Shorten the workweek with no loss of pay!

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S initiated by and drawing the bulk of its activists Kept. 17 marks one year of the Occupy movement, from what they themselves describe as a “precar­ iat.” That is, a part of the workforce without jobs or in unstable, low-paid jobs with few or no benefits or pro­ tection. In this the Occupiers were in good company with the millions of youth facing catastrophic levels of joblessness throughout the Middle East and in Europe who were at the heart of rebellions against tyrants and the exploitative system they served.

Traditionally, one demand raised by the labor move­ ment worldwide to address unemployment has been a shorter workweek and/or workday. The demand for shorter hours (with no loss in pay) was at the heart of the May 1886 mass rallies that Occupy put such effort into commemorating this year.

In late August several items in The New York Times reminded us of the technical possibility of a dramati­ cally shorter workweek. The first was a review of a new book by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, “How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life.” They be­ gin by quoting John Maynard Keynes’s 1928 predic­ tion that by 2030 a 15-hour workweek would be the norm—and that already by 2010 it would be down to 20 hours.

Keynes’s predictions about productivity increases that would make such shorter hours possible have been more than met. Yet after falling at a slow but constant rate from the middle of the 19th century until World War II, since then the U.S. workweek has hov­ ered around 40 hours.

For Marxists the reasons for this are clear: the power wielded by the ruling class and its government to beat back any attempts by labor to win shorter hours; the collaboration of the union bureaucracy with those forces; and the ideological mystification propagated by advertisers and the media to convince us we should work harder and longer to buy more.

The Skidelskys discount the first two causes and fo­ cus instead on why the third is so successful. As a re­ sult the bulk of their book is a philosophical quest to get to the root of consumers’ supposed “insatiability.”

The second Times article was entitled “Skilled Work, Without the Worker.” The author contrasts a Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China in which “hundreds of workers use their hands and special­ ized tools to assemble electric shavers” with a factory owned by the same company in the Netherlands in which “128 robot arms do the same work with yogalike flexibility. … And they do it all without a coffee break—three shifts a day, 365 days a year.

“All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift,” about a tenth as many as the Chinese plant.

This, says The Times, is part of a broader trend in which a new wave of robots “are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distri­ bution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hun­ dreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.

“Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.”

Foxconn, you may remember, is the company whose slave-driving bosses and prison-like housing for em­ ployees have driven many of its workers to suicide. Not surprisingly, the same criminal disregard for humanity was on display when Foxconn’s boss, Ter­ ry Gou, told The Times he was relieved to be able to switch to robots: “Speaking of his more than one mil­ lion employees worldwide, he said in January: ‘As hu­ man beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.’”

“The falling costs and growing sophistication of ro­ bots,” says The Times, “have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost.” MIT economists Erik Bryn­ jolfsson and Andrew McAfee told the paper they fore­ see changes “on the scale of the revolution in agricul­ tural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the U.S. fell from 40% of the workforce to about 2% today.

“Such advances in manufacturing are also begin­ ning to transform other sectors that employ millions of workers around the world. One is distribution, where robots that zoom at the speed of the world’s fastest sprinters can store, retrieve, and pack goods for shipment far more efficiently than people. Robots could soon replace workers at companies like C & S Wholesale Grocers, the nation’s largest grocery dis­ tributor. … (Left) A romanticized Harpers magazine depiction of the May 4, 1886, Haymarket massacre in Chicago. The event took place following massive May 1 rallies across the United States for the eight-hour day.

“Symbotic’s chief executive compares the new system to a huge parallel computer. The design is efficient because there is no single choke point; the cases of food moving through the ro­ botic warehouse are like the digital bits being processed by the computer.”

The New York Times noted that this type of automation, which has gone beyond making things into controlling how they are distributed, “will put automation within range of companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such tasks.”

It is not just workers who experience the im­ pact of automation under capitalism. Ironically, the bosses themselves find their profits de­ clining in the long run because of the anarchic nature of their system. First, because laid-off workers consume less. Second, because auto­ mation decreases the rate of profit by increas­ ing what Marxists call the organic composition of capital. That is, because surplus value can only come from the labor component of value that goes into each commodity, the rate of profit to be made on each commodity decreases when work is automated. And at a certain point the profits available to capital as a whole make it unprofitable to keep production going, leading to more layoffs, meaning fewer consumers buying goods, leading to the need for further automation to regain absolute (if not relative) profits, and on and on.

But the nature of capitalist economic anarchy is such that the bosses can’t avoid those unintended conse­ quences; they have no way to stop themselves from dragging each other down, from quickening the very competition which threatens their profits in the first place. And the faster and faster race ends each time with a collective smash-up as all cars hit the wall. Labor’s approach to worktime Historically, the labor movement when at its best has tried to protect itself against job loss from automation by demanding that the fruits of heightened productiv­ ity go into shortening the workweek, and thus spread­ ing the work, without loss in pay. That was labor’s de­ mand on May 1, 1886, when hundreds of thousands joined rallies across the United States; that was the demand of radicals in the most militant days of the Congress of Industrial Organizations—and it needs to be our demand today.

