BACHRACH/GETTY IMAGES
WITH LIBERTY AND
LEISURE FOR ALL
the war effort. As the war’s end
drew near, unions argued for the
six-hour day as a way to reduce
the inevitable unemployment of
returning troops, but when the
unemployment didn’t happen,
the shorter-hours movement lost
steam. Anti-Communist sentiment
during the Cold War didn’t help.
Calls for shorter hours have remained scarce in recent decades.
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.)
pushed for a 35-hour week in
1979. “One of the chief methods of
keeping unemployment in check
during the Depression was the
adoption of the 40-hour workweek,” Conyers said at the time.
“During the past 30 years, however, the workweek has remained
substantially unchanged, despite
the frequency of massive unemployment, large-scale technological displacement of human labor,
and considerable gains in productivity. We ought to look at reducing the working week and spreading employment among a greater
number of workers, once again, as
a means to reducing joblessness
without sacrificing productivity.”
The AFL-CIO backed the legislation, but Republicans said
it would cause inflation, and it
didn’t get much attention. As
Roediger and Foner have pointed
out, dips in the number of working
hours are now largely seen “not as
labor victories but as omens of a
deteriorating economy.”
Conyers hasn’t revisited his
proposal for shorter hours as a response to the current economic crisis. Instead, he recently supported
taxing banks and using the money
to pay for public jobs, a proposal
partly modeled after the New Deal’s
Works Progress Administration.
“Since the depression, public
policy has been designed to maintain ‘adequate demand’ and ‘full
employment,’” Hunnicutt writes.
“Government deficit spending,
liberal Treasury policies, increased
Sen. Hugo
Black called
a 30-hour
work week
the “only
practical
and possible
method of
dealing with
unemployment” during
the Great
Depression.