WITH LIBERTY AND
LEISURE FOR ALL
Demmer fired him in December
2010 and has appealed his unemployment claim, saying he had no
proof he’d been promised only 60
hours and he had no right to skip
shifts. In August, a Michigan court
sided with Demmer.
Eighty-four hours per week —
that’s the kind of schedule Americans worked more than 200 years
ago, back when there was no cure
for “consumption” and happiness was a revolutionary pursuit.
Americans fought and fought to get
those hours down.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, workers went on strike
thousands of times and bled to
death in the streets in the struggle
against long hours, which they
argued were dangerous and inhumane. They demanded “time to
eat, time to live, time to be happy,
time to be a person,” as one union
worker put it in 1919, using terms
that ring no less true today.
Back then, labor advocates
linked the problems of the overand under-employed, arguing
shorter hours would reduce joblessness by spreading work around.
The argument applied whether it
justified reducing the workweek
from 72 to 60 hours or 40 to 30.
Samuel Gompers, leader of the
HUFFINGTON
10.13.13
American Federation of Labor until
his death in 1924, put it this way:
“So long as there is one who seeks
employment and cannot find it, the
hours of labor are too long.”
For more than a hundred years,
workers successfully pushed for
shorter and shorter hours as productivity kept increasing. In the
early 1900s, progress appeared unstoppable. Soon, it seemed, people
would hardly have to work at all.
“By 1933, observers were predicting that the 30-hour week was
“I LITERALLY TOLD THEM, ‘I’M NOT
GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK AND
DIE IN THE TRACES JUST SO YOU GUYS
CAN MAKE A LITTLE EXTRA MONEY.’”
within a month of becoming federal law,” labor historian Benjamin
Kline Hunnicutt has written, “and
that the ‘progressive shortening of
the hours of labor’ was an inescapable economic fact of life and the
dominant political trend.”
Yet the movement for shorter
hours has fizzled. Since the passage of the landmark Fair Labor
Standards Act in 1938, which established the minimum wage and
the 40-hour workweek, the idea
that shorter hours could reduce