But in between such periods, i.e., when labor is dominated instead by conservative bureaucrats, such demands have fallen by the wayside and the fruits of automation have gone into the bosses’ pockets and, in periods of systemic crisis, into increasingly unprofit­ able and unproductive investments (think subprime mortgages).

Meanwhile, the average workweek stagnates, with some workers laboring at levels above that average in a desperate attempt to make ends meet by working massive overtime or a second job, and others relegat­ ed to laboring below that average as part of a reserve army of labor made up of the chronically unemployed and those in casual, part-time, and/or temporary (precarious) jobs.

And all this is overlaid with the discriminatory push and pull into and out of the job market of specially-op­ pressed segments of the labor force—that is, Blacks, Latin@s, women, etc. Thus, for instance, the mid-20thcentury automation of agriculture involved the driv­ ing off the land of hundreds of thousands of South­ ern Black workers, the majority of whom ended up in Northern ghettoes serving as a new reserve army of labor, i.e., a segment of the workforce kept unem­ ployed and thus ready for use by the bosses under the most exploitative conditions if, when, and how those bosses needed.

At the moment labor can hardly be said to be “at its best,” and is doing little to address this problem. In (continued on page 7)

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... Shorter workweek (continued from page 6)

February 2004, Bill Onasch wrote in his Kansas City Labor “Week in Review” blog a response to a state­ ment by the AFL-CIO on defending overtime. While agreeing with their opposition to President Bush’s plan to weaken premium pay for overtime, Onasch noted: “It is undoubtedly true that ‘middle class’ life style can generally only be maintained by families with two or more breadwinners working substantial amounts of overtime. But is this the American Dream we should be mobilizing to defend?

“The labor movement that we know today was large­ ly built initially around the fight for an eight-hour day, 40-hour week—once considered an almost revolu­ tionary demand. Finally, after decades of battle, some­ times bloody, that standard was codified into national law, covering most workers. … “But after 1938 the movement for shorter hours vir­ tually disappeared from the agenda of the American mainstream union movement. Despite these incred­ ible increases in productivity, especially since World War II, workers were encouraged by bosses, and often union bureaucrats, to work more hours—golden timeand-a-half, sometimes double-time hours. That’s the way to put your kids through college, to buy that third car, or the bass boat, or whatever suits your fancy.”

Onasch contrasted this approach to that of the Labor Party founded by Tony Mazzocchi in 1996. The party’s program explained: “Compared to the late 1960s, we are now working an average of more than one extra month annually. We work longer hours and have less vacation time than almost all workers in the indus­ trialized world. While many of us cannot find work, factory overtime is now at record levels because it is more profitable to pay overtime than it is to hire new workers.”

In response to this state of affairs, the Labor Party called for “amending the federal labor laws to: Define the normal work week to 32 hours without loss of pay or benefits. Provide a minimum of double-time pay for all hours worked over 32 hours a week and 8 hours a day. Forbid compulsory overtime. Mandate one hour off with pay for every two hours of overtime. Require twenty days paid vacation for all workers in addition to the federal holidays. Provide one year of paid edu­ cational leave for every seven years worked.

“Taken together these proposals will create millions of new jobs and allow us free time we need to care for our families and to participate in our communities. More family time and more community participation should be the fruit of increased labor productivity.” The overworked American Those last points about the connection between shorter hours and family time and community par­ ticipation are examined in detail in Juliet Schor’s land­ mark 1991 work, “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure.” Schor, whose academ­ ic posts have been in both economics and women’s studies, addresses the impact of overwork in both the spheres of production and reproduction (i.e., making things and making people respectively) and their mu­ tual interaction.

Schor wrote: “In the last twenty years the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has risen steadily. ... When surveyed, Americans report that they have only sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week, after the obligations of job and household are taken care of. Working hours are already longer than they Spencer Platt / Getty Images were forty years ago… “For nearly a hundred years, hours had been de­ clining. When this decline abruptly ended in the late 1940s, it marked the beginning of a new era in work­ time. But the change was barely noticed. Equally sur­ prising, but also hardly recognized, has been the devi­ ation from Western Europe. After progressing in tan­ dem for nearly a century, the United States veered off into a trajectory of declining leisure, while in Europe work has been disappearing. ... U.S. manufacturing em­ ployees currently work 320 more hours—the equiva­ lent of over two months—than their counterparts in West Germany or France.”

The same difference, we would add, can be seen in health care, where the U.S. stands alone without a real national system. And in both cases the single biggest explanatory factor is the absence of mass labor or so­ cialist parties in the U.S. through which workers could push these demands. Unfortunately, the Labor Party quoted above never achieved mass proportions.

