For most of American history, we have seen timesizing at work in keeping the public sector small. For a century and a half as our technology advanced, we generally converted overtime into training and hiring, and trimmed the workday and the workweek. We started in 1776 with six or seven 12-hour workdays - an 84-hr workweek. For a century and a half, we downsized the workweek to spread among more people the free-market work constantly being taken over by inventions and taken on by immigrants. This worked so well that the overall labor supply was reduced relative to demand and market forces raised wages without government intervention. Repeated cuts in the workweek kept the core of the economy in rough balance so the whole thing stayed in rough alignment with our rising levels of work-saving technology. A balanced center balances everything else, so we did not need big government (and taxes and public debt) to balance everything else.

The Republican contribution

This 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 worried about the longer term and wanted to enhance American freedom by abolishing slavery and 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 U.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 Teddy 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-hr week.

• 1912, TR advocates (in his Progressive Party platform) 40-hr 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 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). Progress by Democrats Cleveland, 1888, and Wilson, 1916, is then reversed by 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 admitting his mistake, flipflopping again, and using a 30-hour workweek (four 6-hour shifts instead of three 8-hour shifts) in the TVA program, he cuts the nation's workweek to 44 hours in 1938, 42 hours in 1939 and 40 hours in 1940 (implemented each year on Oct. 24) and 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. 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 "been tried and failed" (no specifics) - 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 the GOP will bring everyone 2 cars, 3 TV's & a 32-hr workweek (but Ike quickly gagged him & the GOP drifted 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 unimpeded).

• In 1962, Walter Reuther pushed for "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment" at the UAW Convention in Atlantic City.

• But then in 1981, Reagan squelched the air-traffic controllers who were 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.)

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 it?! Are we going to go into 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 tell me "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 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 share the hard thing - money. And if we don't find a way to centrifuge money soon, we're going to be a Third World nation like India. 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 in the next 25 years), you have one miserable dirt-poor Third-World situation with a tiny fraction of the economic dynamism it could have.

Executives, CEOs - let's give this a chance. Let's stop starving our own potentially gigantic customer base of time and money. Let's reinvest in our employees - our "human capital" - at an appropriate colossal level. The future will look back on what we'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" and strangling the "goose that lays the golden eggs."

The American economy is so big, we don't need exports. We just need to stop concentrating skills, employment and wealth in the top income brackets where people have neither the time nor the need to spend on any level remotely resembling that 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.