, to win the election. The historic separation of Church and State begins to vanish, the GOP starts dumbing down with loudmouth talkshow hosts saying anything they think of for sensation and bigger dumb-audience. In 1981, Reagan squelches the air-traffic controllers who are demanding not only $10,000-a-year pay increases but also "shorter hours to relieve the strain of their high-tension jobs." (Quote from David S. Broder in ed/op article "Obama's welcome display of backbone" in 4/01/2009 Seattle Times via seattletimes.nwsource.com.) With only one really political party left, America's diagonally downward spiral steepens.

We don't need government-mandated childcare. We need more time away from work to take care of our own children, instead of leaving it to strangers. And if we can't set things up so that our incredible technology provides that for us, what the heck good is that technology to us?! We have changed its potential blessing into a curse by freezing the workweek forever. We have entered the 21st Century with more and more efficient technology and less and less time for our families and our communities. How long are we going to stay this stupid?! And don't parrot "That's the new reality of the global economy"! Like hell it is! We have designed it this way and we can redesign it. And we will eventually do so - the sooner, the better. And hopefully not after every other nation has surpassed and humiliated us.

And we do not need government job creation in any way, shape or form. We just need to spread the private-sector work - and skills - to include everyone. When everyone is included and self-supporting, taxpayers can stop supporting them and business will have a much bigger domestic customer base. If we can't share the easy things - skills and work, we'll never be able to healthily share the hard things - income and wealth. And if we don't find a way to centrifuge money soon, we're going to be a huge Third-World Haiti. It doesn't matter how much money a country has, if 99% of it is owned by 1% of the population (and there's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening in America at the moment, you have one miserable dirt-poor Third-World situation with a tiny fraction of the economic dynamism it has now, let alone what it could have.

Executives, CEOs - give this a chance. Stop starving your own potentially gigantic customer base of time and money. Reinvest in your employees - your "human capital" - at an appropriately colossal level. The future will look back on what you've been doing so far, shake their heads and say, "Colossal failure to reinvest!" And concentrating the profits in your own pay and perks does not count as reinvestment. That's just putting spending power "on ice" in a huge black hole of money at the top. It's strangling "the goose that lays the golden eggs." The more money you redistribute up the income scale into the tiny topmost brackets, the more you decelerate it, decirculate it and deactivate it. It is you, the wealthy, who create recessions and depressions, just by this very process of using downsizing to clobber payroll (and consumer spending!) and with an efficiency that Communists would envy, redistribute the nation's money supply to yourselves. Result? You are sacrificing your economic foundations (the consumer base and the employment basement) for mere pecking order. How stupid is that?! And week by week you are becoming less secure, as insulated and isolated rulers across North Africa are currently finding out.

The American economy is so big, we don't need exports. Sacrificing American industries and jobs - and the 70% of the American economy that's based on domestic consumption - for the sake of the less than 30% of the economy represented by international trade - in the name of the dogma of Free Trade or sacrosanct Globalization - is just nuts. We need only stop concentrating skills, employment and wealth in the topmost income brackets where people have neither the time nor the need to spend on any significant percentage of their astronomical incomes. And a smoothly engineered cut in the background labor surplus can centrifuge these skills, jobs, and paychecks and deliver economic growth on a vast wartime scale without war.

For more details, see our laypersons' guide Timesizing, Not Downsizing put out as a campaign piece during the 1998 race for Joe Kennedy's empty Congressional seat. The handbook is available online from *Amazon.com and at the Harvard Square Coop, 3rd floor (business & economics sections) in Cambridge, Mass.