But Schor produces figures confirming the realism of the Labor Party’s shorter worktime plank: “The de­ cline in Americans’ leisure time is in sharp contrast to the potential provided by the growth of productiv­ ity. … Since 1948, the level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living … in less than half the time it took in that year. We actu­ ally could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a work­ ing year of six months. Or, every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work-with pay.”

But crucially, Schor doesn’t leave her analysis inside the workplace: “Overwork also has noticeably damag­ ing results off the job: Nationwide, people report their leisure time has declined by as much as one third since the early 1970s. Predictably, they are spending less time on the basics, like sleeping and eating. Parents are devoting less attention to their children. Stress is on the rise, partly owing to the ‘balancing act’ of recon­ ciling the demands of work and family life. … “Half the population now says they have too little time for their families. The problem is particularly acute for women: in one study, half of all employed mothers reported it caused either ‘a lot’ or an ‘ex­ treme’ level of stress. The same proportion feel that ‘when I’m at home I try to make up to my family for being away at work, and as a result I rarely have any time for myself.’ … “The most alarming development may be the effect of the work explosion on the care of children. Accord­ ing to economist Sylvia Hewlett, child neglect has be­ come endemic to our society. A major problem is that children are increasingly left alone, to fend for them­ selves while their parents are at work.

“Even when parents are at home, overwork may leave them with limited time, attention, or energy for their children. … Hewlett links the ‘parenting deficit’ to a variety of problems plaguing the country’s youth: poor performance in school, mental problems, drug Tony Savino / Socialist Action (Above) Traditionally, a key demand of the labor movement has been for a reduced workweek with no loss of pay, to create more jobs. Thirty hours work for 40 hours pay!

(Left) Sept. 17 marks the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Young people today, including many Occupiers, increasingly find themselves unable to acquire decent well-paid jobs.

and alcohol use, and teen suicide. According to anoth­ er expert, kids are being ‘cheated out of childhood. … There is a sense that adults don’t care about them.’”

We would single out for special note from the catego­ ry “mental problems” the epidemic-level rates of what is alleged to be ADHD—a “clinical” label making it easier for Big Pharma to make billions in profits from drugs, while society ignores the stresses and strains underlying children’s behavior.

Just as Schor goes beyond the sphere of production into that of reproduction, she also steps outside the walls of the typical home to examine the impact of overwork on the environment.

In her 2011 interview Schor says: “Since the 1970s the United States has used all of its productivity growth to work more, and to produce more. That means that our ecological impact is expanding and we are putting more pressure on the environment than it can handle. We are seeing the impact on climate, biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle, water scarcity, etc. So if we think about it in the global context where half the world’s popula­ tion does not have access to ecological resources and we will likely have 2 billion more people on the planet, it is clear that the wealthy who are overconsumers of ecological resources need to reduce the pressure they are putting on those resources. For that segment of the population a shift from work time to leisure is key.”

Schor writes: “If worktime decreases, people will be able to spend time doing a variety of things with their leisure time that were formerly commoditized in the market economy. The archetypal examples are growing vegetables, or the care of children, the el­ derly, the sick and the disabled. We are already seeing huge amounts of activity going on outside the market with nonprofessionals being the source of entertain­ ment through home-produced videos, music, writing, software coding, wikis and blogs. People are able to do them because they have time outside their paying jobs, it is called peer production and there is an enor­ mous amount of activity going on in that space. People are producing things for the love of doing it and for the enjoyment of their friends and colleagues.” Why work?

But how do we get to a society where such activities are part of everyday life and not crammed into scarce off-work hours, where what and how we produce is determined by our needs as creative people, by what is nourishing and stimulating for us and our planet, and not just more crap to replace when broken or “out­ dated”?

In addition to fighting for shorter hours, we need to fight for higher incomes for all and guaranteed jobs through public works. One important step down the road is the fight for what Schor calls “social goods,” i.e., needed consumption items available as a matter of right and not depending on your work situation. In a similar vein the Skidelskys call for a basic income divorced from work to minimize the impact of con­ sumerism. But for them, it’s an add-on to ameliorate the worst cultural manifestations of the profit-seeking system.

For Marxists, a guarantee that society as a whole will enjoy the fruits of our labor is at the core of our pro­ gram—as is the notion that distribution of such goods will be decided democratically, and in a way that inte­ grates the needs and concerns of workers as workers, as reproductive beings, as inhabitants of an increas­ ingly endangered natural world.

At the start of this article we pointed to chronic lev­ (continued on page 9, in “Zellers workers on Target for their rights”)

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6 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2012 Today, the length of the average workweek has stagnated, with some people working overtime or on a second job, in a desperate attempt to make ends meet.

After 1938 the drive for shorter hours virtually disappeared from the agenda of the mainstream union movement.