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, Lincoln bans unlimited (and unwaged) workweeks, i.e., human slavery (technological slaves still pour in).

• 1868, Congress (GOP) fights depression by cutting federal government to 48 hrs/wk.

• 1872, Grant bans parallel wage cuts.

• 1892, Harrison spreads 48-hr week.

• 1903, Teddy Roosevelt (TR) cuts mining industry to 54 hrs/wk via arbitration. ....Ref: David Roediger & Philip Foner, Our Own Time (Verso: 1989), p.161.

• 1907, TR cuts railroads to 96 hrs/wk.

• 1908, TR enforces federal 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.

• 1912, Taft strengthens 48-hr week.

• 1922, Harding cuts the last holdout-industry with the 84-hour workweek, big steel, to 48 via his 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. With too little too late, 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, we believe) and still achieves a roughly two-percent drop in the unemployment rate (UE) each year (from 1938's UE of 19.0% to 17.2% in '39, 14.6% in '40, and 9.9% in '41 amplified by the rampup to war), yielding the same 1-hour-cut ::1%-UE-drop corelation that France achieved between 1997 (UE 12.6%) and 2001 (8.6%) when they cut from 39 to 35 hours a week.
  The 38-hour week that many people are expecting in 1941 never comes. The Democrats cite war and later Cold War. So the workweek is stuck 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 boasts the GOP will bring everyone 2 cars, 3 TV's & a 32-hr workweek (Ike squelched the idea & the GOP drifted toward cold-war military spending on a colossal scale).

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.