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18 Indus. & Lab. Rel. Rev. 238 (1964-1965)
Shorter Workweek Controversy, The

handle is hein.journals/ialrr18 and id is 250 raw text is: DISCUSSION The Shorter Workweek Controversy THOMAS SOWELL O vER the years, the arguments for a shorter workweek have settled into a pattern with a few dominant features. A reduction in weekly hours of work is urged on grounds that (1) there is an historical trend to shorter hours, that (2) shorter hours would promote greater worker efficiency, that (3) purchasing power would be increased, and that (4) unemployment would be reduced by spreading the available work. Despite the fact that these propositions are interre- lated, they can be separated analytically and considered in turn. THE TREND TO SHORTER HOURS It is obvious that hours today are dra- matically shorter than they were a cen- tury ago or a half-century ago, and if comparison of selected end-years were enough to establish a trend, that would be sufficient. Many who think that a sig- nificant trend exists credit it in large part to union and/or governmental in- fluence. The familiar reasoning is that unorganized workers are helpless to make This essay analyzes some of the major argu- ments being advanced in favor of a reduction of the workweek. Finding all of these wanting, the author asserts that the labor market is capa- ble of translating increases in productivity into more leisure, if this is desired by workers, and that unemployment is significantly attributable to interferences with that market. Thomas So- well is an economic analyst in private industry.- EDITOR such major institutional changes as re- ductions in the workweek. The plausi- bility of this is obvious. What is not so obvious is why plausibility is so often the test applied in labor economics. In manufacturing, where unions and the government exercise their largest de- gree of control of hours (and earnings), there has been no over-all decline of the average workweek over the past quarter of a century. Hours today are slightly longer than they were in the late 1930's when unions became a dominant force and when the Fair Labor Standards Act established the forty-hour week. There might be objection to this particular comparison, because of depression un- deremployment. But taking the more normal postwar period, average weekly hours in manufacturing have not devi- ated from forty by as much as one hour for any year since World War II.1 The record of other leading non-Communist industrial nations likewise shows no trend to shorter hours over a similar 1U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, Vol. 10, June 1963, p. 33. While there are certain short- comings in the BLS data cited, recent cor- rected data by Dr. Ethel B. Jones requires only that 38.5 hours be substituted for 40 hours to give the same results cited above. Ethel B. Jones, New Estimates of Hours of Work Per Week and Hourly Earnings, 1900-1957, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 45, No. 4 (November 1963), p. 375.

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