April 2, 2013 |
The April 15, 1933 issue of
Newsweek, one of the first in the magazine’s history, contains a remarkable cover headline:
Bill cutting work week to 30 hours startles the nation.
Indeed only nine days earlier, on April 6th, the Black-Connery Bill had
passed in the United States Senate by a wide margin. The bill fixed
the official American work week at five days and 30 hours, with severe
penalties for overtime work.
In his new book, Free Time,
labor historian, Benjamin Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa, explains
that the bill originally had broad support as a means of increasing
employment during the recession and maintaining full employment in the
future.
“We stand unflinchingly for the six-hour day
and the five-day week in industry,” thundered AFL president William
Green to a labor meeting in San Francisco that spring. Franklin
Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins also initially endorsed
the idea, but the president buckled under opposition from the National
Association of Manufacturers and dropped his support for the bill, which
was then defeated in the House of Representatives.
In
its place, Roosevelt advocated job-creating New Deal spending and a
forty-hour workweek limit, passed into law on October 24, 1938, as part
of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
But we came that close to an officialthirty-hour workweek in America. Close, but no cigar…
KELLOGG’S SIX-HOUR DAY
Nonetheless,
many American companies did go to a 30-hour workweek during the
depression, most prominently, the Kellogg Cereal Company, which
established five-day, six-hour, shifts in December, 1930. Kellogg’s and
the workers split the pay loss resulting from the cut in hours;
Kellogg’s initially paid his workers for seven hours a day, but upped
that to the amount they had previously received for eight-hours work two
years later, when he saw that hourly productivity had soared.
In his earlier books, Work Without End and Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day,
Hunnicutt reports that the measure added 400 new jobs to Kellogg’s
Battle Creek, Michigan, work force, while improving family and community
life dramatically. After World War II, Kellogg’s began abandoning the
six-hour shifts in favor of eight hours, largely because increasing
benefit packages made it cheaper to hire few workers and keep them on
the job longer. But the end of the six-hour shifts didn’t come until
1985, when the last six-hour workers were told that if they didn’t
accept the longer work days, Kellogg’s would leave Battle Creek.
The
six-hours workers were angry but there was little they could do to
prevent the change. They held a “funeral,” complete with a mock coffin,
for the six-hour day at Stan’s Place, a local Battle Creek pub, and Ina
Sides, an African-American woman who had worked most of her life at the
plant, wrote a eulogy:
Farewell, good friend, oh six hours!
Tis sad, but true,
Now you’re gone and we’re all so blue!
Get out your vitamins, give the doctor a call,
Cause old eight hours has got us all.
In
1992, I traveled with Hunnicutt to interview former thirty-hour week
workers in Battle Creek. They spoke movingly of the free time they had
when they worked shorter hours—“you weren’t all wore out when you got
home,” one man told me. One couple, Chuck and Joy Blanchard, who had
both worked at the plant, claimed that the six-hour day made Chuck a
“feminist” long before the women’s movement. He and his wife shared the
housework and he was a “room parent” at his children’s school.
The
Blanchards spoke to us about how crime had gone up and volunteering
down in Battle Creek after the six-hour day ended, as people had less
time to look out for their neighborhoods. The Blanchards said they had
little materially, but their lives, blessed with abundant leisure, were
happier than those of young families today, who seem to have so much
more stuff, but never enough time.
NO VACATION NATION
If
the idea that the thirty-hour work week almost became the law of the
land EIGHTY years ago comes as a shock, consider a New York Times
headline on July 31, 1910:
HOW LONG SHOULD A MAN’S VACATION BE? PRESIDENT TAFT SAYS EVERY ONE SHOULD HAVE THREE MONTHS
At
a time when workers produced a tenth of what they do today, William
Howard Taft, a conservative Republican, argued that all workers needed
two or three months of holiday time each year to improve health, family
connections and productivity. Yet, more than a hundred years later,
Americans average two weeks of paid vacation and a quarter of us get
none at all.
When the organization I represent,
Take Back Your Time
worked with Florida Congressman Alan Grayson to propose a very modest
paid vacation law in 2009, we were practically accused of plotting the
end of western civilization as we know it, and of “trying to turn our
America into a 21st Century France,” as if we were going to force
everyone to appreciate good food and wine. All this, when the evidence
shows that stress from overwork plays a role in five of the six leading
causes of death in the US and that workers who don’t take vacations are
twice as likely to have heart attacks as those who do.
How
is it that the world’s richest country is one of only a handful (the
other five are tiny and poor) of countries with no law requiring paid
vacations (although residents of Puerto Rico are guaranteed 15 days off
each year)?
How is it that we understood the need for shorter hours of work in 1910 and 1933 but have forgotten it today?
REMEMBRANCE AS A CALL TO ACTION
Progressives
who want to end unemployment in a way that improves health and limits
unsustainable economic growth should be advocating that America provide
real vacation time and shorten working hours. Although workers often
say they’d prefer more money to more time, the evidence shows they
appreciate the time off when they get it.
A recent experiment with a compressed four-day workweek (albeit with ten hour days) was extremely popular in Utah.
Undoubtedly,
for poor workers, shortened hours would need to be combined with a
higher living wage minimum, as they would otherwise take on extra jobs
to make up for reductions in pay that usually accompany shorter
work-time. But in fact, there is no reason why a nation (the US) where
the median worker has seen almost no pay increases since the 1970s
despite a doubling of worker productivity, should not reduce working
hours without a pay cut, at least for the middle-class and the poor.
Eighty
years ago, the American Federation of Labor and the United States
Senate understood that the healthiest and most sustainable way to reduce
unemployment was to sharply reduce working hours. The anniversary of
the Black-Connery’s bill passage in the Senate marks a time to pause and
ask why progressives aren’t raising this issue again.
John de Graaf is a filmmaker and co-author of "Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic" and “What’s The Economy For Anyway?”
