So let's make it official.
This deep and persistent recession has created huge unemployment across America. According to the federal government's "U-6" measure, which includes people who are unemployed, under-employed and who have given up looking altogether, the real unemployment rate in America is now around 16 percent. More than seven million public- and private-sector jobs have disappeared since the recession began last year.
But a pair of other worrisome indicators are telling us that we can no longer expect a business-as-usual recovery.
For one thing, an increasing number of economists and workforce specialists think many of the jobs that have disappeared will not return, or will only return slowly.
For another, wages have fallen not just against inflation, but in real dollar and cents terms, and sometimes quite drastically. Thirty percent wage cuts among rank-and-file workers (though not executives) have been reported at some large firms, and that's in addition to lay-offs.
Now, here's the key statistic that leads to my immodest proposal:
The US government reports that recessionary job losses
-- combined with furloughs, lay-offs and direct give-backs in compensation -- mean that the average US worker is now only putting in the equivalent of about 33 hours per week.
So if we're effectively already at a 30-hour work week, why not make if official?
Unusually stubborn problems demand unusually aggressive solutions. Indeed, a 30-hour work week could be the answer to some highly intractable problems in what is likely to be a very sluggish economy. Consider:
Some businesses have already unofficially moved to work weeks that more closely approximate 30 hours than the 8-hour, 5-day norm that was established in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
These firms have done this through the back door, sometimes by getting the assent of their workers -- some of them represented by labor unions
-- to in effect share jobs by scaling back each worker's week by a few hours on up to a full day. The firms do it so that wage cuts or lay-offs or both are either unnecessary or greatly curtailed.
Informal polling suggests many workers favor this concept. They like the idea that they're all working together to divide up and share the remaning pool of work hours, even though each of them is earning (and working) proportionately less. That's potentially a good thing in terms of morale and institutional history.
Now, presumably such a roll-back wouldn't necessarily work for everyone. Industries and employment sectors where employees are salaried and not paid hourly wages would present problems.
So would market sectors where work demands are highly variable and paying overtime is thus endemic. And no unionized worker should be forced into such an arrangement absent collective bargaining on the matter.
Furthermore, a 30-hour week wouldn't be a panacea. You don't have to look hard to find examples of part-time workers in the conventional 40-hour workplace who get paid less and receive little or no fringe benefits and nevertheless sometimes find themselves pressed into duty for extra, non-overtime hours.
So to make a 30-hour work week really work, the government would need to step in and establish that as the national hourly wage norm, and furthermore set some kind of transitional plan that would gradually bring the hourly wage for a future 30 hours of work into line with a current 40-hour job's buying power. That might require a phase-in plan and perhaps something like a two-tiered work week, not unlike the two-tier pay scales some private firms have been imposing.
Of course, a 30-hour week is not something your average chamber of commerce is going to appreciate, but maybe they should reconsider.
For one thing, a 30-hour work week would very quickly put many more Americans back in harness. That would save money by alleviating today's misshapen unemployment curve -- the one that forces some workers to put in way too many hours to compensate for the absence of colleagues.
In the mid term, as demand for workers increased across the country, a 30-hour week would smooth out the recovery for many millions of workers vying for too few new jobs. It would formalize today's informal job-sharing arrangements, and give security both to employers and workers in those arrangements.
Finally, in the long term, a 30-hour week would pay at least three kinds of soft benefits to individuals and the nation as a whole:
1. Salaries would begin to rise again as the so-called "full employment" level came within reach, but this time within a 30-hour structure. Over time, that would be like giving hard-pressed and suffering workers their own small version of the monster bonuses that executives on Wall Street have been paying themselves -- you know, their reward for being decidedly less productive than rank-and-file, white collar and blue collar workers.
American workers have been hugely more productive in this awful recession, and eventually they deserve to be rewarded for that, and not just with "atta boy" lip service.
2. The 30-hour week would return a greater semblance of sanity and comfort to a highly stressed nation, and make this a nicer, more sustainable country. Americans not only work harder, they work longer and for less pay and fewer benefits including fewer vacations than do their counterparts in many industrialized nations.
The American worker is thus highly stressed. De-stressing workers in this significant but manageable way would do much to improve the nation's health, and that would save us money.
3. Workers with more leisure time would presumably spend more money recreating, an indirect boost to the economy with a strong multiplier effect.
Arguably enough money would be saved by these effects alone to make up for the difference in wages between a 30-hour and a 40-hour week.
Now, why don't we do it? Because from a broad-spectrum, political point of view, this, like Social Security, is one of those third rails in American politics. And yet, we've done it before.
