Manufactured time scarcity

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” that due to labor-saving automation we’d be working 15-hour weeks by now. On the surface he was wrong, since the 40-hour work week continues to remain standard. But he was spot-on that we’d only need to work 15-hour weeks: surveys show that the average office worker spends less than 3 hours of the typical 8-hour work day actually working. This may be due to the phenomenon described by anthropologist David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs that an increasing proportion of jobs serve no useful social function.

There is of course a huge class divide here between salaried and hourly employees. When typically lower-income employees are paid by the hour, employers are very good at squeezing as much work out of them as possible. But if capitalism is such an engine of efficiency, why would it support this kind of inefficiency for anyone?

David Cain argues that keeping employees at work for 40 hours a week, even when unnecessary to do their jobs, serves a foundational (but unacknowledged) purpose for the economy as a whole: it creates an artificial scarcity of time which is a primary driver of consumerism. If we only worked 15-hour weeks, we’d have time to garden and cook and wouldn’t need to buy prepared foods or order delivery. If we didn’t need to drive into a distant office 5 days a week, we’d spend less on cars and gas.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Opting Out

The way so many of life’s necessities depend on full-time employment supports this. If you choose to work less than 40 hours a week (to say nothing of those forced to), you are suddenly on your own when it comes to things like health insurance, disability, and saving for retirement (none of which would be necessary in a society that didn’t shift these burdens to the individual). Our economy is designed to make life exceedingly precarious for anyone who opts out of the 40-hour work week.

My oldest starts kindergarten this fall, and one of the biggest surprises to me has been just how much her public school is closed. There are dozens of half-days and day-off throughout the year, and of course the two-plus months of summer break. My partner and I are privileged to have two sets of grandparents nearby, some degree of flexibility in our work schedules, and disposable income to spend on summer camps—without all of which it would be impossible to reconcile the required 40 hours of work a week with parenthood. My point isn’t that schools should be open more (many of these days, school is closed only for students, teachers are still there working), bur rather that the 40-hour work-week puts many working parents, especially the less privileged, in an impossible situation.

Impact on Climate Change

As Will Stronge (author of Overtime: Why We Need a Shorter Working Week) points out in this interview, a shorter work-week could also have beneficial effects on climate change for the several reasons:

• People would commute less, burning fewer fossil fuels (at least the people who aren’t already working from home), though that assumes people wouldn’t drive elsewhere with their additional free time.
• People might consume less carbon-intensive, pre-packaged food, the kind you bring to work to eat when you don’t have a kitchen or reusable cutlery handy.

I’d add that, as noted above, this manufactured scarcity of time is a primary driver of consumerism, which is itself a major contributor to climate change. To this end, a shorter work-week can help us move in the direction of Degrowth.

If you’re going to fight climate change, a decent way of doing that while also improving people’s working lives is reducing the [length] of the working week.

As a form of social control

There is a history of those in power believing that Americans need to be kept as busy as possible, lest they begin to question the status quo:

• John Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, claimed: “Nothing breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.” (source)
• William Levitt, who architected America’s first “Levittown” suburbs, said “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.”

History

• Of course, the 40-hour work week was a boon fought for by generations of labor activists, before which workers had to work up to 12-hour days, 6 days a week. “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest,” was a rallying cry coined by Welsh labor activist Robert Owen in 1817. It wasn’t until 1926 that Henry Ford phased out the 6-day work week, and 1940 when the Fair Labor Standards act required employers to pay overtime beyond 40 hours/week, providing a strong financial incentive for employers to reduce the standard work-week to that amount.

Further Reading

• Workism Is Making Americans Miserable in The Atlantic explores the history of “workism,” the ideology that work is where one should find meaning.