It took organized labor many decades (including physically violent assaults by police and employer goon squads) to finally win a 40-hour work-week standard in America, many decades after that was the norm in "old" Europe [France, for example, has a national 35-hour work week]. For some reason the American business model only likes innovation when it doesn't involve worker compensation or workplace conditions.
And heck, the original 40-hour fight isn't even over. In 2001, before the current economic troubles arrived (but while we were suffering other economic problems, including the bursting of the Internet "dot.com" bubble) the Republican Party wanted to go in exactly the opposite direction.
That year, GOP Senators Judd Gregg of New Hampshire (who this year almost became Barack Obama's Commerce secretary) and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas proposed a bill to amend FLSA and allow employers to schedule work weeks of up to 50 hours without having to pay time and a half for overtime. In other words, it was an anti-overtime bill.
Supporters downplayed the proposed bill's negative impact on wages, arguing that the bill would make it easier for workers to spend time with their families. Well, folks, so does layin' 'em off. The bill actually would have meant that that workers would only get overtime pay if they worked more than 80 hours in a two-week period.
Had that bill passed, hourly workers in all likelihood would have been pressed much more often to work more than 40 hours a week -- just like their salaried counterparts in white shirts.
That was the GOP idea in the good times. What would the party's leaders think of smoothing out the overly angular work curve in bad times by cutting the FLSA's 40-hour per week standard? They'd probably proclaim a 30-hour proposal socialistic, communistic, and anti-American -- just as their party and corporate apologists did for decades leading up to the FLSA's enactment.
There's another reason the business establishment and many politicians, conservative and otherwise, would dislike a 30-hour week. Going to that standard and giving workers more free time might encourage some of them to, ah, er, um, well, you know, get more politically informed and active. The elites are doing just fine without that, thank you. But most of us would benefit from more community-minded communities.
Want to help the country, help your colleagues, help yourself and feel better in the process? Contact your elected officials, university economics departments, colleagues, neighbors, relatives, newspapers, labor unions and others; urge them to explore this idea.
You have nothing to lose but your unemployment, that pile of bills on your home office desk, and your ulcer.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
emma peel 2
C Berg
mginmn
Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Salon.com
Comments
what's chances of that?
My employees can't live on less than they earn now, without government assistance, which depends on a revenue stream that is not bouncing back any time soon. (Yes, many of them could have made better choices, but I run the shop, not their personal lives.) Increasing industry productivity won't help without increased demand, and without increased revenue I can't afford to pay benefits — mainly the health insurance I currently provide — to a larger pool of workers. So unless I act like Walmart, a shorter week doesn't work for me and it doesn't work for them. So far, I've managed to keep them employed because my managers are working more, not less, and the highest paid of those managers are well under six figures, hardly in the stratosphere. But we all have jobs, and that is a big factor in keeping stress under control.
In this community, if the standard work week were 30 hours, the ambitious employees would have two 30-hour jobs, and not much would change for anyone else.
Too much money has been spent, for too long, on stuff that nobody really needs and that, in the case of real estate prices, isn't even real. Until those bills are paid, to the extent that they can be, I'm having a hard time seeing increased productivity as anything other than more inventory.
Your concerns all seem legitimate to me. My point is that if we keep doing things the same old way expecting new results, we'll remain a politically insane nation. I am no economist or labor expert but it seems to me there are all sorts of ways to restructure work, compensation, benefits, vacations and the like to produce a 30-hour week that ends up saving us money.
I've tried this idea out over the years with various of my employers, and I hear the same concerns you express. And yet, as I pointed out, some employers already are moving in this direction -- but only out of desperation and/or a sense of being compassionate towards valued employees at a difficult time.
The biggest single objection is having to carry more "full time" employees, with the implications that brings to paperwork and contributions to Social Security and unemployment insurance, among other discrete costs per worker. But those obligations could also be adjusted.
As for the idea that workers are already earning the minimum they need to get by: Okay, but other workers are being quickly removed from that category, which results in huge social costs for the nation, paid for by workers. That cost may be more indirect and seem less onerous, but it's not.
At the end of the day, I expect we'd have a country where everyone might consume a bit less and be the healthier for it. One reason people need so much income is to cover our country's normative lifestyle. Do families really need two or three automobiles. The answer, sadly, is often yes, because holding down several jobs and being able to migrate to and from work in the absence of good mass transit alternatives requires it. But if workers could put in a four-day week, and perhaps in some cases one or two of those days could be flexed at home, that would not only save fuel, but also more time.
The list goes on. A 30-hour week wouldn't happen in a vacuum, without other changes, and it couldn't happen overnight. But since it's already happening, on a wildcat basis, all I'm saying is we need to study the trend further and see what all-encompassing change might do to benefit the economy.